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  Issue 72

   

Debate on global civil society

Accountability and responsibility for results achievement

 

Prior to the beginning of the CIVICUS World Assembly on 22 and 23 May in Glasgow, a Brainstorming workshop for participatory governance was held, where representatives of governmental institutions, international organizations, research institutions and civil society organizations took part from different countries all around the world.

 

Who should be accountable and responsible? Why is it necessary? Who should accountability primarily be realized to? Do civil society organizations put into practice what they preach? These were some of the issues on which more than 1.000 representatives of the civil society, from over 100 countries worldwide, debated and looked for a solution from 23 to 27 May 2007 within the seventh CIVICUS World Assembly held in Glasgow, Scotland.

CIVICUS - World Alliance for Citizen Participation is an international network of civil society organizations that work at the local, national, regional and global levels. It was established in Washington, DC in 1993, now with its headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. 

CIVICUS aims to initiate, develop and strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world, especially in areas where participatory democracy and citizens’ freedom of association are threatened.

The CIVICUS World Assembly is one of the largest international civil society conferences mobilizing hundreds of practitioners, activists and researchers of civil society who try to create a unique opportunity where they approach donors, governments, business and media in order to make changes mutually in people’s lives all around the world.

A central theme of the event was “Accountability and responsibility for delivering results” and all the events that happened within those 5 dynamic days were focused on certain aspects of this topic: “Accountability and responsibility of civil society”, “Accountability and responsibility of the media”, “Corporate accountability”, “Government accountability”, “Accountability within organizations based on membership”, “Accountability of international financial institutions” etc. These issues were discussed through 80 events that had different forms, from plenary sessions and panel discussions, workshops and training-workshops, to visits of different local organizations, institutions and projects.

At the first plenary entitled “Accountability: To Whom and For What?”, held in the overcrowded main hall of the Exhibition and Conference Center in Glasgow, the term “accountability” was analyzed: what it really meant, seeking to find not a common definition, but a practical understanding of what it should mean to different power holders and how it could be strengthened across different sectors in the society.

Alejandro Litovsky, from the global “think tank” organization “Accountability” represented wide understanding of this term and he thinks that development is basically responsibility and accountability: “Improving development outcomes is essentially about changing who has access to decision-making. When we talk about development as accountability, we are saying that the only way development can take place is by transforming the way power is distributed and held to account. Accountability is about civilizing power.” he said.


Participatory governance a synonym for responsible governance

Prior to the beginning of the Assembly, on 22 and 23 May in Glasgow, a Brainstorming workshop for participatory governance was held.

In the past few years CIVICUS implemented a Participatory Governance Program in order to promote democratization and to strengthen the voice of civil society in the processes of decision-making. CIVICUS is preparing the next phase of this program. As a result, a consultative brainstorming-workshop was convened to check the directions for further formulation of the program. Representatives of governmental institutions, international organizations, research institutions and civil society organizations took part from different countries all around the world.

The workshop aimed to identify key participatory governance challenges and opportunities, take stock of “cutting edge” participatory governance practices, and brainstorm about strategies for promoting and building civil society capacity for participatory governance. The CIVICUS team presented the concept of the future program that should primarily be focused on networking, sharing practices and building civil society capacities for more successful effect and contribution to participatory governance.

 

Accountability of civil society organizations  

Accountability of civil society organizations was discussed at several plenary sessions and specially designed training sessions and workshops. The discussions went beyond just looking at civil society organizations’ need for compliance with formal requirements to donors under contracts. It was shown that there was a need to show accountability for internal governance processes. Civil society organizations worldwide have come under fire from other stakeholders, such as governments, that argue that civil society representatives are not elected and therefore on what basis do they purport to represent others. This raised the issues on legitimacy, presentation, representation and self-regulation.

David Bonbright, Executive Director of Keystone – an organization from Great Britain that works on civil society organizations’ accountability, was one of the panelists at several sessions and had prepared a concept-document titled “Answering for Ourselves: Accountability for Citizen Organizations”, which was the basis for a number of discussions. He points out that the accountability of citizen organizations is their reason for being: to bring about an explicit public benefit by serving others than themselves. According to him, the legitimacy of citizen organizations is found in their engagement with and responsiveness to their primary constituents, their ethical integrity, and their effectiveness in pursuing their mission.
 

The first volume of the Global Survey of the State of Civil Society has been promoted
 

This volume includes summaries of the reports from the Civil Society Index for 44 countries. The Civil Society Index is an action-research project that was implemented by unique methodology in the countries participants by national partners of CIVICUS. This research assesses the condition of civil society from an aspect of its structure, environment it acts in, values it practices and promotes and impact it realizes at social level.

This volume aims to raise the awareness at global level for the roles, strengths and weaknesses of civil society all around the world. In this publication on 10 pages there is a summary of the report on Macedonia prepared by the Macedonian Center for International Cooperation.

The Global Survey of the State of Civil Society has initiated a discussion at several workshops, and at one of them representatives of organizations – national coordinators from different countries presented the experiences from its implementation, the challenges they had faced and the opportunities that the survey opened.  

About 200 organizations from Scotland, England and Northern Ireland reported on their target groups during the event and in action, presenting their programs, reports and activities in front of the local and world public in the exhibition presented at the Voluntary Organizations Fair, which took part simultaneously with the forum part.
 

Accountability at global level 

Accountability of global institutions and international civil society organizations was also a discussion issue. Some of the findings of the 2006 Global Accountability Report were presented and some of the work done in promoting principles of accountability at the global level. In spite of the resistance to globalization, decision-making at levels beyond that of the nation state is an unavoidable reality. A web of connections binds us globally through trade, finance and communications. Governments alone can no longer address problems such as climate change and poverty, which are global in nature. They are joined by an increasingly powerful number of organizations from the intergovernmental, non-governmental and corporate sectors, which affect the global public sphere. Yet a lack of accountability of these organizations to the communities they affect often constrains progress on addressing such global problems.

The issue was addressed on the role NGOs play in making the United Nations accountable, particularly the dialogue between civil society and the United Nations, maintained by the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service, established for that purpose.

At one of the workshops the Accountability Charter was looked at, adopted by 15 international NGOs in June 2006. Its purposes, contents and the process of its conceptualization were shared and some of the organizations signatories outlined from their own perspective its implications after its one-year application. .
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