The Evolution of NGO Accountability Practices and their Implications on Philippine NGOs

A literature review and options paper for the Philippine Council for NGO Certification

 

By: Danilo A. Songco

 

 Introduction

 

Philippine NGOs have been at the cutting edge of NGO self-regulation.   The Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), the biggest coalition of NGOs in the Philippines, established a Code of Conduct for Development NGOs in 1991.  It was the first to establish a Code of Conduct among NGOs in Asia (Sidel, 2003) and probably one of the first in the global NGO community.  CODE-NGO’s Code of Conduct has since been signed by over a thousand NGOs and was recently updated to provide for clearer enforcement mechanisms.  In 1998, the Philippine Council for NGO Certification (PCNC) was established by 7 of the biggest NGO coalitions.  It is one of the very few government recognized NGO certification system in the world and has been the subject of discussion and possible replication by NGOs in different countries.  Both initiatives are repeatedly cited as models and analyzed in many of the documents that were reviewed for this paper.

 

Today, however, after 8 years of existence, PCNC has certified only 1,000 NGOs---nowhere near its potential market of 6,000 NGOs when it was established.[1]  While there are a number of factors that could have contributed to this less than expected performance, the challenge to PCNC (as well as the entire NGO community in the Philippines) is how to take NGO accountability through self-regulation to the next level.  This is an overwhelming challenge at a time when Philippine NGOs are facing a serious crisis of sustainability and relevance. This crisis in the Philippines has strong parallelism to the global NGO situation.   

 

The global discourse on NGO accountability is creating a wealth of literature.  Many of them shed light on the issues at hand.  Others simply add more fuel to heat up the debate.  This review does not intend to cover the entire scope of such literature because the sheer volume makes it nearly impossible to do so.  Instead, this review attempts to build upon more current papers and summative documents that already synthesize learning from a large collection of writings.  This paper is prepared primarily for the members and leadership of PCNC in its effort to make NGO self-regulation more effective NGO in the Philippines.  More specifically, the objectives of this review are: (1) to appreciate the breadth of discourse on NGO accountability and, (2) to identify different approaches that would be useful to PCNC’s efforts to increase accountability of Philippine NGOs.  By strengthening its accountability practices, PCNC hopes to contribute to reviving the vigor and dynamism of the Philippine NGO community.