NGOs are undergoing an alleged crisis of trustworthiness. The past decades have seen an increase in both academic and practitioner skepticism, particularly given the transformations many NGOs have undergone in size, professionalism, and political importance. The accountability agenda, which stresses transparency and external oversight, has gained a significant amount of traction as a means to solve this crisis. But the causal link between the implementation of these recommendations and increased trustworthiness among donors has never been considered. This paper bridges this gap by drawing on theoretical innovations in trust research to put forward three arguments. First, the proponents of the accountability agenda are implicitly working with a rational model of trust. Second, this model does not reflect important social characteristics of trust between donors and NGOs. Third, this mismatch means that the accountability agenda might do more to harm trust in NGOs than to help it.

In recent years, INGO legitimacy has been subject to growing scrutiny from analysts and practitioners alike. Critics have highlighted a backlash against INGOs in the Global South, a growing mismatch between INGO capacities and contemporary global challenges, and diminishing support for norms such as democracy and human rights that underpin INGOs' work. Although these problems have attracted significant attention within the academic literature, this article argues that existing explorations of INGO legitimacy have broadly conformed either to a top-down approach focused on global norms and institutions or a bottom-up approach focused on the local dynamics surrounding states and populations in the Global South. We suggest that this divide is unhelpful for understanding the current predicament and propose a new approach, which pays closer attention to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down dimensions, and to historical context. This new approach can provide important insights into current debates about the future roles and internal structures of INGOs.Résumé La légitimité des ONGI est de plus en plus remise en question par les analystes et praticiens. Les critiques ont fait la lumière sur les réactions hostiles que soulèvent les ONGI dans les pays du Sud, l'écart grandissant entre les capacités des ONGI et les défis mondiaux de l'heure et le respect de moins en moins grand des normes sous-jacentes au travail des ONGI, dont la démocratie et les droits de l'homme. Même si ces problèmes ont été largement traités dans la documentation spécialisée, cet article avance que les recherches existantes sur la légitimité des Resumen En años recientes, la legitimidad de las organizaciones no gubernamentales internacionales (INGO, por sus siglas en inglés) ha estado sujeta a un creciente escrutinio de analistas y profesionales. Los críticos han destacado una reacción violenta contra las INGO en el Hemisferio Sur, un creciente desequilibrio entre las capacidades de las INGO y los desafíos mundiales contemporáneos, y un apoyo decreciente de las normas, tales como la democracia y los derechos humanos que apoyan la labor de las INGO. Aunque estos problemas han atraído una importante atención dentro del material académico publicado, el presente artículo argumenta que las exploraciones existentes de la legitimidad de las INGO se han ajustado ampliamente a un enfoque de arriba a abajo centrado en las normas e instituciones mundiales o en un enfoque de abajo a arriba centrado en la dinámica social que rodea a los estados y poblaciones en el Hemisferio Sur. Sugerimos que esta división no ayuda a la comprensión del dilema actual y proponemos un nuevo enfoque, que presta una más estrecha atención a la interacción entre las dimensiones de abajo a arriba y de arriba a abajo, y al contexto histórico. Este nuevo enfoque puede proporcionar importantes perspectivas en los debates actuales sobre los futuros papeles y estructuras internas de las INGO. Voluntas (2016Voluntas ( ) 27:2764Voluntas ( -2786Voluntas ( 2765 123

The aim of this paper is to examine NGOs' legitimacy in the context of global politics. In order to yield a better understanding of NGOs' legitimacy at the international level it is important to examine how their legitimacy claims are evaluated. This paper proposes dividing the literature into four models based on the theoretical and analytical approaches to their legitimacy claims: the market model, social change model, new institutionalism model and the critical model. The legitimacy criteria generated by the models are significantly different in their analytical scope of how one is to assess the role of NGOs operating as political actors contributing to democracy. The paper argues that the models present incomplete, and sometimes conflicting, views of NGOs' legitimacy and that this poses a legitimacy dilemma for those assessing the political agency of NGOs in world politics. The paper concludes that only by approaching their legitimacy holistically can the democratic role of NGOs be explored and analysed in the context of world politics.

In this paper we argue that there is a gap between the de facto and de jure legitimacy of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that requires more consideration from scholars who study their role in the international system. The gradual acceptance of INGOs as de facto legitimate actors can be seen in the long-term expansion of their role in international norm deliberation. Despite this development, most INGOs still lack international legal recognition, and thus de jure legitimacy. We argue that this gap between de facto and de jure legitimacy creates problems for both INGOs and members of international society. In seeking to address this disjunction, we highlight the limits of the current literature in understanding legitimacy as primarily sociological phenomena through an examination of the accountability agenda. We then propose a template for INGO legal recognition based on the principles that underpin the regulation of charities in English law as a first step in a gradualist argument for the institution of their international de jure legitimacy.

The global governance literature is increasingly concerned with questions regarding the purpose of global governance and the sources of power in world politics. One strand of this debate centers on nongovernmental organizations and to what extent their role in global politics and policy processes is legitimate. This article uses Greenpeace India as an instructive case study to analyze the legitimacy problems facing international nongovernmental organizations (INGO s) campaigning on a global policy platform in the context of domestic politics. The article argues that the undertheorization of INGO s’ agency as global actors is likely to reproduce processes of structural delegitimation that maintain a discrepancy between two of their legitimacy constructs. This is exemplified in questions about their representativeness and restrictive regulatory frameworks that undermine their legality. This article proposes that developing a more nuanced empirical understanding of the endogenous and exogenous limits of INGO s’ power can help bridge the theoretical gap between their global and local agencies.