CIVIL SOCIETY: Accountability – Long Word, Long Way to Go

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, May 24 2007 (IPS) - Long word, “accountability”. Been around a long time as well. Why then, Civicus secretary-general Kumi Naidoo asked at the opening plenary of the Civicus World Assembly in Glasgow, is it only now becoming current?

Naidoo has been talking about it 10 years, more, and so, certainly, has Simon Zadek, chief executive of the AccountAbility, the independent Britain-based watchdog for just that. But even within civil society – at the declared forefront of holding governments, business and others accountable – that word has never before surfaced quite as strongly as now.

The Civicus world assembly, the seventh organised by the Johannesburg-based civil society group, and the second in Glasgow, marks really “the first public debate on accountability,” Lisa Jordan, deputy director of the Global and Civil Society unit at the Ford Foundation in the U.S. reminded everyone at the start of the assembly.

It’s a word whose time has come. “It’s the accountability moment, isn’t it,” said Zadek. “If you did a Google search in a newspaper now for the word ‘accountability’ compared to five years ago, there would be a dramatic difference in word count. Whatever newspaper it is. The discourse has been transferred beyond recognition over the past five years.”

That accountability question is a fair one for civil society to ask. “The history of accountability is the history of social movements, the history of civil society,” said Zadek. “Civil society has been the primary accountability agent through the ages.” It has been the means through which “powerful individuals and institutions are held to account.”

But the idea of accountability could do with a, well, historical turn. It must not much longer be about preventing the wrong things getting done. “The future can’t just be about compliance; not just about preventing organisations from doing things, but about how to get them to do things.” In all instances, accountability must inevitably track the line of power, and people must do all they can “to hold that power to account.”

Because perhaps institutions are no more seen as what they have long been taken to be. The future of the United Nations itself now seems in doubt, said Zadek. As is the belief that a sovereign state can run a government to the satisfaction of people.

No longer is it enough to believe either that the rule of law enacted by a democratically elected government is enough to do the job. Because voters, Naidoo said, “do not necessarily elect the best candidate, but the least worst one.”

Uncertainty sounds like it’s good for accountability. State accountability, legal and financial accountability… “all institutional forms are up for grabs,” said Zadek. It is becoming increasingly more apparent, Jordan said, that “power manifests itself in distributed ways, and it doesn’t run through just one channel.”

If the old ideas of state, of business, do not sit in firm little boxes any more, as Zadek said, that does throw up the question who should now be accountable for what. And inevitably, also the question who should hold to account those who say it is their job to hold others accountable. Civil society, itself, that is.

A usual assumption, at least among civil society, is that it is “benign, good and democratically inclined,” said Maja Daruwala from the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. But much of civil society is not, and it must hold itself to account. “Civil society does have a dark side, and that dark side needs to be addressed,” said Jordan.

This Civicus world assembly does look introspectively inclined. Because that question about civil society itself is being asked by civil society through the assembly that runs through Sunday, May 27. “We are not here solely to talk about the accountability of governments and the World Bank and institutions like that,” said Naidoo. “We will ask how we can be more accountable, as civil society.”

“Civil society organisations around the world are very vocal in their criticism of government and business, but they themselves, their accountability to their own constituency, has emerged as the key issue in this sector,” said Civicus chairperson Aruna Rao.

It is of course the essence of accountability that the questioner cannot stand apart from the question. And accountability is, perhaps paradoxically, the brave new concept that cannot stand alone. “Stop thinking of accountability as an add-on,” said Zadek. “It is not a side event, not a side subject. It governs the question how we all work as individuals, as institutions, in relation to one another. A vision of a future should be unthinkable without accountability.”

“Accountability is not a tool or a mechanism,” said Jordan. “It’s a relationship between people and organisations who have power, and between organisations and people whose potentials and possibilities are governed by that power.”

And non-governmental organisations are not necessarily powerless institutions, she said. An NGO that services a million children “is accountable to those beneficiaries.”

Which must mean that in civil society, everyone is accountable. Perhaps just for not asking the questions, or for asking the wrong questions. And, if accountability is as integral to just about everything as it should be, it will have arrived the day Civicus and anybody else don’t need to talk about it any more.