Pursuing
Community
Centered
Accountability

This year’s story is one of remarkable progress to break down intentionally-created obstacles to justice and equity. Some of our organization’s proudest moments this year came when a community in Uganda bravely spoke to World Bank officials about their demand for accountability from an abusive project, and seeing their complaint move forward as a result; beholding communities in Nepal speaking their truth to European bank officials after a years long investigation led to validation of their grievances; seeing new communication tools we developed provide a direct input channel for those most impacted by abuses to communicate remotely and at scale; and seeing nine separate institutions improve their accountability policies as a direct result of our tenacious advocacy. These are just a few examples from our past year of collaborating with Indigenous and local people, and advocates around the world, to identify and surmount these obstacles.

The obstacles facing communities seeking justice, dignity, and respect for their environment concern all of us. How are they intentional? These obstacles are built by corporations who seek profits absent meaningful regulatory or moral guides, knowing that their operations cause harm; government officials who prefer violence and corruption to ethical governance; and global institutions that overtly operate with impunity when not held accountable by their shareholders. It requires all of us to challenge and dismantle these obstacles.

The context of this progress is a shifting landscape. Climate change intensifies the stakes, while security threats and COVID have made the work more challenging. Where we used to see occasional security threats and physical and digital risks to community partners, civil society colleagues, and our own team, we now see threats almost across the board. We have never shied away from working with communities facing oppressive conditions, that is of course why we exist — to partner with communities who most need support to be heard as they speak out to defend their rights. However, what’s being asked of these communities now is heartbreaking and unthinkable: Indigenous farmers in Nepal who risk imprisonment for defending their land, parents in Uganda who face illegal detention for protesting forced displacement, forest-dwelling communities in Myanmar fighting to survive dictatorship, while defending forests and fragile mangroves. As COVID continues with communities where we work the last to receive vaccines, investments are continuing to cause harm. We have had mixed results pushing back against some using the pandemic as an excuse to cut corners around community engagement, while delaying accountability processes.

Our team confronts these barriers every day by building strength. We do this through working in deep partnership with community and civil society partners, but also by developing the data, research, and analysis our field needs, and that our own policy team actively uses, to push for systemic change. In this past year, we’ve also explicitly named our efforts to do solidarity fundraising — the process of building capacity of partners where philanthropic resources are not equitably reaching organizations doing some of the hardest work — this includes making funder introductions and assisting with grant applications for groups like AREDE in Haiti and Witness Radio in Uganda. Our theory of change relies on their success in building strong, resourced organizations that can focus on community organizing and speaking truth to power.

In turn, our success relies on you. Thank you for being part of our collective movement for justice,
equity and dignity.

Natalie Bridgeman Fields
FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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Filling Accountability Gaps in United States Development Finance

In December 2020, as a result of our advocacy, the United States Congress instructed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to establish an accountability office. USAID channels billions of dollars of US taxpayer money each year and, without this office, it is unaccountable for the harm its investments may cause to communities and environments. For example, in Haiti, our community partners lost their livelihoods when USAID and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) funded the construction of an industrial park on their fertile farmland. This year, the communities are finally seeing remedy after years of advocacy to the IDB’s accountability office. As USAID had no venue to file a complaint, but for the IDB’s office, that remedy would not have been possible.

Similarly, the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is in the process of establishing a new accountability office as a result of our advocacy. As the second largest source of development finance in Africa, accountability at the DFC is crucial for communities impacted by its projects. Our team is engaging closely in the creation of these offices to ensure they center community voices to prevent harm, and offer communities an effective venue to demand justice if harm does occur.

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A New Accountability Tool at the World Bank

Nearly thirty years ago, the World Bank established the first accountability office — the Inspection Panel. But the Panel had not kept up with best practice in the intervening years, and offered only limited options without an eye to remedy for community complainants. Following an intensive review process during which Accountability Counsel advocates leveraged field-wide policy data, the Bank launched a new Accountability Mechanism that offers dispute resolution — a key tool in securing tangible remedy for communities who experience harm. Now, our team is advocating for robust procedures to ensure this option can be used effectively by communities like our partners in Uganda.

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Advocating for Community-Centered Impact Management for Investors

Too often, when investors measure and manage their impact, they leave out the very people who are best placed to know, and bear the most risk, if an investment goes off course: local communities. To change that, Accountability Counsel advocates for impact investors to establish accountability mechanisms to hear from and redress issues raised by communities. As a result of our advocacy, new global impact measurement and management standards – including from the UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goal Impact Team and the Global Reporting Initiative – now include accountability mechanisms as required governance tools. The next step is to educate investors using these standards to make sure they are properly meeting the requirement to hear from and redress environmental and social concerns raised by communities.

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Communication and Consultation During COVID

As a community-centered organization, in-person engagement with our local partners has long been central to our advocacy model. The COVID-19 pandemic made travel dangerous for both our team and our community partners, and slowed complaint progress as accountability offices extended their travel bans. To mitigate these challenges, our Research team expanded on the remote surveying tool they built in 2019, called Zwazo. Developed in partnership with communities in Haiti, Zwazo is a flexible voice- and text-optimized consultation tool that enables community feedback and fosters access to information. Before COVID, our community partners used it to gather input from more than 400 Haitian farmers and their families to inform a December 2018 remedy agreement. This year, Zwazo was used to communicate with herders in Mongolia, support collective labor rights action in Haitian garment factories, and, through our Good Ally commitment, coordinate logistics for tenants’ rights trainings, rent support, and COVID-19 vaccine outreach for the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. What makes Zwazo so powerful is not its technology, but its locally-led structure. To date, over 200,000 messages have been sent and received with Zwazo and its sister site Asfour, positioning local communities as active participants with meaningful agency in international finance and in broader organizing.

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Investigating Accountability ‘Dark Spots’

After several years in operation, we and the broader field are reaping rewards from our Accountability Console, the world’s most comprehensive database of community complaint data. With more than 1,600 complaints, thousands of documents, and thousands of policy data points, this powerful tool allows us to identify and analyze why remedy remains rare. It’s particularly rare for communities in certain ‘dark spot’ regions, which are characterized by an influx of investment but without a correlating number of complaint filings. Our team is in the process of investigating barriers to complaint filing and outcomes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where both the number of complaints filed and the percentage of complaints that result in outputs, like a compliance report or an agreement to remediate harm, are significantly lower than in other regions. With this data in hand, our team is connecting directly with communities across the MENA region to understand what factors are contributing to this trend, what policy changes are needed to make IAMs more accessible, and what support and resources communities need to better access recourse and remedy.

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