Working Paper 32: Abstract

Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability:

Issues and Challenges

This paper reports an effort to explore the issues of civil society legitimacy and accountability and the range of initiatives that have been created to respond to them.  The paper begins with a discussion of the factors that have made legitimacy and accountability critical issues, including some factors inherent in the nature of civil society and others that have emerged in recent years.  Then it develops a framework for understanding legitimacy and accountability as concepts, some elements that support or undermine their existence, and some possibilities for intervening to strengthen them.  The next section focuses on steps involved in building organizational accountability systems that respond to the multiple and potentially conflict claims of organizational stakeholders.  The section illustrates these steps with examples from around the world and argues that such systems can contribute to strategic learning and organizational capacity-building as well as enhancing legitimacy.  The following section provides a similar analysis for multi-organization domainssectors, campaigns, and intersectoral problem domains.  It provides examples of innovative approaches to enhancing domain legitimacy and accountability from around the world1and argues that such systems can foster productive discourses about the definition of domain problems and problem-solving processes.  The closing sections discuss societal legitimacy and accountability and continuing dilemmas.  The paper concludes with an argument for the pivotal nature of improving civil society legitimacy and accountability given its growing importance in local, national and global governance and problem-solving.