NGO legitimacy and accountability - 2013 workshop review

The inaugural workshop of the group was held on 9 October 2013 in Portsmouth. The theme of this year’s workshop was NGO Legitimacy and Accountability. We have attached the report from the workshop in the document below. There were 24 participants including academics and practitioners from Oxfam, Plan International, INTRAC and One World Trust.

The aim of the workshop was to bring academics and practitioners together to identify gaps in research and facilitate networking for future collaboration, and it was a great success. The emphasis was on practitioners and their experiences working with academics and on NGO collaborative research projects in general. We like to thank them especially for their contributions, as their contribution was invaluable to the workshop. We like to thank all our participants for their insightful and dynamic contributions. There was great variety in the debates, which helped raise awareness about how to approach research on NGOs’ accountability and legitimacy; the problems and the solutions. 

The main outcome of the workshop is twofold. Firstly, we created an NGO focused platform for practitioners and academics to communicate. We intend to follow up on this with future workshops and social media. Secondly, the workshop identified a communication and dissemination gap between academics and practitioners when it comes to NGO research. Hopefully we can take steps to address this in future workshops and projects, and generate a deeper debate on how to bridge this gap.