By Rabi Thapa

Last October, two dozen independent accountability mechanisms (IAMs) convened in Manila, the Philippines, for the IAMnet Annual Meetings. The meetings began with a plenary session on the policy reviews that no fewer than seven IAMs are undergoing. Participants recounted the myriad challenges involved in finetuning the policies of IAMs, but what was uppermost in their minds was how the reviews could be used to improve the process of accountability to fulfil their mandates to both communities and their parent institutions.

IAMs have been in existence for 30 years now and have, since the founding of the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, evolved along pathways that reflect the scope of international financial institutions (IFIs), existing accountability mechanisms in the public and private sectors, landmark cases, and international guidelines on the principles and policies that should underpin the functioning of IAMs. So, what makes for a strong independent accountability mechanism?

Back to the roots of accountability

In reviewing policies, there is a risk of getting lost in the fine print as laid out in the resolutions that have established a given IAM. Accountability is at the root of the mandate of all IAMs, but how might we define it?

Margaret Wachenfeld, Managing Director at Themis Research, says, “Accountability is about people or institutions or businesses taking responsibility, not only for what they’ve done, but importantly, for helping resolve and redress any harms that have happened.” She adds, “There are many different definitions of accountability.”

Ioana Popp, Founder of UNaccountable, confirms the multidimensionality of accountability: “In over 200 consultations with different stakeholders on the issue of accountability, one of the striking findings was that everybody tends to see accountability in a specific way, and they’re all right, because they’re all part of this ecosystem.”

According to Popp, who is developing a model for relational accountability between United Nations organizations, “Accountability is what one would call a public good. It is the non-exclusive and at best, mutually reinforcing outcome of the interdependent relationships between different stakeholders.”

In a recent interview with Accountability Matters, Margaux Day, Executive Director of Accountability Counsel, zeroed in on the community-centered nature of accountability as it should be viewed by IAMs and IFIs: “There shouldn’t be a single definition, because what accountability means is defined by each impacted community member, and we are seeking community-led accountability.”

Business not as usual

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), provide further context to the quality of accountability IAMs should be pursuing. The UNGPs are based on the “Protect, Respect, Remedy” framework, were unanimously endorsed by the Human Rights Council in 2011, and have been widely supported by the duty-bearers they name in the three pillars described in the context of business operations: for States to protect human rights; for corporations to respect human rights; and for effective remedy to be provided for victims of business-related human rights abuse. Principle 31 of the UNGPs covers non-judicial grievance mechanisms that should help address the third pillar—which IAMs are one model of—and elaborates effectiveness criteria for them. They should be legitimate; accessible; predictable; equitable; transparent; rights-compatible; a source of continuous learning; and based on engagement and dialogue.

A strong IAM is thus an effective one that brings lasting remedy to communities. The UNGPs provide a basis for this work. Victoria Marquez-Mees, Chief Accountability Officer at the Independent Project Accountability Mechanism (IPAM) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, says that she is a strong believer in the UNGPs, and emphasizes accessibility and predictability. She also highlights transparency while acknowledging the difficulty of realizing remedy for complainants: “The transparency principle is one of our strongest as a mechanism where we still do not really provide remedy. Continuous communication with all the parties should be sustained through the processing of the case.”

Wachenfeld is also lead author of OHCHR’s Remedy in Development Finance, which specifically refers to IAMs and their role in the context of Principle 31. She says that the UNGPs were set up primarily to address human rights abuses by businesses, but can and should also be applied to development projects financed by IFIs, particularly private sector financing by IFIs: “With project-level grievance mechanisms that report to their own management, public transparency is not something that you see from these mechanisms, unlike IAMs.” For IAMs, she advocates for an interpretation of Principle 31 to include structural independence from management, the ability to make recommendations and supervise their implementation, and a focus on non-retaliation and non-repetition of harm. She concludes: “IAMs can absolutely use the UNGPs. But not only—it’s a ‘UNGPs-plus’, I would say.”

Akiko Sato, Business and Human Rights Project Liaison Officer with the United Nations Development Programme, views trust as an emergent property of the eight UNGP principles. “Trust is very important, and any mechanism has to empower the people,” she explains. “That cannot be achieved if any of the elements in the UNGPs are lacking.” Popp of UNaccountable adds: “I think it’s very important that accountability be perceived as an effort that is constructive.”

From the very beginning, IAMs have understood that while they differ from each other in terms of their structure and functions, they share common principles. Citizen-driven Accountability for Sustainable Development (2012), authored by 11 IAMs, states: “Citizen-driven accountability rests upon several core principles: independence, impartiality, transparency, integrity and professionalism, accessibility, and responsiveness. … in large measure because all are critical to creating an atmosphere of trust.”

Seeing the forest and the trees

The Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO) of the International Finance Corporation/Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency has carried out qualitative self-assessments using the 82 indicators included under the UNGP effectiveness criteria, while the Independent Redress Mechanism (IRM) of the Green Climate Fund has tested a quantitative approach. Co-author of Remedy in Development Finance Mac Darrow, presenting the criteria during an IAMnet webinar, says that a consistent application of a common set of criteria, to be made public, could help complainants obtain a clearer picture of IAM processes and help them advance their claims.

However, in Glass Half Full? The State of Accountability in Development Finance, civil society contributors say: “Using the UNGP effectiveness criteria to assess the IAMs and DFIs [development finance institutions] presents a challenge because the criteria are focused primarily on the process, not the outcome. The true test of the effectiveness of a complaints process, however, is whether the grievance is resolved.”

