ABSTRACT
Until the early 1990s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were not subjected to intense scrutiny regarding their accountability, governance, legitimacy or wider societal impacts (Edwards and Fowler, 2003; Lloyd, 2005; Najam, 1996; Unerman and O’Dwyer, 2006a). Najam (1996, p. 339) claims that ‘most NGO scholars also happen[ed] to be NGO believers’ who had implicit faith in NGOs’ work, be it as advocates of specific causes such as human rights and social justice, providers of relief and humanitarian assistance, or as facilitators of development. This enabled the emergence of a myth of NGO infallibility and a concomitant reluctance to closely scrutinize the presumed ‘magic’ of NGOs’ work (Lloyd, 2005; Najam, 1996). However, NGO numbers have since grown exponentially and their influence in arenas such as international business and governance has escalated (Doh and Teegen, 2002).1 The increasing popularity of non-state actors with various donors (Fisher, 1997) and increasing dissatisfaction with conventional politics has meant that NGOs have moved from being ‘ladles in the global soup kitchen to a force for transformation in global politics and economics’ (Edwards and Fowler, 2003, p. 1; Doh and Teegen, 2002; Salamon, 1994). Commenting in the early 1990s, one analyst suggested that this ‘quiet revolution’ in the role and influence of NGOs could ‘prove to be as significant to the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation state was to the latter nineteenth century’ (Salamon, 1994, p. 109, cited in Fisher, 1997, p. 440). Hence, NGOs, in whatever form, have now become subject to much more critical scrutiny, especially regarding their accountability, both internally and externally. In response to some of these pressures, a group of five
international NGOs, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, Greenpeace and CARE International, launched an accountability charter – a collectively developed code of conduct – in June 2006 (INGO, 2006; Russell, 2006). This chapter examines the nature of this recent emergence of interest in NGO accountability. It focuses particularly, albeit not exclusively, on the nature and practice of NGO accountability for their impacts on social sustainability.
