In March 2009, the UN-Business Focal Point newsletter published an article (see article here) about the Collaborative Governance Observatory (CGO), a new on-line partnership community launched by AccountAbility, a global nonprofit think tank. Since this publication, AccountAbility has actively engaged with various stakeholders on CGO, resulting in CGO evolving from a tool for partnership managers to improve partnership effectiveness and efficiency to an accountability hub for partnerships driven by civil society.

Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary growth in the number, size and scope of partnerships between traditionally disparate sectors. The UN has taken a lead role in advocating public-private partnerships and various UN entities actively seeking partnerships and alliances with transnational corporations and other companies. Partnerships are quickly becoming mainstream vehicles to address complex issues from public health and agriculture to education and water scarcity.

Though many claim that partnerships are a more efficient and innovative means to solve complex development problems, a growing chorus of concern is emerging, pointing towards the many risks they carry in working towards basic UN goals associated with inclusive, equitable and sustainable development.

For partnerships to deliver on their development promises, they should be first and foremost accountable to the beneficiaries themselves and to the civil society actors representing their best interests. From this premise, AccountAbility initiated the CGO online platform to enhance the development outcomes of collaborative initiatives by improving their governance and accountability practices.

Through the CGO, civil society actors will have a mechanism to drive partnership accountability by calling for public disclosure of information, for example, by offering partnerships the space to publish partnership agreements, reports and accountability frameworks, tools and policies on an ongoing basis for comment and input from civil society. CGO also seeks to develop new accountability tools and instruments, to increase transparency on governance, targets and expenditures and to bring civil society actors together to share knowledge and resources.

CGO will help to bridge these gaps by helping to improve the oversight of UN partners by allowing partnerships the space to voluntary place more information in the public domain to improve communication, transparency and accountability. UN agencies are encouraged to use CGO as a platform to encourage partnership disclosure.

By empowering civil society to hold partnerships to account and by providing actors with the tools, capacity, knowledge and international networking opportunities to do so, CGO aims to lead in the development of an accountability hub for partnerships.

CGO will soon host a webinar to kick start the development of an accountability tool.

In the coming weeks, CGO will be launched at: www.cgobservatory.net.

For more information, please contact Steve Rochlin, Head of AccountAbility, North America or Sunette Steyn, Senior Associate, AccountAbility.