context Archives | Accountability Lab

How A Weekend on Wasan Island Helped Us Learn, Improve and Strategize

By: Blair Glencorse, Executive Director of the Accountability Lab and a winner of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award. This summer, the BMW Foundation kindly convened a group of activists, thinkers, practitioners and policy-makers on Wasan Island in Canada for an Impact Weekend on behalf of the Accountability Lab (photos here). The retreat was transformational- as a young, growing organization often overwhelmed with day-to-day activities, it provided the perfect space for all of us at the Lab to rethink and strategize. It was also well-timed- a period of reflection after four years of our work to build accountability in countries like [...]

Ideas for Future Work on Transparency and Accountability

By: Blair Glencorse, Executive Director, Accountability Lab. This article was originally published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a collection of twenty think pieces by leading scholars and activists on the future of the transparency and accountability movement, commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) and curated and edited by Thomas Carothers. Getting Closer to the Ground Progress in the field of transparency and accountability has been patchy. Funders have focused largely on transparency (and to a lesser extent accountability), and the associated efforts around open government. This has been valuable—transparent information should provide the basis for more effective policymaking and [...]