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Organisational Accountability
A Critical Issue Of NGOs

By Shankar P. Rajbhandari

ACCOUNTABILITY in organi-sational context is not only imperative but also difficult to articulate. Organisations often fail to maintain organisational efficiency due to the lack of conceptual clarity of institutional accountability. Many organisations become confused to set the hierarchy of accountability. Such a dilemma of accountability by and large prevails in NGO management as well. One very common dilemma that NGOs sporadically fall into is the situation whether they are supposed to be accountable mainly to the people or to the donors. Importantly, people are the prime concern for every NGO whereas many NGOs can hardly survive without a full support or consent of the donor(s). This implies that both the functional relationship of NGOs with the people and enabling relationship with the donors are equally important from the standpoint of institutional survival and sustainability.

In view of the above, an NGO for being pragmatic and moving forward, has to follow a number of points. First every NGO has to define accountability from its organisational spirit. Second, NGOs are needed to articulate the forms of accountability and so as their degree of relationship with the key stakeholders. As survival is the first principle of organisation management, all NGOs may not necessarily be accountable equally to the all organisations or people. In this regard, the forms of accountability should be clarified by NGOs without any confusion. Third, the dichotomy between accountability versus legitimacy should be duly confirmed. In this regard, it is desirable that both the donors and beneficiaries should be satisfied with NGO programmes and services. Fourth, NGOs should be competent enough to eliminate the problems of institutional accountability carefully emphasising to identify the root causes of the problem areas of accountability.

Issues

What does accountability mean in the context of NGO? In search of an operational definition of NGOs accountability, it can be described as mechanisms by which the organisations concerned can be held responsible for their actions and whether they fulfil the agreements and conditions they enter into, including adherence to the values and principles for which they stand.

Following the functional relationship of NGOs with the nature of services and their external variables, three forms of accountability can be perceived: explanatory accountability. Accountability with sanctions and responsive accountability.

Explanatory accountability is a kind of accountability of an NGO being required to give an account to various institutions or to the people or to the government, etc. NGOs are to be transparent enough with their plans, programs, activities, procedures, and budgets. Thus, NGOs are accountable to the people, government, donors, and to the other stakeholders, legally, socially, technically, and professionally.

Similarly, NGO accountability with sanctions is the right to require an account and to impose sanctions. With a view to catering better programmes or services in pertinent subject area(s), NGOs are bound to impose sanctions for the well-being of the community or people. Child right, gender equality, human rights, etc. can be taken as some of the glaring examples of it.

Responsive accountability is the views of those accounted to must be taken into account. NGOs are to be responsive to the target beneficiaries for their pertinent service demands. Also, they are to be responsible to the government, donor agencies, society, and others.

The form of accountability is also linked with the form of resource transfer. The strategy pursued by both NGOs (recipient) and donor (funder) is to diversify the control over the resources they receive, in such a way that the influence of any one donor is marginalized. In several NGO literatures, accountability is linked to the issue of making NGOs more effective. An improved accountability may increase efficiency.

Towards achieving the efficiency and effectiveness of an NGO, the issue of accountability, however, cannot be ignored. Although, accountability is very much good for any NGO, it is sometimes harmful for the legitimacy. In fact accountability and legitimacy are rested, but should not be intermingled. Legitimacy can be based on media legitimacy, elite legitimacy, etc., and does not have to rest on either accountability or legitimacy among recipients.

As a matter of fact, the implicit contract between NGOs and service recipients is a fundamental basis for accountability mechanisms. But due to the strength of donors’ options and beneficiaries’ acceptance or rejection sometime becomes difficult for accountability. From the experience, it implies that the more a project is geared towards the target group, and adapts to the changing local circumstances, the more difficult it will be to be accountable in the way the system expects.

Priority Setting

As mentioned earlier, the most crucial and difficult part of NGO accountability is the art of setting its priority. Virtually, NGOs are related to donors vis-a-vis governments at one end and divergent target beneficiaries at the other. This multi-varied relationship often creates difficulties to ensure accountability for NGOs.

An NGO might formally and rhetorically be accountable to a number of institutions and groups, the question may arise ‘which group comes first?’ - the donor or the target beneficiaries. Even among the donors (in case of having the donors more than one), the question may arise which donor first? This also applies to the beneficiary groups as well. In this regard, one should keep in mind that the one which affects more should be carefully taken into account as multiple accountability is a common slogan but difficult to maintain.

Nevertheless, the smartness of an NGO can be assessed in terms of its institutional ability in balancing or convincing the beneficiaries and donors by way of designing effective programmes, delivering efficient services, and achieving the satisfactory level of all sorts of accountability - responsive, sanction type, and explanatory. This should be seriously manifested by all existing NGOs that ultimately help to improve the capacity building of NGOs in Nepal, indeed.

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