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Abstract
Transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) are often said to lack accountability. Taking issue with this claim, we report the results of a study on the accountability regimes of 60 transnational CSOs engaging in political advocacy. We scrutinize their transparency, opportunities for internal participation, evaluations and self-regulation, complaint procedures, and their independence from the state and intergovernmental organizations. We find that most transnational CSOs are reasonably transparent and offer participatory opportunities at least for members. They are organizationally independent from states and intergovernmental organizations, but dependencies on public funding are striking in some cases. Independent evaluations of their activities are scarce and codes of conduct, often suggested as an avenue towards better self-regulation of CSOs, do not seem to play a major role in practice. We conclude that the debate over transnational CSO accountability should focus on the most critical issues. In the case of general interest organizations, this seems to be the danger of co-optation through public financing. Special interest organizations, by contrast, are highly independent but have deficits in external transparency, especially regarding their budget.
Notes
In this article, the term CSO denotes a non-governmental and non-profit organization which has a legal personality and pursues its goals in non-violent ways. In addition to activist organizations, this definition includes the social partners (i.e. international federations of trade unions and employers associations), consumer associations, charities, and religious communities. We use the attribute transnational to indicate that the CSOs under study are active across borders and contribute to international decision-making (see also Florini & Simmons, Citation2000, p. 3). While this definition is widely used, there are other understandings of transnational actors (see, e.g. Escobar's article in this issue).
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