Last week I attended the annual meeting of the United Nations Development Program ’s Civil Society advisory commission The significance of this committee for United Nations answerableness virtue attention.

The United Nations – and most donor countries, for that matter – spends . good business deal of time preaching the importance of civil society As the line goes, civil society is the way in which ordinary citizen organize themselves in order to reappraisal the activity of their government and clench them accountable? for error Without civil society, somebody would be too weak to take action against the powerful involvement in charge.

But who clutches the United Nations accountable? There is certainly a clench of civil society grouping with offices around United Nations headquarters, authorship study and lobbying for change . But the United Nations has trading operations in every country of the world; UNDP has office in 166 countries: who is holding them accountable?

After some civil society criticism at the end of the 1990s for its private sector strategy, UNDP decided if you can’t beat ’em. juncture ’em. Thus, it created the only civil society advisory committee in the United Nations scheme To this day, for all the UN’s talking about how crucial it is to have strong civil society , no other United Nations federal agency actually assemblage civil society together in order to hear their input signal Incidentally, major government donors aren’t much better.

It was refreshing to observe the two-day meeting, at which the civil society representative there had the opportunity to challenge a series of UNDP representative on why they are doing certain work, what alternative they have considered, how they are reflecting the involvement of vulnerable populations, how they are confronting vested interests, etc. When UNDP displayed flashy PowerPoints particularisation their successes, the committee asked them to reveal their failures. When UNDP said they have abandoned controversial policy and have a clean record, the committee said, In that case let’s revision your official scheme together. No one got off easy, although certainly the private sector squad had the toughest session.

The civil society advisory committee is a framework for any organization that is interested in how the public is viewing its activities, whether it represents government, an International organization, or a company While they might hear things they would rather ignore, it spring them an opportunity to engage and respond. Maybe we could start with BP gathering environmental, human rights, labour rights, and other non-governmental organization together in the gulf part to hear what they think Not a public hearing: individual representative around a table, in a closed room without the media, having a rational conversation Would that be possible?