I’m at a conference called “AccountAbility: Reinventing Accountability for the 21st Century.” A few minutes of conversation discloses that “accountability” means something different here than in the US. In the US, accountability is a magical belief in the power of paperwork to end all corporate crime. Accountability is imposed by the government. In Britain, “accountability” is a term used by social do-gooder groups to beg big corporations to stop killing us and our world. (“Do-gooder” is, for me, a term of high praise.) Conference sponsors: Edelman PR, Shell Foundation, Barloworld. Second-level sponsors: OpenDemocracy, Civicus, Keystone, Great Place to Work.

[Nevertheless, the session I’m participating in seems to use the term in the US sense since it poses accountability as the solution to the “problem” that anyone can say anything she wants on the Internet. Also, the program lists something about “PR” in the subhead, but not in the materials I’ve seen. That explains why Edelman PR (who paid my way here and to whom I consult) is sponsoring the conference and moderating the panel. But since 2 of the 3 panelists are mainstream media news people, and the session blurb is about news and the Internet, I doubt we’ll spend much time on PR.]

About 250 people are here. Quite diverse in gender and color.

Tom Delfgaauw opens the plenary session by saying that the key question of the conference is: What are the accountability innovations required in the next few years to achieve the environmental, economic and social objectives lis

First speaker: Mary Robinson whose resume is too long and astounding to capture here, except maybe to say she’s a former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and director of the Ethical Globalization Initiative and honorary president of Oxfam. She says 191 countries have agreed to support the rights of children, although not all live up to it. The two countries who have not are Somalia and the US. Human Rights is underfunded by the UN, she says.

Now she talks about the role of business in human rights. She says that Kofi Annan has appointed someone to investigate this very question. “It’s a weak mandate,” she says, but quite important. The WEF is also looking into this.

Because of the rise of importance of “civil society” groups, they need to be accountable, too. (She says they are sometimes called the “second world power,” unknowingly quoting Jim Moore.)

She talks about “accountability innovations”: 1. Business Leaders Initiative on Human rights. This is modeled on the BLI on Climate Change, which is easier to measure. 2. The UN’s Global Compact — she thinks it’s an entry point for global corporate responsibility. She says 800 companies doing business in China have signed up. At Aspen recently, an audience of CEOs had never heard of the Global Compact. She asked why they wouldn’t take the opportunity to help “level the playing field of values.” 3. “Trying to make trade fair by bringing the hman rights approach to it.” She says the reason babies lie in ditches as their mother harvest cotton in Mali is the US’s $4B subsidy or cotton. The EU, she says, is headed in a similarly wrong direction wrt sugar in Mozambique. “Stability of consumers” is in the interest of global business.

She ends by telling of a conversation yesterday with a 24-yr NGO worker outside of Capetown (he works on AIDS and nutrition-related issues) who complained about the appalling level of corruption in NGOs. “There might be a danger that we look how to control those at the top…but how do we make it culturally vibrant for small NGOs to resist being corrupted?” (The 24-year-old, she says, is her son.)

In response to a question, she says that she’s depressed by the political situation in Australia, where steps she considers to be ineffective in increasing security are worsening human rights.

Q: Can we recast accountability as “democratic competence” as a citizenship-building strategy?

A: I’m very interested in reframing it this way. There’s broad support for democracy. If we could harness some of that constituency…

Q: Isn’t the increasing disparity of income and wealth having a determintal effect on accountability?

A: Yes.

Q: What do US companies say about why they’re not signed up to the Global Compact?

A: Three factors: 1. They do not like the UN. 2. Those who have actually looked at it have said,l “We’re doing it anyway. Why should we bother reporting to the UN.” 3. Fear that at some stage it’ll become mandatory.

[Tags: accountability HumanRights ngo]

Categories: Uncategorized dw