Pluralist Accountability: New Avenues for Enhancing the Legitimacy of International Organisations?

The legitimacy of international organizations (IOs) has suffered from cases of human rights violations committed by IOs and their implementing partners. As a response, new forms of accountability have evolved whereby third parties act as accountability holders, i.e. set human rights standards for IO policies and monitor and sanction the (non-)compliance with these standards. This paper asks how this pluralist accountability affects the legitimacy of IOs. I develop a framework to analyze the impact of pluralist accountability on IO legitimacy with regard to two criteria, participation and transparency. I demonstrate with examples from UN peace operations that while pluralist accountability does not satisfy the demands of state-based legitimacy conceptions, it significantly enhances participation and transparency and thus responds better to the demands of a society-based model of IO legitimacy. The analysis also reveals, however, how the degree of legalization constraints the effect of pluralist accountability. Due to these limitations, pluralist accountability cannot be regarded as a panacea for solving IO legitimacy problems, although it can accommodate for the absence of vertical accountability at least to some degree.