Observer organizations in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are clustered into nine constituency groups. Each constituency has a “focal point” (representative) to mediate between the Secretariat and the 1800 NGOs admitted during each Conference of the Parties meeting by collating information, coordinating interactions, offering logistical support, and providing collective representation. Drawing upon a series of interviews with constituency groups and other qualitative data, we explore how the focal point of each constituency group remains accountable to the observer organizations he or she represents. We make two major contributions. First, we map the accountability mechanisms that exist between the observer organizations and focal points in each constituency. Second, we argue that variation in the usage of accountability mechanisms across constituencies corresponds to the existence of parallel bodies operating outside the UNFCCC. This article speaks to broader issues of accountability and representation in global climate governance.

The rise of transnational nonstate certification programs has contributed to complex accountability relations surrounding efforts to hold companies accountable for their environmental and social impacts. Using the analytical lenses of internal and external accountability, we examine the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)—a fisheries certification program—to assess how its decisions about goals, engagement of stakeholders, and accountability mechanisms have affected the controversies facing the program and how it has sought to address them. We reveal a misalignment between environmental groups and the MSC. Both seek to advance sustainable fisheries, and the market campaigns of environmental groups have supported certification. However, the MSC has provided these groups limited influence over its governance; it has responded to external demands for accountability by focusing on internal accountability, and reforming its assessment and objection procedures. Environmental groups have responded by working to decouple their campaigns from supporting the MSC. Tracing the consequences of this misalignment therefore highlights the need to assess rival processes such as market and information campaigns to understand attempts to hold nonstate certification programs to account.

Cities are increasingly seen as essential components of the global response to climate change: setting targets, taking action, and rendering themselves accountable to global audiences for their efforts. Why cities are making themselves globally accountable in the absence of compulsion or obligation, and what it means for cities to operate simultaneously as global and locally accountable actors, constitute important puzzles for scholars of global climate politics. In this article I set out the basic parameters of this phenomenon, and offer a conceptual framework with which to parse the politics of accountability in networked urban climate governance. I apply this framework to identify three distinct forms of accountability present in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group: an external politics of recognition; a network politics of ordering, and; an internal politics of translation. The article explores each for their distinct political processes, orientation, and power dynamics, and offers some propositions with respect to how they interact, and what it means both locally and globally when cities make themselves globally accountable.