Globalising Accountability within the International Organisation of Credit: Financial Governance and the Public Sphere

Recent developments concerning the international financial architecture have drawn attention to what many perceive to be an accountability deficit at the level of global decision making. This problem is explored here within the framework of an increasingly globalised structure of financial governance, drawing attention to the institutional barriers that stand in the way of operationalising traditional forms of accountability. In order to strengthen a global form of accountability in the absence of traditional democratic links between citizens and decision-making institutions, it is argued that accountability needs to be better internalised within those institutions that actually make decisions with global consequences. To be effective, however, this form of accountability demands the formation of a global financial public sphere, where norms of inclusion and publicness can be established and progressively instantiated. The first step towards realising such a development must be to understand accountability itself in terms of what can be called a logic of participation. This article therefore considers how such a logic can be formulated and grafted onto the existing foundations of global financial governance, and advances several strategies to strengthen accountability framed in this way.