Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance results at CSGR's 10th Anniversary Conference

The Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance project presented preliminary results in a session at the tenth anniversary conference of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation [1] (CSGR), held at the University of Warwick on 17-19 September 2007. CSGR, one of the project funders, marked its first decade with an international conference on the theme (highly appropriate for the CS-AGG project) of ‘Pathways to Legitimacy? The Future of Global and Regional Governance’.

The CS-AGG panel comprised a subset of the project authors. Jan Aart Scholte from CSGR presented the project conceptual framework on ‘Global Governance, Accountability and Civil Society’. Saied Ameli of the University of Tehran presented his analysis of ‘Civil Society and Accountability in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference’. Morten Ougaard of the Copenhagen Business School presented his work on ‘Civil Society and Patterns of Accountability in the OECD’. Heidi Ullrich tabled her study of ‘Contested Accountability: Civil Society and the International Fair Trade Association’. Michael Schulz of the School of Global Studies at Gothenburg University chaired the event. Discussant was Robert Lloyd, Project Manager of the Global Accountability Report at the One World Trust.

The presentation to around 40 academics and practitioners was a welcome opportunity to consolidate revisions to the four studies since the Gothenburg workshop and to elicit feedback from a different audience, which included a number of researchers from across Europe in the GARNET Network [2] of Excellence on Global Governance, Regionalisation and Regulation.