Journal of Civil & Legal Sciences
Open Access

Research Article

International Economic Institutions: Developing the Concept of Substantive Accountability

School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, UK

*Corresponding Author:

Abayomi Al-Ameen
LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD. Lecturer, School of Law and Politics
Cardiff University, UK
Tel: +44 (0)29 208 70097
E-mail: Al-AmeenH@cardiff.ac.uk

Received Date: January 08, 2016; Accepted Date: February 02, 2016; Published Date: February 09, 2016

Citation: Al-Ameen A (2016) International Economic Institutions: Developing the Concept of Substantive Accountability. J Civil Legal Sci 5:173. doi:10.4172/2169- 0170.1000173

Copyright: © 2016 Al-Ameen A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The need to hold International Institutions (IIs) accountable is well documented. In response to such clamours, there has been effort to implement some level of scrutiny of institutional actions either through an internal process or through some form of external review. It is contended that efforts so far made are inadequate as; first, the present level of scrutiny is often focused on institutional forms and procedures with scant or no visible scrutiny of the substantive actions of IIs. Secondly, even if substantive actions were to be scrutinised, many IIs (particularly international economic institutions) would escape scrutiny because of the somewhat blanket assumption that their acts are not authoritative. This paper seeks to establish the need to hold international institutions accountable for their substantive actions and in particular to broaden the scope of scrutiny to include seemingly innocuous “soft” measures through the adoption of “effect-perspective” in characterising an institution’s modus operandi.

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