In October, One World Trust's Global Accountability Project (GAP)-which aims to assess how open and receptive global organizations are to the internal demands of their members and the external demands of individuals and groups who are affected by the organizations daily operations-hosted an international workshop in London to discuss best practices in an organization's relations with its external stakeholders. 21 The workshop brought together a variety of international NGOs and companies, and some intergovernmental organizations. The British NGO seeks to develop indicators to measure the degree and quality of stakeholder engagement within the world's international organizations.

The workshop documented the participants' experiences and perspectives on approaches to and methods of stakeholder engagement. However, there was some disagreement with the starting premise of the organizers that stakeholder engagement was always "good" and that you could usefully compare the practices of organizations with very different mandates and restrictions.

The conceptual framework for GAP's understanding of accountability divides accountability into eight management elements, ranging from member control of the organization to complaints mechanisms. The intention is to compare the practices of transnational corporations (TNCs), intergovernmental organizations and international NGOs. One reason for this comparison is to attract media interest, by ranking organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) alongside well-known NGOs and large companies. Through this attention, the aim is to increase the debate about accountability, and therefore promote action.

This strategy worked earlier in the year, when GAP published its first report on "member control." The report gave the WTO a high score, and higher than a number of NGOs, for its mechanisms of accountability to members-a finding which generated press coverage. However, some questioned the results; by focusing on the accountability to members, the study ignored the accountability of those members themselves. At the WTO, the accountability of government delegations to the people in the countries they affect by their decisions remains a problem. Moreover, some delegations have used the WTO secretariat more than others, and played a much stronger role in drafting agreements, which then structure the agendas of future negotiations. The same problem has also be posed in the context of the corporate sector. Although a company may be accountable to its shareholders, what then of the accountability of those shareholders' interests in profit taking to the people affected by the corporation? In addition, defining companies' members as its shareholders, rather than its employees could be challenged.

Some participants pointed out that trade unions were not present at the workshop on "external stakeholder engagement"- and that most would regard themselves as internal not external stakeholders. However, as they were neither covered in the assessment on member control, some questioned whether One World Trust had effectively defined unions out of the process of assessing their employer's accountability. It was noted that unions have often expressed concerns at how the language of stakeholder participation is sometimes used to marginalize them.

The starting assertion of the organisers of the workshop was that engagement must be undertaken in a manner that links external stakeholders to the political processes of decision making; however, this became more problematic as the workshop progressed. Some participants noted that it would not always be beneficial for some international NGOs to be accountable to those they influence-such as the governments, companies and international institutions they may criticize. Instead, the pressing issue is the accountability of decisions and decision-making processes to the people whose lives they influence. Decisions made by TNCs have much larger impacts on people's lives than those made by NGOs. Stella Amadi, a participant from Rivers State College in Nigeria, said after the workshop that the legal mechanisms for ensuring the accountability of such companies to the many people they can negatively affect is very weak, and so comparing them with NGOs is not helpful.

A key theme that emerged in some of the summing up was that if all sectors of organization are to be compared for their accountability, then the constituency that demands that accountability needs to be more clearly defined. Principles of human rights and democracy suggest that this constituency must be the people who are affected by an organization, not the people who can or do affect it. To investigate this issue rigorously will require assessing the impacts of different organizational sectors, and problems with the limits on decision-making within organizations that are set by its institutional form (corporation, government, or NGO).