Law Commons^™

What Ngo Accountability Means - And Does Not Mean, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This essay offers a review (4000 words) of "NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations," Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds. (London: Earthscan 2006).

International and transnational NGOs have been under criticism for alleged lack of accountability since they emerged into prominence in the 1990s. In recent years, the debate over NGOs has shifted from legitimacy and "representativeness" to accountability in the narrower senses of internal governance, fiduciary responsibility, relationships with national governmental authorities, and similar issues. The volume under review seeks to cover both aspects of the debate, with emphasis on the latter, narrower issues. The review essay argues …

What Ngo Accountability Means - And Does Not Mean, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2009-18Abstract:This essay offers a review (4000 words) of "NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations," Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds. (London: Earthscan 2006); following AJIL permission, it is given in unedited form and is available in final form in 103 AJIL 1 (January 2009).International and transnational NGOs have been under criticism for alleged lack of accountability since they emerged into prominence in the 1990s. In recent years, the debate over NGOs has shifted from legitimacy and "representativeness" to accountability in the narrower senses of internal governance, fiduciary responsibility, relationships with national governmental authorities, …

Book Review: Stephen Hopgood, 'Keepers Of The Flame: Understanding Amnesty International', Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-66Abstract:This brief review (1100 words) examines Stephen Hopgood's half journalism-half anthropological journey inside the world of Amnesty International. The book is an outstanding piece of both reportage and analysis, and the review discusses the various pressures, political and ideological and social, on AI and those that work in its International Secretariat. As the review notes, AI is more like a religious order than anything else, and that observation has ramifications for the NGO world beyond AI.

Squaring The Circle? Reconciling Sovereignty And Global Governance Through Global Government Networks (Review Of Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order), Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This book review summarizes and critiques A New World Order, offering both an internal critique of the argument's consistency as well as an outside critique of the argument from the standpoint of the value of democratic sovereignty. The review locates Slaughter's argument within the debate over international relations realism and idealism, and further locates it within a continuum of seven idealized positions in the debate between global governance and sovereignty, with pure sovereignty at one extreme and world government at the other, with the most relevant positions of democratic sovereignty and liberal internationalism located in the middle. The article concludes …

Development Decision Making And The Content Of International Development Law, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

International development law deals with the rights and duties of states and other actors in the development process. As the consensus view of the development process disintegrated during the 1970s and 1980s, the agreement on the content of international development law also began to break down. Today there are two competing idealized views of development. The first, the traditional view, maintains that development is about economic growth, which can be distinguished from other social, cultural, environmental, and political development issues in society. The second, the modern view, maintains that development is an integrated process of change involving intertwined economic, social, …

The Limits Of Pragmatism In American Foreign Policy: Unsolicited Advice To The Bush Administration On Relations With International Nongovernmental Organizations, Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Bush Administration has tended to see international nongovernmental organizations in a pragmatic way, as functionally the international equivalent of domestic "volunteer" organizations. This article argues that the Bush Administration ought to see international nongovernmental organizations as organizations seeking to substitute so-called "international civil society," on the one hand, and public international organizations, on the other, for the authority of democratically sovereign states. Looking beyond the particular issues on which international NGOs press political agendas - human rights, environmentalism, etc. - the function of international NGOs is to delegitimize democratic sovereignty in favor of liberal internationalism. The article argues that …