Of Measurement and Mission: Accounting for Performance in Non-Governmental Organizations

As members of civil society NGOs would seem to have a built-in proclivity towards representation: towards working on behalf of some group of people, or toward some specific goal. Yet in practice such moments of accountability are rare. Unlike other social agents, NGOs have not yet developed customary mechanisms for reporting on their activities. This gap is not due to either oversight or neglect. On the contrary, both NGOs and their observers have argued with increased vigor over the past decades for some measures of accountability; some way to determine the impact of NGOs and the cost-effectiveness of their behavior. Such measures, however, are inherently difficult to assemble. It is hard to attribute specific achievements to individual NGOs or count the efficacy of non-market based activities; harder still to crack the connection between NGOs and either development or democratization. And yet as the NGO sector grows in both scope and power, it is precisely these measurements that become more critical.

This paper probes the problem of accountability in three separate but related ways. First, it describes the wide variation that characterizes NGOs and propose a typology based on these differences. Second, it examines more specifically how performance might be measured across NGO sectors and what kind of information can be derived from these measures. It then concludes with a brief discussion of perhaps the thorniest issue of NGO accountability: whether NGOs contribute to democratization and how society can tell.