Challenging the accountability agenda: what increases an NGO’s trustworthiness?

When it comes to a non-governmental organisation’s trustworthiness, there is an unexplored assumption in the literature that the implementation of accountability measures will increase trust. Vincent Charles Keating and Erla Thrandardottir explain why this ‘accountability solution’ may not in itself increase trust, and that it could actually harm it

NGOs, trust, and the accountability agenda

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are undergoing an alleged crisis of trustworthiness. The past decades have seen an increase in both academic and practitioner scepticism, particularly given the transformations many NGOs have undergone in size, professionalism, and political importance. The accountability agenda, which stresses transparency and external oversight, has gained a significant amount of traction as a means to solve this crisis. But the causal link between the implementation of these recommendations and increased trustworthiness among donors has never been considered. This article bridges this gap by drawing on theoretical innovations in trust research to put forward three arguments. First, the proponents of the accountability agenda are implicitly working with a rational model of trust. Second, this model does not reflect important social characteristics of trust between donors and NGOs. Third, this mismatch means that the accountability agenda might do more to harm trust in NGOs than to help it. </jats:p

Monitoring the Morphology of M87* in 2009–2017 with the Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has recently delivered the first resolved images of M87*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. These images were produced using 230 GHz observations performed in 2017 April. Additional observations are required to investigate the persistence of the primary image feature—a ring with azimuthal brightness asymmetry—and to quantify the image variability on event horizon scales. To address this need, we analyze M87* data collected with prototype EHT arrays in 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2013. While these observations do not contain enough information to produce images, they are sufficient to constrain simple geometric models. We develop a modeling approach based on the framework utilized for the 2017 EHT data analysis and validate our procedures using synthetic data. Applying the same approach to the observational data sets, we find the M87* morphology in 2009–2017 to be consistent with a persistent asymmetric ring of ~40 μas diameter. The position angle of the peak intensity varies in time. In particular, we find a significant difference between the position angle measured in 2013 and 2017. These variations are in broad agreement with predictions of a subset of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations. We show that quantifying the variability across multiple observational epochs has the potential to constrain the physical properties of the source, such as the accretion state or the black hole spin

First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

We present measurements of the properties of the central radio source in M87 using Event Horizon Telescope data obtained during the 2017 campaign. We develop and fit geometric crescent models (asymmetric rings with interior brightness depressions) using two independent sampling algorithms that consider distinct representations of the visibility data. We show that the crescent family of models is statistically preferred over other comparably complex geometric models that we explore. We calibrate the geometric model parameters using general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) models of the emission region and estimate physical properties of the source. We further fit images generated from GRMHD models directly to the data. We compare the derived emission region and black hole parameters from these analyses with those recovered from reconstructed images. There is a remarkable consistency among all methods and data sets. We find that >50% of the total flux at arcsecond scales comes from near the horizon, and that the emission is dramatically suppressed interior to this region by a factor >10, providing direct evidence of the predicted shadow of a black hole. Across all methods, we measure a crescent diameter of 42 +/- 3 mu as and constrain its fractional width to b