Confronted with mounting pressure to ensure accountability vis-à-vis customers, citizens and beneficiaries, organizational leaders need to decide how to choose and implement so-called accountability standards. Yet while looking for an appropriate standard, they often base their decisions on cost-benefit calculations, thus neglecting other important spheres of influence pertaining to more broadly defined stakeholder interests. We argue in this paper that, as a part of the strategic decision for a certain standard, management needs to identify and act according to the needs of all stakeholders. We contend that the creation of a dialogical understanding among affected stakeholders cannot be a mere outcome of applying certain accountability standards, but rather must be a necessary precondition for their use. This requires a stakeholder dialogue prior to making a choice. We outline such a discursive decision framework for accountability standards based on the Habermasian concept of communicative action and, in the final section, apply our conceptual framework to one of the most prominent accountability tools (AA 1000). Copyright Springer 2006accountability standards, discourse ethics, Habermas, organizational accountability, stakeholder management, stakeholder dialogue,

Adding to official development assistance (ODA), private foundations have emerged as important donors to the global health agenda. Amid this increasing funder diversity and growing global health budgets, responsiveness to recipients' needs is a central concern. Merging datasets on ODA flows in 2005-2007, over 2,800 foundation grants, disease burden, and perceived priorities in 27 low-and middle-income countries, this study offers the first comprehensive national-level analysis of global health aid responsiveness. Our analysis shows that national patterns of disease burden explain neither public nor private aid flows during this period. While ODA committed during these years was weakly yet significantly correlated with health priorities, private grants' responsiveness was even weaker and did not achieve ODA significance levels either.

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Mounting concerns over aid effectiveness have rendered 'ownership' a central concept in the vocabulary of development assistance for health (DAH). The article investigates the application of both 'national ownership' and 'country ownership' in the broader development discourse as well as more specifically in the context of internationally funded HIV/AIDS interventions. Based on comprehensive literature reviews, the research uncovers a multiplicity of definitions, most of which either divert from or plainly contradict the concept's original meaning and intent. During the last 10 years in particular, it appears that both public and private donors have advocated for greater 'ownership' by recipient governments and countries to hedge their own political risk rather than to work towards greater inclusion of the latter in agenda-setting and programming. Such politically driven semantic dynamics suggest that the concept's salience is not merely a discursive reflection of globally skewed power relations in DAH but a deliberate exercise in limiting donors' accountabilities. At the same time, the research also finds evidence that this conceptual contortion frames current global public health scholarship, thus adding further urgency to the need to critically re-evaluate the international political economy of global public health from a discursive perspective.

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