About the Charter
Background
The Development and Conceptualization of the International Non-Governmental Organisations Accountability Charter
The International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGO) Accountability Charter was born out of deliberations of a number of prominent civil society leaders brought together annually since 2003 by the International Advocacy Non-Governmental Organisations (IANGO) Workshop. The Workshop idea itself was a result of conversations between the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation and several IANGO leaders. The IANGO Workshop initiative was launched in recognition of the need to create a platform for collective reflection, personal learning and strategic thinking to facilitate individual and collective action on common challenges and opportunities facing IANGOs working for the promotion of public goods in diverse regions and environments. The IANGO Workshop, co-facilitated by the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organisations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, convened a diverse range of global civil society actors engaged in issues such as poverty alleviation, human rights, citizen participation, women's rights, environmental advocacy, labour rights and good governance in the aim of addressing the concerns and specific challenges facing organisations working on the global level to not only provide relief and development but to also advocate for the resolution of complex trans-national problems and for the achievement of social, economic and political justice.
The IANGO Workshop's raison d'être revolves around four distinct but inter-related goals that collectively contribute to the amelioration of IANGO impacts and to their ability to carry out their missions more effectively. The first aim of the IANGO Workshop to allow IANGO leaders to share knowledge about global problems and dynamics came as a result of the realization that a solid knowledge base is indispensable to the success of IANGOs' work and to the expansion of their impacts. The second goal of the Workshop is to provide opportunities to building wider coalitions and support for specific campaigns and lobbying on issues of common concern. The third goal of the Workshop is to allow for informal interactions and mutual support between leaders of trans-national organisations, who seldom have the opportunity to engage with their peers to discuss responses to specific challenges that face them as leaders of organisations working across a range of issues and countries. The last goal of the Workshop is to identify and address sector-wide issues and challenges such as engagement with intergovernmental organisations and the legitimacy, accountability and transparency of IANGOs.
The conceptualization and creation of the INGO Accountability Charter represents one tangible outcome of IANGO Workshop. In four years, conversations regarding the importance of INGO legitimacy and accountability progressed to the public launch of the INGO Accountability Charter expressing the commitment of eleven leading INGOs to uphold the highest standards of moral and professional conduct in all their policies, activities and operations. At the first IANGO Workshop meeting hosted by Transparency International in Berlin in June 2003, participants raised the importance of INGO legitimacy and accountability in light of the increasingly prominent and influential role on the international arena and their increased access to resources and policy-making circles. In order to better scope the accountability challenge, participants requested that the Hauser Center prepare an overview research paper on the issue to serve as a basis for the subsequent IANGO Workshop discussions. At the 2004 IANGO Workshop held in Oxford at the Oxfam International Headquarters, participants created a task force composed of heads of Greenpeace International, Oxfam International, Amnesty International and International Save the Children Alliance to review and synthesize the experience of Workshop members regarding their own accountability. At the Amsterdam meeting hosted by Greenpeace International in June 2005, the aforementioned task force shared its initial draft of the "Charter of Accountability" for INGOs. Workshop participants undertook the commitment to present the draft to their national affiliates, partner organisations and networks for inputs and suggestions to integrate into the revised version of the Accountability Charter. Inputs from an independent consultant specialist on accountability and reporting issues were also solicited to finalize the draft. Members of the Workshop continued the development of the Accountability Charter for an additional year, prior to publicly launching it at the fourth annual IANGO Workshop hosted by Amnesty International in June 2006 in London.
On the 6th of June 2006, eleven leading INGOs comprising ActionAid International, Amnesty International, CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Consumers International, Greenpeace International, Oxfam International, International Save the Children Alliance, Survival International, International Federation Terre des Hommes, Transparency International and the World YWCA held a press conference in order to publicly declare their adoption of the Charter; galvanize support around the issues of civil society legitimacy, accountability and transparency; and invite other INGOs to undertake the same commitment in order to promote and garner support for the highest common standards of conduct for NGOs working trans-nationally.
At the launch of the Accountability Charter, the Charter Founding Signatories agreed to delegate the responsibility of overseeing the development of the Charter implementation to a Steering Group composed of Amnesty International, Greenpeace International, Oxfam International, ActionAid International, International Save the Children Alliance, Transparency International and the CIVICUS: World Alliance of Citizen Participation. The latter was also designated to serve as the Secretariat of the Charter to track signatories, administer the sign-up and reporting processes of the Charter, facilitate communications between Charter Signatories, create and maintain an institutional home for the Charter and serve as an interlocutor between potential signatories, current signatories and the Steering Group.
Since the launch of the Charter in June 2006, the Founding Signatories adopted a provisional Roles and Responsibilities document governing the Charter; elected a Management Committee which on the behalf of Founding Signatories undertakes the oversight of the sign-on process and guides the general development of the Charter and the reporting process; and agreed on criteria for new signatories in order to ensure that only those INGOs that abide by the Charter's ethical framework adopt the Charter.
Financial costs needed to run the IANGO Workshop and to develop the INGO Accountability Charter have initially been absorbed by Workshop host organisations and participants themselves. The costs of convening, planning and facilitating the face to face meetings of the Charter %u201Cproducers%u201D and bringing in participants from small and/or Southern based INGO unable to pay their own costs have also been covered by small grants from various foundations (Ashoka, Bertelsmann, Hewlett, Ford) and by contributions in kind by larger participating organisations and organisers of the events. In March 2006, the Ford Foundation has approved a small two-year grant to CIVICUS: the World Alliance of Citizen Participation to serve as the Secretariat for the IANGO Workshop and the INGO Accountability Charter. Beyond that period, Charter Founding Signatories aim to render the Accountability Charter a financially self-sustaining initiative. In the future, costs for Accountability Charter hosting, administration and development are to be covered by signatories- who benefit from the initiative- through annual membership fees corresponding to their annual incomes. Signatory fees are also meant to ensure that only those organisations committed to the Charter will sign-on.
The launch of the Charter merely represents a starting point of an ongoing process to establish and implement a system that not only sets common standards of conduct for INGOs but also creates mechanisms to report, monitor and evaluate compliance as well as provide redress. Acknowledging the importance of preserving the integrity of the Charter and of ensuring the establishment of enforcement instruments, the Management Committee on behalf of Founding Signatories is involved in a number of processes to further the development of the Charter. There are ongoing discussions and efforts to design compliance and reporting indicators for INGOs signatories to the Charter through a multi-stakeholder consultative process administrated by the Global Reporting Initiative, to create a peer-review process, to establish a legal framework governing the Charter and to consolidate an independent panel to handle complaints and provide redress.
To keep up to date with further developments to the Accountability Charter initiative please visit the Announcements section of this website.