Alnoor Ebrahim

Accountability In Practice: Mechanisms for NGOs

Summary. — This paper examines how accountability is practiced by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Five broad mechanisms are reviewed: reports and disclosure statements, performance assessments and evaluations, participation, self-regulation, and social audits. Each mechanism, distinguished as either a ‘‘tool’’ or a ‘‘process,’’ is analyzed along three dimensions of accountability: upward–downward, internal–external, and functional–strategic. It is observed that accountability in practice has emphasized ‘‘upward’’ and ‘‘external’’ accountability to donors while ‘‘downward’’ and ‘‘internal’’ mechanisms remain comparatively underdeveloped. Moreover, NGOs and funders have focused primarily on short-term ‘‘functional’’ accountability responses at the expense of longer-term ‘‘strategic’’ processes necessary for lasting social and political change. Key policy implications for NGOs and donors are discussed. 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Accountability Myopia: Losing Sight of Organizational Learning

This article challenges a normative assumption about accountability in organizations: that more accountability is necessarily better. More specifically, it examines two forms of “myopia” that characterize conceptions of accountability among service-oriented nonprofit organizations: (a) accountability as a set of unconnected binary relationships rather than as a system of relations and (b) accountability as short-term and rule-following behavior rather than as a means to longer-term social change. The article explores the effects of these myopias on a central mechanism of accountability in organizations—evaluation—and proposes a broader view of accountability that includes organizational learning. Future directions for research and practice are elaborated.

Information Struggles: The Role of Information in the Reproduction of NGO-Funder Relationships

This article examines struggles over information between two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India and their key international funders. The author outlines both the strategies used by international funders to increase their control over information generation within NGOs and the strategies used by the case NGOs to resist these interventions. Three main arguments are advanced: (a) The information requirements of funders affect NGOs not only by placing demands on their attention but also by promoting positivist and easily quantifiable valuations of success and failure; this is not an intended effect but a systemic one; (b) NGOs resist funder attempts to structure their behavior through a series of strategies that include the symbolic generation of information, selective sharing of information, and the strategic use of professionals to enhance legitimacy; and, (c) this combination of funder demands for information and NGO resistance to external interference serves to entrench existing information systems, thereby reproducing tensions between NGOs and funders.

What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale and Scope of Social Performance:

Organizations with social missions, such as nonprofits and social enterprises, are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This article draws on several cases to build a performance assessment framework premised on an organizations operational mission, scale, and scope. Not all organizations should measure their long-term impact, defined as lasting changes in the lives of people and their societies. Rather, some organizations would be better off measuring shorter-term outputs or individual outcomes. Funders such as foundations and impact investors are better positioned to measure systemic impacts.

Placing the Normative Logics of Accountability in “Thick” Perspective

This article provides a critical reflection on the heavily normative nature of current accountability debates. In particular, it explores three streams of normative discourse on nonprofit accountability: improving board governance, improving performance-based reporting, and demonstrating progress toward mission. The article describes how these logics are associated with three basic accountability regimes: coercive, technocratic, and adaptive. It then discusses how a focus on these normative logics and regimes, although important, can mask the realities of social structure and the relations of power that underlie them. The article proposes a more empirical approach to framing accountability—“thick description”—that might enable scholars better understand how social regimes of accountability actually operate in different contexts and in which the instruments of accountability are at least as likely to reproduce relationships of inequality as they are to overturn them.

NGO Behavior and Development Discourse: Cases From Western India

This paper examines the effects of shifts in “development discourse” on the behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Drawing upon detailed case histories of two well-established NGOs in western India, it is demonstrated that (1) the case NGOs have been profoundly influenced by discourses prevailing during their initial, formative stages; (2) NGO behavior is subject to changes in global development discourses that are transmitted to them via a range of mechanisms including consultants, conditions of funding, and reporting requirements; and (3) these NGOs have been able to challenge and adapt certain discourses to suit their own needs and circumstances, sometimes even sparking wider structural change.

Learning Processes in Development Planning a Theoretical Overview and Case Study

Planners work with various kinds of organizations, sometimes to provide technical expertise and other times to facilitate communication between different organizations and interest groups. Planners are also important players in “organizational learning.” In this article, the authors describe how organizational practices change through learning. Drawing from the sociological literature on organizational behavior, the authors develop a conceptual model of organizational learning. This model is then applied to the case of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) engaged in development planning in western India. We show not only how learning processes have led to behavioral change in this NGO but also ways in which learning has been constrained.

Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society

Civil society actors have been pushing for greater accountability of the World Bank for at least three decades. This paper outlines the range of accountability mechanisms currently in place at the World Bank along four basic levels: (1) staff, (2) project, (3) policy, and (4) board governance. We argue that civil society organizations have been influential in pushing for greater accountability at the project and policy levels, particularly through the establishment and enforcement of social and environmental safeguards and complaint and response mechanisms. But they have been much less successful in changing staff incentives for accountability to affected communities, or in improving board accountability through greater transparency in decision making, more representative vote allocation, or better parliamentary scrutiny. In other words, although civil society efforts have led to some gains in accountability with respect to Bank policies and projects, the deeper structural features of the institution — the incentives staff face and how the institution is governed — remain largely unchanged.

INSTITUTIONAL PRECONDITIONS TO COLLABORATION Indian Forest and Irrigation Policy in Historical Perspective

This article examines the institutional preconditions or rules that shape collaborative natural resource management between public agencies and citizen groups. In particular, it asks: How do the preconditions surrounding a given natural resource, such as property rights, legislative frameworks, and agency performance incentives, circumscribe the possibilities for collaboration? Drawing upon irrigation and forest management policies and practices in India from the mid-1800s onward, it is argued that the context of irrigation provides some opportunities for supporting agency-citizen collaboration, whereas such efforts in forestry are unlikely to succeed without fundamental structural change.

Agricultural cooperatives in Gujarat, India: agents of equity or differentiation?

Agricultural cooperatives have been promoted in Indias economic development programme as a means of encouraging large-scale agricultural production while enhancing community cooperation and equity. Focusing on sugar cooperatives in Gujarat state of western India, the author shows that these cooperatives have been successful in promoting large-scale agricultural production and in improving the economic and social standing of their members. This success, however, has been built upon the exploitation and pauperisation of local landless communities and migrant labourers. As a result, there has been an increased differentiation of the peasantry in south Gujarat.