Civil Society, Representation and Accountability Restating Current Debates about the Representativeness and Accountability of Civic Organizations

PERUZZOTTI, ENRIQUE

NGO Accountability. Politics, Principles and Innovation

Earthscan

Lugar: London; Año: 2007; p. 43 - 58

In recent years, a very lively debate about the public status of civil society organizations has emerged as a result of the increasing questioning by governments and multilateral agencies of the role and activities of NGOs and civic associations.  The impressive proliferation of a multitude of advocacy organizations and of different sorts of NGOs in the domestic and global arenas have generated justified concerns about the nature and consequences of their activities on domestic representative institutions as well as has raised doubts about the representative claims and the accountability of those civic associations.  For many years, particularly when those organizations largely operated under authoritarian environments, the issue of the representativeness and accountability of civic actors could be easily brushed aside given the illegitimate nature of the domestic governments and the continuous threat they represented to any form of autonomous social activity that dare to challenge and expose their abuses. However, the increased presence of democratically elected governments in developing countries makes it difficult to keep avoiding an attentive and thoughtful analysis of the relationship between civil society actors and representative institutions.  What is the nature of the ties that link civic associations to the citizenry at large? Should we extent the claims to representativeness and accountability that frame the relationship between citizens and politicians to civic organizations?  Can civil society organizations be equated to political parties?  Should they become part of representative institutions? Or should they remain in the constituent side of the representative equation?  These are some of the questions that will guide the analysis. To respond to them I will proceed as follows: Section I focus on the conceptual links between accountability and representation to show that the concept of accountability is intrinsically linked with the delegation of power that citizens make to politicians. Section II analyses the relationship of civil society to representative institutions, arguing that civic organizations are located not on the representative but on the constituent side of the democratic bond. Section III critically reviews existing debates about the representative claims of civil society organizations arguing that analyses that simply stretch the concept of political representation to civic associations overlook the crucial differences between these two types of organizations. Section IV focus on the issue of the accountability of civic organizations as well as explores alternative ways to improve the institutional environment and organizational quality of the plurality of associational forms that characterize contemporary civil societies.