Ethical Disputes, Coordinating Acts and NGO Accountability: Evidence from an NGO river-care programme in Malaysia

Citation

Ang SY & Wickramasinghe D (2022) Ethical Disputes, Coordinating Acts and NGO Accountability: Evidence from an NGO river-care programme in Malaysia. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2022.102416

Abstract
We use the Theory of Orders of Worth (OW) espoused by Boltanski and his associates to understand how disputes emerge in situations and how such disputes themselves reach agreements in the context of community engagements by an NGO. Based on a nine-month period of fieldwork at an NGO river-care programme in Malaysia, we find that, in situations of disputes, coordinating acts are predicated upon moral justifications by social actors, making the programme accountable to multiple stakeholders. Moreover, these coordinating acts develop dialogic accounting and transform felt accountability forms into adaptive accountability forms. We conclude that NGO accountability in a developing country like Malaysia is a manifestation of the ability of moral justifications governed by multiple orders of worth and that such adaptive accountability forms mediate to assimilate global development agendas into local policies and programmes.

Keywords
NGO accountability; Malaysia; Disputes; Coordinating acts; Order of worth; Moral justifications

Notes
Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Online

Journal
Critical Perspectives on Accounting