AccountAbility Forum is a practitioner-focused journal dedicated to providing insight into the practice of accountability for sustainable development. Bringing together contributions from leading practitioners, it offers insights from policy-makers, business and NGO leaders, as well as academics, which demonstrate how accountability can drive performance.
Through direct consultation with AccountAbility’s members, networks and partnerships, each issue focuses on a current development or trend in the area, and in this way ensures that topics are both timely and relevant. AccountAbility Forum provides the essential resource for businesses, NGOs, governments and academia to learn about the most recent and important developments in accountability for sustainable development.The Accountability Quarterly publication is the predecessor to the Accountability Forum publication.
AF Issue 12: Autumn 2007 Accountable Leadership
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AF Issue 11: Autumn 2007 Material Futures
How organisations manage the relevance, or ‘materiality’ of their non-financial impacts, risks and opportunities appears central to the next generation of accountability mechanisms. Determining what aspects of sustainability are ‘material’ to organisations has become the latest turn in integrating sustainability into organisational practices. But how does such materiality need to be defined if it is to deliver against such high expectations? What are the implications of emerging innovations in practice? And when we evaluate ‘materiality’ are we thinking fundamentally about businesses’ performance or their impact on the environment and society? In this issue of AccountAbility Forum, a range of international practitioners and thinkers reflect on how they approach materiality and where debate and practice needs to go next..
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AF Issue 10: Summer 2006 Technology and Transparency
ICT is increasingly important in how we engage with companies, government and one another. The internet, email, blogs, chatrooms all enable new forms of interaction. We ‘google’ or ‘skype’ someone. Peer-to-peer processes, XBRL or RFID processes are said to signal further new forms of interaction between institutions and individuals, whether as citizens or consumers. At the same time we are uncomfortable, or even highly resistant, to some side-effects of such ICT, fearing that, instead of making our organisations more responsive to us, ICT will make individuals too transparent to companies wanting to sell things or governments wanting to watch us. In this issue of Accountability Forum expert practitioners explore how companies, government and civil society are dealing with the rewards and risks of ICT when it comes to transparency and accountability.
None of the recent and ongoing scares and worries about energy security, climate change or nuclear power will break the trend for ongoing energy demands; but these anxieties raise difficult questions about how we think about the relationship between energy and accountability. In this issue, leading practitioners from diverse backgrounds respond to the central question: ‘can we move to more efficient, equitable and cleaner energy systems by changing how we practise accountability in energy use?’ In this issue of AF leading practitioners and thinkers from groups including the Frances Seymour and Nancy Kete of the World Resources Institute, Camilla Toulmin of the International Institute of Environment and Development and Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute address some of the fundamental problems we face as we try to encourage responsible and accountable energy use.
Previous issues of the journal have focused on the accountability of private and non-governmental organisations, as well as that of partnerships. This issue covers the remaining sector in analysing the ways in which public sector bodies, from intergovernmental organisations such as the World Bank, through to local governments, are addressing the issue of accountability to their most immediate stakeholders: citizens. It includes articles from leading practitioners and thought leaders in this area including Utopies, One World Trust and the Centre for Public Agency Reporting.
Effective accountability is a pre-condition to addressing our common agenda: sustainable development. Accountability is the basis on which decisions are made, actions are taken and outcomes achieved. Our single greatest challenge is to reinvent accountability for the 21st Century. Tomorrow’s social organisation will be impacted by today’s dramatic changes in how people come together, through knowledge and civil society networks, open-source standards and e-communities. This special issue of the journal, which marks AccountAbility’s 10th anniversary, draws on a number of high-level contributions to examine what accountability innovations are needed for the 21st century, where are they most likely to come from and how can they be encouraged and made effective.
There are many perspectives on stakeholder engagement. Some people consider it as something they have always been doing and don’t really know what all that recent fuss is about. Others dismiss it as a potential distraction away from an organisation’s primary purpose. However, it is also increasingly being recognised as an essential part of good organisational management as well as one of the primary building blocks for sustainable development. This issue of the journal explores the current state of stakeholder engagement, as well as outlining AccountAbility’s own work in the area through the development of an AA1000 module and Handbook.
For corporate responsibility to move from the margins to the mainstream it has to be core to the way in which companies go about their business. It is no longer enough for there to be a CR programme separate to strategic planning, product development, corporate governance or supply chain management. Continuing AccountAbility’s aim to upscale the impact of corporate responsibility, and following previous issues of AccountAbility Forum on Responsible Competitiveness (AF1) and Mainstreaming Responsible Investment (AF3), this issue will focus on strategies and examples of how businesses are integrating corporate responsibility into their core plans and operations.
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Standards for corporate responsibility continue to be developed and new ones emerge. But where is it all going? Although there is a certain level of contemporary confusion and bewilderment at the speed of developments in standards, little has been done to understand where it is all going. What will the profusion mean for improving the responsibility of companies? Will companies converge around certain key standards making it easier to judge and manage performance? Or will the kaleidoscope of approaches continue to flourish?
This issue will focus on the future of standards, with contributors offering a series of scenarios and predictions as to what we might expect in the future.
Data suggests a trend towards more ‘socially responsible investments’ (SRIs), and that these investments appear to broadly maintain performance in comparison with other rated funds. But relative success of incredibly diverse investing strategies that all come under the heading ‘SRI’ hardly constitutes sufficient evidence. Worse still, this evidence is seen by many across the investing community as flawed, produced largely by SRI advocates serving mainly as support for campaigns to show why SRI investment is a good thing. This issue explores the conditions under which responsible investing could become the norm, consistent with statutory directives and market dynamics, with the aim of ultimately making a significant difference in mitigating negative and enhancing positive social and environmental externalities.
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The question of NGO accountability is being asked by a wide range of organisations and individuals; these range from progressive-leaning organisations such as SustainAbility to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. NGOs themselves have been more than aware of the importance of accountability; after all, it is what informs and drives their purpose. However, the debate is often bogged down by preconceived stances and the practice is patchy and unstructured.
This issue of AccountAbility Forum draws together a number of leading commentators and practitioners in NGO accountability. It includes analysis of exciting new initiatives such as ACCESS, which aims to develop a reporting standard for NGOs. Other NGO leaders, analysts and practitioners such as Kumi Naidoo of CIVICUS, Lester Salamon of John Hopkins University, Agnès Callamard on the Humanitarian Project, and L. David Brown of Harvard University, all offer important insights.
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For the launch of AccountAbility Forum we are delighted to bring you a special double issue that covers two under-explored areas of corporate responsibility: the responsible competitiveness of nations, and business and economic development. We have brought together a wide range of contributors, who in various ways are realising the potential of CR in these core areas, and working towards matching the micro activities of economic development with the more macro effects on national economies.
Responsible competitiveness is about achieving a more progressive role for business (and indeed governments and civil-society organisations) in society. More than that, it poses the challenge of moving towards a scale of impact that makes a real difference, and so makes sense of corporate responsibility. Articles cover a wide range of issues including the economic impact of mining, the opportunities of under-served markets, the responsible competitiveness of London and of the EU, and measures of competitiveness and economic development that are adding new dimensions to understanding success.
"...readers will be treated to in-depth articles on the responsible competitiveness of nations, business and economic development"Corporate Citizenship Briefing, February - March 2004
