The point of making people and organizations more accountable Essay

The point of making people and organizations more accountable - Essay Example This is because there are the stakeholders who need current information on the status of their concerns. For example, in an international session that looked at accountability across all sectors involved in HIV, including community, government and UN, a reporter reported that - The movement is now fragmented. There are some new voices but it's not representative of everyone. And ever since treatment became accessible, the sense of urgency is lost. Many activists who were fighting for their lives have now gone on medication and gone back to having full time jobs (Narayanan, 2006). One strong point of making people and organizations more accountable is that people's ability to realise their rights to resources have increased (Newell &Wheeler, 2006b). Accordingly more responsive institutions enable people to gain access to resources, equipping them with legal frameworks, citizen engagements, understanding of accountability, and state-market relations. Citizens are taught a range of informal and formal strategies to demand accountability, too. Another reason in making people and organizations more accountable is to fight the perception that the organization is illegitimate. Therefore, organizations, especially those international in scope, need to increase transparency, improve accountability, and think harder about norms for global governance (Nye, 2001). By increasing visibility, criticism may be minified (Lloyd & de Las Casas, 2005). It cannot also be discounted that some organizations are speaking up on behalf of marginalized communities and have facilitated the participation of these communities in such matters as HIV/AIDS response (Code of Good Practice, 2004). There are questions then about the quality and accountability of programmes being delivered by some organizations. NGOs are said to have lacked resources, technical skills or experience, and this has implications for the quality of programming, monitoring and evaluation of these programmes (Code of Good Practice, 2004). The truth is that not everyone benefits equally from programmes so that attention has to be given to issues of intra-community accountability, adequate channels of representation, and new mechanisms for inclusion and participation (Newell & Wheeler, 2006b). This sense of community as a reason for accountability was also emphasized by Johnsson (1996). Another is that while markets have bonded people together, environmental, social, and political interdependence have also increased (Nye, 2001). There is concern that humanitarian agencies have no accepted body of professional standards to guide their work, especially when new ones are coming into the humanitarian sector. A truism is that whether experienced or newly-created, humanitarian assistance agencies could make mistakes, be misguided or sometimes misuse the trust placed in them (Borton, 1994). Moreover, any allocation of resources needs guidance (Code of Good Practice, 2004). There is also the need for donors to be more accountable to those they aim to support and those they press to reform (Newell & Wheeler, 2006b). History is replete with peoples' fight from developing countries with country borrowings with the World Bank and IMF. Indeed, rational behaviour (Olson et al, 1998) is one point of making