Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, And Public Ethics
Cambridge University Press, 9/6/2007
EAN 9780521700115, ISBN10: 0521700116
Paperback, 368 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Accountability is seen as an essential feature of governments, businesses and NGOs. This volume treats it as a socially constructed means of control that can be used by the weak as well as the powerful. It contributes analytical depth to the diverse debates on accountability in modern organizations by exploring its nature, forms and impacts in civil society organizations, public and inter-governmental agencies and private corporations. The contributors draw from a range of disciplines to demonstrate the inadequacy of modern rationalist prescriptions for establishing and monitoring accountability standards, arguing that accountability frameworks attached to principal-agent logics and applied universally across cultures typically fail to achieve their objectives. By examining a diverse range of empirical examples and case studies, this book underscores the importance of grounding accountability procedures and standards in the divergent cultural, social and political settings in which they operate.
Introduction
1. Forging global accountabilities Edward Weisband and Alnoor Ebrahim
Part I. Public Accountability
Participatory Spheres from Global to Local
2. Multilateralism and building stronger international institutions Ngaire Woods
3. Global financial governance and the problem of accountability
the role of the public sphere Randall D. Germain
4. Citizen activism and public accountability
lessons from case studies in India Anne Marie Goetz and Rob Jenkins
Part II. Experiments in Forging NGO Accountability
Mutuality and Context
5. Multiparty social action and mutual accountability L. David Brown
6. Not accountable to anyone? Collective action and the role of NGOs in the campaign to ban 'blood diamonds' Ian Smillie
7. Bringing in society, culture and politics
values and accountability in a Bangladeshi NGO David Lewis
Part III. Reflective Accountability
New Directions for Participatory Practice
8. A rights-based approach to accountability Lisa Jordan
9. Evaluation and accountability in emergency relief Coralie Bryant
10. Towards a reflective accountability in NGOs Alnoor Ebrahim
Part IV. Global Accountability Frameworks and Corporate Social Responsibility
11. Financial actors and instruments in the construction of global corporate social responsibility Michael R. MacLeod
12. Public accountability within transnational supply chains
a global agenda for empowering southern workers? Kate Macdonald
13. Tripartite multilateralism
why corporate social responsibility is not accountability Edward Weisband
Conclusion
14. Prolegomena to a postmodern public ethics
images of accountability in global frames Edward Weisband.