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Public concern for the natural environment has been one of the vital issues of discussion in recent decades across the globe. Individuals are now stressing the importance of the natural environment. In the context of developing countries, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) are well positioned to have powerful impact on the discharge of corporate social responsibility through the usual pressures and lobbies exerted by the NGOs and their various networks than any other stakeholder. This study examines the impact of NGOs on environmental reporting of quoted manufacturing companies listed on Nigerian Stock Exchange. Using simple random sampling technique, secondary data were collected from annual reports and accounts of 10 selected manufacturing companies spanning 2010–2019. Multiple regression technique was used to analyse data collected. The findings reveal that environmental reporting and corporate social responsibility costs do not have significant impact on ROA and NPM with p-value of 0.713 and 0.612 at 5% level of significance, respectively, but both variables have positive significant effect on ROA. This means that the fund committed to environmental cost by these selected firms does not reflect on their profitability for the period reviewed. Based on this, it was recommended that as a matter of urgency for international Environmental NGOs should collaborate with local ones in achieving environmental friendly society. Similarly, United Nations should channel more funding on environment-focused NGOs because environmental issue is one of the cardinal points to be achieved by Sustainable Development Goals.

This chapter, which is in themes, starts with a survey of the rise of environmentalism for the purpose of sustainability. It then evaluates the roles of nongovernmental organisations' (NGOs') self-regulation and government regulation on the need for accountability that ensures sustainability. NGOs' accountability is a way of making sure that stakeholders' social, environmental and economic sustainability are protected and rigorously evaluated. This chapter further examines what the enduring mechanisms should be if true accountability, which leads to sustainability, will be achieved to suggest a holistic accountability that involves downward and upward accountability. In doing so, this chapter utilised the identified five mechanisms that ensure the continuity of world sustainability, which is prima-facie, the objective of funders/donors, beneficiaries/stakeholders and the NGO's loop.

Corporate social responsibilities (CSRs) with social, economic, and environmental elements become of high demand in the private, public, as well as third-world sectors or so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These sectors have their own identity in carrying out the CSR projects. However, the CSR initiatives to be implemented by the NGOs promised challenges due to the NGOs' identity in justifying human rights that remains dissimilar with corporation or fund provider's identity to maximize the profit with less concern on the humanitarian issues leading to tension for both parties to have CSR project alliances. NGOs face extreme difficulty to raise funds from the private sector due to their ideology in influencing the social movements that might harm society. Also, the fund raised by the NGOs for CSR projects are somehow misused by this party for its own self-interests and leads to an accountability issue. An NGO is seen as a key player in CSR projects but still there is an issue of legitimacy and mistrust amongst stakeholder groups. Underlying to these issues, this study aims to explore the challenges faced by NGOs in regards to the CSR initiatives that have been announced by the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) to be used widely and harmoniously by all sectors of the world and its future directions to successfully implement CSR in its own style of leadership. Therefore, the involvement of NGOs in CSR initiatives can be effectively employed with government intervention on economics development programmes in alleviating poverty which becomes a central issue highlighted in many countries nowadays. Extensive rules and regulations from the government towards NGOs are embedded within the CSR project developments of NGOs and are necessary in reducing the discrepancies in the roles that NGOs play.

The era of globalization has increased the challenges for multinational corporations (MNCs) to retain legitimacy. In striving for legitimacy, MNCs increasingly engage in dialogue processes with their stakeholders. However, the era of globalization and the parallel rise of the Internet and the new “Web 2.0” have dramatically widened the range of options for such dialogue processes. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in particular make use of “social media” (e.g., Facebook, Weblogs, Twitter) which enable them to quickly generate attention regarding socially and environmentally harmful business practices by MNCs. In response, MNCs have started applying social media technologies for corporate communication purposes. However, given the novelty of these activities, we lack knowledge on how these organizations make use of social media. Therefore, in this chapter, we examine how MNCs and NGOs utilize one particular social media application, that is, Twitter, for dialogic stakeholder communication.

In our empirical study, we examine current practices of Twitter usage by MNCs and NGOs. We investigate a dataset of more than 3,000 Twitter articles from 30 MNCs and 30 NGOs in the German-speaking world. Our analysis is based on the “conceptual orality or literality” scale by Koch and Oesterreicher (1994).

The comparative analysis shows that on average MNCs and NGOs exhibit a surprisingly similar profile on Twitter. Both tend toward conceptual literality. However, the analysis of Tweets per organization reveals a much larger variance. At the extreme poles, while some NGOs (like Greenpeace Youth) make extensive use of the medium’s potential for conceptual orality, some MNCs (like Deutsche Börse) almost entirely adhere to conceptual literality. In other words, these MNCs promote a classical one-way model of communication and fail to make use of the dialogue-like qualities of the medium.

We analyzed a small number of organizations and we restricted our study to MNCs and NGOs in the German-speaking world. Furthermore, Twitter only allows for short messages with a maximum of 140 letters or signs. This, in turn, renders questionable whether the medium is suited to establish deliberative dialogues between MNCs and NGOs that are based on more elaborate arguments which can be expressed in the short format.

