Leadership and Accountability in International NGOs, 1st ed. 2019
Palgrave Studies in Governance, Leadership and Responsibility Series

This book highlights the views of accountability of INGO leaders and assesses the challenges they face in implementing organizational accountability . The author draws on over 150 interviews with executives about accountability and uses empirical evidence to propose an Accountability Puzzle that shows how definitions, audiences, practices, and signals about accountability are interconnected and interdependent; INGO accountability is incomplete without all the pieces assembled. Nevertheless, more accountability is not always the answer and can hinder leaders' responsiveness to stakeholder demands. This book will make an important contribution to NGO literature by offering a greater understanding of that accountability means for those in charge of these transnational organizations.

Part I – Leadership and INGO Accountability

 

Chapter 1: Leadership in INGOs

Executive leaders of INGOs have received little attention in the recent NGO literature particularly

related to accountability. Given their central role in brokering accountability relationships

their organization engages in, why such disinterest? This chapter introduces the reader to the role

of leadership in INGOs and argues for an actor-centered perspective to help understand the many

complex challenges related to international NGO accountability. It explains why and how leaders

matter in the study of International NGOs. This chapter also presents the roadmap for the book.

 

Chapter 2: Constructing the Accountability Puzzle

Who decides to what, to whom, and how INGOs and their leaders should be accountable and

why? This chapter presents the organizing framework of the book. It argues that accountability

scholars have fostered insular academic debates and promoted an incomplete picture of what being

accountable internationally is. In this chapter, I review the main theoretical approaches to accountability.

To acknowledge that accountability is both a relational and context-driven organizational

ideal, I introduce each of the four pieces of the INGO accountability puzzle: definition, audience,

practices, and signals. I explain how increasing pressures for greater accountability have

exposed INGO leaders to an “accountability dissonance disorder”, i.e. the persistent attempt to

rely on practices mismatched to the accountability signals for their intended audiences.

 

Part II – Solving the Accountability Puzzle Piece by Piece

 

Chapter 3: Definitions, Audiences, Practices, and Signals

How do leaders of INGOs define accountability? To whom do they feel accountable? And

how do these leaders implement accountability in their organizations? This chapter explores each

of these questions in details using data from 152 open-ended interviews. Rather than imposing

pre-conceived notions of what accountability is from the academic literature, this chapter reconstructs

the accountability puzzle using the views of those who aim to achieve it in their daily activities.

In this chapter, I show how INGO leaders do not frame accountability in terms of trade-offs

between principled ideal and resource-driven incentives. Instead, they take a complementary, a

nuanced and more strategic approach to INGO accountability.

 

Chapter 4: When Does Context Matters? Organizational Differences and Similarities

This chapter asks whether or not leaders of INGOs think about the accountability in similar

ways across the various contexts in which their organizations operate. Are Human Rights leaders

similar to Environmental leaders? Do leaders managing financially effective organizations think

differently about accountability? Does size matter in any meaningful way? Using secondary data

for each of the 152 INGOs, I explore the variation of leadership views across different sectors, financial

health of the organization, budget size, and activity focus. This chapter makes the case for

a context-driven approach to accountability, one in which all four pieces of the puzzles are understood

in relation with the organizational constraints leaders face.

 

Chapter 5: Accountability Challenges

Is more accountability necessarily better? How are INGOs’ executive leaders overcoming the

accountability challenges they face? In this chapter, I discuss the prevalent assumption that more

accountability is necessarily better. By exploring the leaders’ critiques of what hinders their responsiveness to

stakeholder demands, I argue that more accountability is not necessarily better as

it exacerbates the problem of accountability dissonance discussed in chapter 2. I identify three

problematic areas.

Paloma Raggo is Assistant Professor of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, Canada.