Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics

Description

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.

Alnoor Ebrahim is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and the Wyss Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School. He is also an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. Edward Weisband holds the Diggs Endowed Chair Professorship in the Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech.

'This book's creative critical (re)constructions of global accountabilities are extremely welcome. 'Accountability' is so ascendant in contemporary global governance, perhaps even aspiring to the kind of pivotal position once held by 'sovereignty' in Westphalian world politics. These authors show us how the new discourse can enable rather than frustrate societal betterment.' Professor Jan Aart Scholte, Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick 'Global Accountabilities provides a treasure chest of analytic insights in this era where innovations are desperately needed to overcome fractured and ineffective accountabilities across the state, business and civil society.' Simon Zadek Chief Executive of AccountAbility, Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and author of the award winning book The Civil Corporation