Our study addresses the lack of research regarding new possibilities for stakeholder communication in the age of social media. Moreover, the study methodologically contributes to the study of social media in the context of corporate communication by applying the scale of “conceptual orality or literality” to MNCs’ and NGOs’ Twitter usage.

The community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) approach has been taken by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a common approach to build resilient communities in their disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts. The approach has been initially implemented in the developing world by NGOs, followed by international organizations like the International Federations of Red Cross and Red Crescent (Benson, Twigg, & Myers, 2001; Maceda, Gaillard, Stasiak, Le Masson, & Le Berre, 2009). The approach is now increasingly promoted among local governments in order to strengthen the links between the official disaster management system and community-based organizations (Kafle & Murshed, 2006). There are many case studies of DRR projects with community-based approaches by NGOs and local governments, and there are many variations as well (Heijmans, 2009).

Civil society, as represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is exerting increasing pressure on national governments, multinational corporations, and international institutions. In this chapter we document the evolution of participation by civil society and NGOs in Western Hemisphere economic integration, focusing particularly on the NGO role in three important trade and investment agreements: the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas process. We find that NGOs are having increasing influence on the trade and investment agreements in the Hemisphere, and are poised to take on a major role in multilateral negotiations and agreements.

Democratization has become the prescription for peace in conflictual societies, but often stagnates in a political standoff or devolves back to war. Sustainable and effective democracy in these societies requires a citizenry which actively guides and pressures political leaders toward effective policy making for peace. But in societies with little or no democratic tradition, it takes time to develop the attitudes and organizations required. This study examines the relationship of democratic exposure to the development of the ideology of external political participation among peacebuilding NGOs. Using original field interview data, it compares the ideology of 28 peacebuilding NGOs in Northern Ireland to 37 in the less democratic context of Bosnia. The study examines the effects of exposure to democracy on “externally democratic ideology,” defined as an ideology of participation in the political processes of society external to the organization. Three aspects of exposure to democracy are examined: societal democratization, internal democracy in the NGO, and mentorship by outsiders from established democracies. The findings are that internal democracy is associated with externally democratic ideology, but outsider mentorship is not, even when controlling for dominating relationships, and neither is societal democracy, except indirectly via its effect on internal democracy. Implications for theory, policy, and future research are discussed.

This chapter develops a new reference for local government accountability in socioenvironmental issues based on the views of leading socioenvironmental nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) in Indonesia. This study introduces an alternative view related to the government accountability model by focussing more on the socioenvironmental issues, which tend to be marginalised due to the dominance of [neo]liberal economic development and New Public Management paradigm in the praxis of government. A Fairclough's critical discourse analysis method has been applied to annual reports from three main socioenvironmental NGOs in Indonesia ranging from 2015 to 2018. This study found that there are three important notes for the local government's regulation, practice and accountability's activities to be in a line with the sustainable paradigm and the views of these NGOs. First and the foremost, the government's policy should give attention to public needs and ecological standards. Secondly, the rights and obligations related to the environmental issues should be transparent and accountable. Lastly, the government should release the accountability reports in full disclosure document and make the reports publicly available for various stakeholders. In particular, the accountability reports play a role as a tool for people to monitor the government's activities in socioenvironmental issues. This research implies an alternative view in the context of socioenvironmental accounting literature enrichment. It also provides valuable input to other governments, especially in developing countries and countries with economic growth that are highly reliant on the natural resources sector, in order to manage and account for their natural wealth in a more responsible and sustainable manner. Likewise, this research offers an alternative discourse of socioenvironmental accountability from the view of socioenvironmental NGOs in Indonesia.

There are growing concerns about the environmental activities of firms and their accountability towards reporting on such activities against the background of the voluntary reporting regimes. As a result, the motivation for this study is to investigate the role of NGOs' (nongovernmental organisations) engagement in influencing firms' environmental accounting disclosures using data of listed firms in Ghana. Environmental disclosure scores were constructed through content analyses from 422 annual reports of the listed firms with NGO engagements surrogated with dummy variables, capturing firms' acknowledgement of their engagements with NGOs and the data analysed using the two-step generalised method of moments. The results provided evidence to show that NGOs' engagement is positive and significantly influence firms' environmental reporting practices. Further analyses confirming profitability, leverage and market share prices among others are significant for explaining environmental disclosures. This is regarded as the first study to investigate the relationship between NGOs as stakeholders and the quality of environmental accounting disclosures. The findings provided comprehensive implications for policies that could further strengthen pressure groups to deal with environmental degradation through firms' activities.

This chapter reviews the contribution of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to Africa developmental transformation by exploring key activities around three key areas where NGOs have impacted Africa's development namely environmental, social and economic context. This perspective emphasises the central role of NGOs in triggering developmental changes in Africa. Exploring the complexities of NGOs' management and its impact on the development of Africa through a collective action lens, we discovered that although NGOs have been responsible for developmental growth in Africa, there exists a certain tussle between the NGOs and state actors due to relegation of the state. With recent calls for accountability and transparency, NGOs would have to include more strategies geared towards collaborative partnerships and more inclusion of state in order to maintain sustainable growth. We conclude by reflecting on the socioeconomic impact of NGOs and implications for sustainable development in Africa.