What NGO Accountability Means - and Does Not Mean

This essay offers a review (4000 words) of NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations, Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds. (London: Earthscan 2006). International and transnational NGOs have been under criticism for alleged lack of accountability since they emerged into prominence in the 1990s. In recent years, the debate over NGOs has shifted from legitimacy and representativeness to accountability in the narrower senses of internal governance, fiduciary responsibility, relationships with national governmental authorities, and similar issues. The volume under review seeks to cover both aspects of the debate, with emphasis on the latter, narrower issues. The review essay argues that the debate over representativeness and legitimacy - accountability in the large sense - cannot be left aside, but continues to be present, if only because the incentives that led NGOs to claim to represent the \u27peoples of the world\u27 in the first place have not gone away but have instead merely been submerged under critical pressure. The review essay argues that the question of NGO accountability as a matter of claims to governance remain salient, because global civil society still seeks a role in global governance in a way that relies upon claims of representativeness and that is not satisfied by narrower mechanisms by which NGOs make themselves accountable for other, narrower purposes, such as internal corporate governance or fiduciary accountability for charitable assets