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Accountability

Global accountability report 2003

Access to information: NGOs lag behind

Authors: H. Kovach; C. Neligan; S. Burall; One World Trust
Publisher: World Trade Organization , 2003

Full text of document

This report compares the accountability of inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), transnational corporations (TNCs) and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It assesses 18 of the world’s most powerful organizations and gives scores for their performance in two aspects of accountability:

  • Member control of governance structures; and
  • Access to information
The results show wide differences within and between the three groups, clearly indicating leaders in the field and those that fall behind.

Some important findings include:
  • Only a minority of members actually exert real control over many of the organizations examined.
  • IGOs are far more susceptible to this than international NGOs.
  • International NGOs, on the whole, avoid this problem.
  • Only the International Chamber of Commerce within the international NGO group fails to use a mechanism to ensure that a minority of members does not dominate.
  • TNCs also suffer from a form of minority control as a result of the rise in the number of large institutional investors.
  • International NGOs provide less online information about their activities than IGOs and TNCs.
  • All of the groups limit access to information about their decision-making processes.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) are the only organizations in this study to have scored well in both member control and access to informal, coming top overall. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has the lowest combined score of all organizations.