Participatory Governance and Social Audit in the Third Sector

This chapter describes the role that participation and participatory governance may have in social accounting and auditing in third sector organisations. After an introductory section describing the relevance of third sector organisations in the planning and implementation of social and other policies, the second section outlines a model for participatory governance that may respond to many of the challenges that these organisations face in terms of transparency, legitimacy, and effectiveness of operations. The third section describes three instances where this model was tentatively implemented by the authors, while the following sections point to the open issues and conclude on the perspectives of the participatory model.