In Loco Civitatis? Accountability, Transnational Actors, and Global Governance

Global governance engages a proliferation of transnational actors who wield substantial global policy power to tackle emerging national and transboundary challenges. Yet, the assurance of effective accountability mechanisms for such transnational entities who operate in loco civitatis (society without the state) remains a challenge. The interplay between transnational actors and state-driven accountability expectations has implications for transnational actors, their audiences, and for the concepts of accountability, legitimacy, and transparency in transnational governance. This paper addresses a critical need to understand transnational accountability. Informed by multidisciplinary framework, we create a nine-point transnational actor accountability framework. We apply our framework to 24 transnational actor categories and 46 case studies. We find that transnational actors are incompletely accountable with wide variances among actors and across accountability types. Our paper contributes to ongoing transnational governance discourses and underscores an imperative for enhanced accountability mechanisms for transnational actors.