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Accountability is about the construction of a grammar of conduct and performance and the standards used to assess them. Accountability gaps continue to proliferate, blurring and challenging traditional lines of accountability. At the same time, changing narratives of what accountability means and how it can be enforced depend on shifting power relations within a society. Thus, the hope that more accountability will increase the effectiveness and legitimacy of institutions must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

While a global notion of accountability does not yet exist, multiple, shifting accountabilities manifest themselves in discourses about the state, the market and civil society:

• The accountability of states remains a predominant reference point. The rhetoric of public accountability continues to grow amidst calls for good governance and new public management techniques.
• The increase of global corporate power has left an accountability gap. As transnational corporations now often wield as much power as states, there is a need to create new accountabilities to hold them to.
• Aid is increasingly being channelled through NGOs. This in turn has led to accountability gaps, as NGOs face the same governance problems as other institutions.
• The new reality of multi-level governance and the rise of supranational and regional authorities has made it necessary to expand traditional definitions of accountability. Even as notions of accountability to whom and for what continue to evolve, identifying accountability ‘types’ can highlight distinct approaches to - and practices of - accountability.

Political accountability is no longer the sole preserve of the state, but is increasingly supplied by civil society watchdogs. Enforcement mechanisms for both horizontal and vertical accountability, such as law and sanctions, inevitably have certain limitations:

• Social accountability allows citizen action to oversee the workings of government, often through mechanisms such as legal cases, press reports, and social mobilisations. Such efforts can be less effective where legal and press freedoms are absent or constrained, or when fundamental and longer-term issues are at stake.
• Financial accountability has become a more widespread demand, affecting not only the state, but also civil society and market actors. More than a technical exercise, the definition of financial accountability now often includes social and environmental auditing practices and a distinction between managerial and administrative levels of accountability.
• Civil accountability is not only sought by traditional pressure groups, but also by community-based organisations seeking to defend their livelihoods and basic rights. Strategies of civil accountability may focus less on achieving change within the state and more on activities such as awareness raising and challenging cultures of secrecy in institutions.