As forms of governance involving multiple actors increase in importance in European countries and open up new opportunities for civil society actors, issues of accountability, representation and legitimacy become increasingly significant.  Governance creates new ambiguous spaces where boundaries, identities and roles and hence accountabilities are blurred.  Civil society actors in these new governance spaces find themselves juggling their existing multiple accountability demands (from funders, members, service users and peers) with those of the partnership. In addition the demands of participation within these spaces may pull them away from the institutions or constituencies that they are representing, creating a tension between leadership and representation. There are also competing appeals to different sources of legitimacy: based on knowledge, skills, values or the participatory nature of the network or organisation they represent as well as tensions between traditional representative forms of democracy and the newer more participatory approaches involving civil society organisations and citizens.

Some of these issues have been addressed by papers in previous Cinefogo work streams. The workshop will aim to explore the ways in which accountability is constructed by different actors in partnerships and the ways in which civil society organisations and their partners handle the tensions involved, as well as conceptual frameworks which can help us to analyse better how accountability works in these settings.