Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Nonprofits and NGOs have become increasingly important actors in addressing and correcting both market and government failures through a host of activities ranging from direct service provision to political advocacy. This increasing participation in public service provision raises questions for governments about the most effective means of monitoring and regulating their activities.  At the transnational level, questions of accountability arise – on whose behalf are transnational actors working and with what forms of accountability or responsibility? In response to these questions, governments consider various forms of regulation and control while NGOs explore self-regulation as a potential means for balancing autonomy and responsibility. Tension exists between the threat of centralized state control of NGOs, which can potentially hinder the ability of NGOs to carry out their work and the inability of governments to create coherent public policy and services.   

This paper examines variation in the structure of transnational and national NGO accountability systems, focusing in particular on the emergence, diffusion  and content of nonprofit and NGO voluntary self-regulation regimes. We examine two sets of hypotheses.  First, we examine the factors driving the emergence and diffusion of self-regulation programs for international non-governmental organizations across countries.  We expect that countries with stronger ties to transnational accountability programs and countries with neighbors who have adopted such systems will be more likely to develop voluntary self-regulation regimes, controlling for current public regulation regimes.  We then examines the variation in the content of these regimes across countries and between national and transnational regimes. We argue that while national level systems often emerge in response to national-level regulatory systems and ‘hard law,’ transnational systems operate in the realm of ‘soft-law’ and globally negotiated accountability spaces. These different accountability domains might be expected to translate into different voluntary regulation structures if NGOs are responding accountability demands from different principals. We test our hypothesis with a global dataset that covers 263 voluntary regulation programs across 180 countries. This analysis suggests that emergence of self-regulation at the national level is driven more by responses to domestic regulatory pressure than by global isomorphic pressures. National level systems are more likely to include provisions aimed at protecting beneficiaries, and less likely to include provisions supporting the rights to public criticism, suggesting that domestic principals influence the structure of these initiatives.