The views, insights and opinions expressed below are of the author(s) and are not Accountable Now’s. We are proud to amplify a range of diverse voices that help shape, challenge and push our work as well as the sector as a whole to “do good better.”
It must have been in the year 2001 or 2002. I was the CEO of the International Save the Children Alliance, today Save the Children International. At a meeting with Jeremy Hobbs, CEO of Oxfam International, I learned that he planned to meet the leaders of Amnesty International and Greenpeace International, Irene Khan and Gerd Leipold, to talk about matters of common concern, such as, strategic cooperation in international advocacy, cooperation among their national organisations, and accountability across their federations. These were also matters of concern to me and I asked whether I could participate in that meeting. I was invited and some weeks later the meeting took place.
At the meeting we went through the different agenda items and found that the size and shape of our common challenges demanded more, better, and ongoing cooperation between our organisations. We also found that, among the different issues we discussed, the lack of our own organisations’ accountability was one of the most urgent issues to address and the one best suited for starting a more systematic cooperation. We came to this conclusion even though we had quite different reasons to strive for better accountability.
One line of arguments for better accountability was: ‘As the CEO of my organisation I am personally responsible for the work we do. However, I lack the accountability instruments I need to make sure I know how my organisation performs, where danger looms, and when, where, and how I need to intervene to keep our work on track. Basically, I am steering my organisation through permanent fog with a malfunctioning steering wheel and a defect rudder.’
Another reason for more focus on accountability was: ‘We hold governments and businesses responsible for their actions, and they increasingly ask us for our own accountability. We find it difficult to reply to their questions as we lack the mindsets and instruments for a solid internal accountability. While we are well set up for holding others accountable, we are rather poor at our own accountability. This needs to change urgently.’
A third reasoning was: ‘I try to run a federation of about 30 national organisations. All too often, they work in parallel, unnecessarily doubling their work, and, sometimes, they even work against each other. Normally they don’t do this on purpose, they just don’t know what the others are doing. We need much better accountability across the federation in order to avoid overlaps, reduce unnecessary work, and increase efficiency and effectiveness of our joint efforts.’
And finally, at that time a perspective rather few donors had: ‘Our partners in our programmes are no longer willing to accept any charitable contribution, no matter what it is and how it is being delivered. While they continue to accept their accountability to us, they increasingly demand accountability from us as well. We need to improve our own accountability mechanisms in order to deliver the information our partners need for their own planning and monitoring purposes and as a basis for a partnership of equals.’
In the subsequent discussion it became clear that, most probably, the largest part of our sector would have similar challenges and would welcome an initiative to strengthen accountability, as long as they were involved in the discussion early on. We decided to produce a first draft of a framework for civil society accountability, an Accountability Charter, as the basis for a sector wide discussion. One of us had some money earmarked for consultancy and offered to spend this on hiring a consultant who would be tasked with producing a first draft. Shortly thereafter IANGO Workshops developed, CIVICUS came on board and the rest is history, as recorded on the Accountable Now website.
The meeting of the four CEOs became a regular exercise. More CEOs of large international civil society organisations joined and in 2007 this meeting received a formal institutional frame, the Berlin Civil Society Center, now called the International Civil Society Centre. Over a number of years, the Centre hosted the team of Accountable Now. Thus, the meeting of four CEOs in the early 2000s gave rise to two international organisations which have been cooperating very well with each other.
25 years ago, in many organisations, accountability to donors and accountability to the government and its tax offices under not-for-profit laws was more or less all there was about accountability. If you wanted to operate in a country, if you wanted to receive funds from a specific donor you had to – and you still have to today – comply with the accountability requirements defined by the government and other funders. As a rule, civil society organisations behaved in a very similar way towards their recipients: they defined accountability standards and parameters and held recipients accountable. At that time, accountability was mostly a top-down affair. Bottom-up accountability was very rare.
Thankfully, this has been changing over the last 20 years, even though a long way still remains to go. Any human rights based activity, any form of cooperation, any kind of influence on others has to go hand in hand with accountability to those we partner with, no matter how well our intentions are. One of the key challenges for the next decades of accountability work is to fully and finally end one-way-accountability. There will be no full empowerment of our partners, no equal partnership without mutual accountability.
As right wing and fascist ideologies continue to gain ground especially in the traditional ‘donor countries’, the other key challenge I see is how to avoid the fact that transparency and accountability of civil society organisations are increasingly being used to stifle or even prevent our work, to hamper or even close down our organisations. Sadly, as big parts of the world turn crazy, a naïvely open and transparent accountability can be highly detrimental to our causes, to our people, to our partners, and to our organisations. I believe that our sector will increasingly face the dilemma between wanting to be transparent and accountable and aiming to protect our partners and their work, as well as our employees and our organisations.
The challenge for the next few decades will consist in fighting a scary trend away from ‘human rights for all’ towards ‘the right of the strongest’. Right wing radicals of all kinds have identified democratic, human rights focused civil society organisations as some of their main enemies. Once in power, fascists will not tolerate work which is based on the principle of equal rights for all. Therefore, we have to fight fascism strongly, consistently, and in great solidarity. In this fight, transparency and accountability will be crucial in securing our credibility and legitimacy. On the other hand, practiced naïvely, our own transparency and accountability can easily be used by our enemies to harm us. At the time when we four CEOs met to discuss accountability the answer to the challenge was quite simple: ‘the more accountability, the better!’ Our successors, and the successors of our successors, will not have such a simple answer… I wish them luck on their tight-rope-walk between the best possible accountability and the survival of their organisations.
Malaga, August 2026
Celebrating our 20 Years in Focus Anniversary Campaign, this Insight is part of our “20 Reflections From 20 Years” Series. This series gathers perspective from folks across AN’s two decades to reflect on Accountable Now then, now, and tomorrow.
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