Marquez-Mees also warns that in formulating policies to fit the UNGPs, IAMs should keep in mind their primary objective: to achieve results for communities. This includes offering lessons to IFIs via their advisory functions, in order to obtain a commitment to non-repetition of harm in the projects they finance—minimizing the need for future complaints. According to her: “You can have policies and procedures that follow those principles very well. Most IAMs have them. Then it comes to how you implement them, how you live them.”

Accountability for sustainability

Defining accountability, setting criteria to achieve it, and ensuring that the focus is to “do no harm” brings us full circle to the fundamental idea that for development to endure across generations, or be sustainable, it should benefit all. As the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) state, “Leave No One Behind.” To be effective, IAMs thus need to understand not just the concept of accountability, but also the very nature of development goals. Like the SDGs, accountability needs to address the concerns of everybody in the long term. Citizen-Driven Accountability for Sustainable Development is explicit: “Equitable, sustainable development requires robust accountability mechanisms.”

As adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986, “The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.” Pratyush Sharma, Core Team Member, UPEACE Human Rights Centre, clarifies that this means that not only should governments and financing systems do their utmost to avoid human rights violations in development projects, but development itself should be a demand-driven process. This applies as much to recipient states as beneficiary communities and project-affected peoples. Sharma asks: “What has been the involvement of people throughout the project cycle? What is their ‘connect’ with the project?” As Robert Chambers, Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, put it back in 1995, “Whose reality counts?  The reality of the few in centres of power? Or the reality of the many poor at the periphery?”

All together now

Glass Half Full? The State of Accountability in Development Finance describes the accountability system as “made up of two halves—the IAM and the DFI, which in turn is composed of its management and board of directors. Each must fulfil its responsibility for the system to work and provide remedy to those who are harmed.” Marquez-Mees describes an ecosystem of accountability: “Accountability is not only the remit of the accountability mechanism people. It’s also part of what the management of the banks do, what the board does, even what civil society and the complainants do. So, we’re part of an ecosystem of accountability. There are things that are under your control, but you’re also restricted by other things that may or may not be apparent.” She explains that even where the independence of IAMs from management is guaranteed structurally, it may be constrained by their need to obtain Board approval on a range of matters from recruitment to budgets to implementation of the recommendations IAMs make. Popp highlights “relational accountability” in the context of accountability across the UN bodies that are invested in delivering the SDGs: “It’s about the relationships that are necessarily established within this ecosystem and the different sets of stakeholders that are working together to deliver with their distinctive roles, responsibilities, and attributes on their shared priorities.”

In this holistic yet realistic reading, accountability depends less on the actions of an individual IAM than on all stakeholders from project design to completion and beyond, including any complaints. Sato reminds us that “there is a huge power imbalance between community people and development actors that we should acknowledge.” While IAMs need to understand development as not just a privilege but a right of people, and work toward effectiveness by basing their policy and practice on criteria such as those supplied by the UNGPs, IFIs and governments have a critical role to play in ensuring that IAM recommendations are acted on in relation to specific projects and in the longer term. Civil society and the media, too, have a role in advocating for “social accountability.”

Finally, IAMs themselves have acknowledged the need to collaborate on improving their effectiveness. At the 2024 IAMnet Annual Meetings, participants agreed that it would be useful to adopt principles for IAM policy reviews, so that each IAM undergoing such a process, now and in the future, will be well positioned to negotiate outcomes that assist them in improving their effectiveness in compliance, dispute resolution, and advisory processes.

Got talent?

IAMnet now has a working group on policy reviews. “There is no institutional memory that has been consolidated, and that is a missed opportunity, because we should be publishing a benchmark,” says Marquez-Mees. “Can we have a pool of independent experts who really know about these things, about how to set up a mechanism, the challenges of it, and what the relationships are with the different stakeholders? Now that we’re moving toward mutual reliance, common standards would be very much in the interest of everyone.”

IAMnet also has a working group on accountability talent, which seeks to encourage the development of capacity in what is a niche sector. Pratyush Sharma indicates that this is essential if accountability practitioners are to understand the needs of the people they are mandated to serve. “An interdisciplinary team in every department is important, because if multilateral development banks are working in silos, it is not going to solve the problem.”

Staff working in IAMs do have access to training. At the World Bank, for instance, trainings on the Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) are consistently promoted to all staff—and are mandatory for environmental and social specialists. Recently, staff working in accountability from across the Bank—including the Inspection Panel and the Dispute Resolution Service of the Accountability Mechanism—completed a bespoke five-day in-person course on the ESF that drew on the 10 Environmental and Social Standards. The field-oriented, case-based nature of the presentation was designed to take participants far beyond theoretical understandings of accountability. William Romans, Head of Operations of the Dispute Resolution Service, says: “We are aware that we have to keep our skills current and relevant, and staff capacity-building is core to what we are doing.”

If IAMs can recruit, train, and retain staff on the cutting-edge of accountability concerns, they will undoubtedly contribute to better outcomes for communities. Furthermore, they will not only be “doing no harm” but, as Sustainable Development Vice President Laura Tuck says in the introduction to the ESF online training, they will enable us “to change the way we think about development, to build environmental and social sustainability directly into the projects we do.” If IAMs succeed in this mission, then they will truly prove themselves to have been effective.