Community organizations are now often expected to address harm and hold people accountable. Many organizations are now articulating policies, designating people to receive concerns, and developing processes for responding. This impulse is generally well-intentioned and driven by genuine care. Leaders sincerely want their communities to be places where harm is not ignored, people are able to come forward with concerns, and there are meaningful pathways for accountability.

But each of these steps carries an implicit promise. Establishing behavior standards means making a commitment to upholding those standards through some kind of enforcement mechanism. Saying harm will be taken seriously means making a commitment to not just listen, but to do something. What that something is, and what it will actually require of the people responsible for doing it, is often left unspecified at the time the promise is made. By the time actual concerns arrive and those promises are called upon to deliver, the organization may have already taken on responsibilities it did not fully understand or intend.

Doing accountability work at the organizational level requires more than care, good intentions, or a mere desire for a community to be the kind of place where harm is addressed. Care still matters. But care alone cannot make difficult decisions. Care alone cannot evaluate conflicting accounts. Care alone cannot always remain impartial in the midst of competing needs. Organizational accountability requires more than care. It requires governance.

Governance is not a word often used in community groups. It might sound overly formal, institutional, or hierarchical: the opposite of the organic, relationship-based work that draws people to community work in the first place. But any time an organization has the power to make binding decisions that can affect people’s lives, relationships, and reputations, and is willing to act on that power, it is taking on the responsibility for governance.

Creating standards of expected behavior is governance. Developing ways of enforcing those standards is governance. Imposing consequences for failing to uphold them is governance. Communicating decisions that impact people is governance. When leaders approach these jobs as care rather than as governance, the failure modes are predictable, and sometimes catastrophic.

Decisions can get made on the basis of relationships, politics, or expediency rather than process. People who are more powerful, more central, or more liked may be subject to a different set of rules than others, which can shield them from accountability rather than facilitating it. Complex situations can be flattened into simple binaries because there is no capacity for encountering difficulty. Emotional responses can be mistaken for organizational judgment. And the people who most need the process to support them may be the ones who pay the steepest price for this failure.

Seeing accountability work as governance is not about valuing hierarchy over equality. It is about recognizing that with power comes responsibility. It is about being honest about what leaders must do, the impact they can have, and the consequences of not taking that seriously enough.

Establishing Standards of Behavior

The first governance responsibility is one that many organizations are now taking more seriously, but often without recognizing what that responsibility requires in practice. Many groups are articulating standards of behavior through formal, written documents such as codes of conduct, safer spaces policies, community agreements, and other similarly named instruments. The exact terminology often matters less than the function these policies play. If a policy establishes certain behaviors that are either required or prohibited, and defines or implies some mechanism by which those behavior standards will be enforced, then that policy functions as a set of rules, regardless of what it is called.

Creating rules is a core function of governance. At the societal level, this is the job of lawmakers. At the community level, it is normally done by well-meaning volunteers. For many groups, the easiest way to develop rules can be to look around at what other groups are doing and copy whatever sounds good, perhaps with a few changes to better fit how the group wants to see itself. This can be more risky than it appears.

Rules borrowed from other contexts can carry hidden assumptions about organizational capacity and authority as well as the specific social dynamics that made those rules necessary. A rule that is well-understood in one context might be unexpected or even incomprehensible in another. Attempting to modify a rule from another context, without fully understanding why it was created, how it is intended to be interpreted, and how it is enforced, can result in a rule that not only is a bad match for the needs of the community that adopted it, but that lacks any understandable function.

A common problem with many groups’ rules is a lack of specificity. If a rule speaks in general terms, especially when it uses widely valued but vague words like safety and respect, participants cannot know what is actually expected of them. A rule that cannot be clearly understood cannot be reliably followed. Yet when something goes wrong, someone must define what the rule actually meant. When the meaning of a rule is specified only retrospectively, it is much easier for those with the most power and influence to define it according to their own agendas rather than any objective standard of fairness.

Vague rules can also lead to conflict when differing interpretations collide. People often assume their beliefs about what a rule should be dictate what it actually is. This is not just an issue at the community level, but also in other contexts, including in the legal system. Lack of specificity makes this problem worse, as people can be reasonably acting in good faith on completely different understandings of the same rule. Even in the legal system, where laws are written by teams of professionals with extensive legal training, lawsuits often center around evaluating competing understandings and interpretations of a rule. Creating well-defined rules is difficult work, even for people who do it for a living.

Specificity is not the only challenge rule makers face. There’s also the question of whether the rule even makes sense for a community. Even a well-specified rule might not serve a community if it addresses something that is not actually a problem, or addresses it in the wrong way. And for a rule to have force, it also needs to have an enforcement mechanism. A rule that is clearly unenforced can be worse than no rule at all, because it communicates that what people in power say cannot be trusted. It communicates that a group’s norms are actually unspoken, and that people must read between the lines to determine how power actually works, who it favors, and what it allows.

A rule without an enforcement mechanism is not actually a rule. It is a suggestion. This does not mean suggestions are inferior to rules. On the contrary, suggestions, in the form of guidelines or principles that are meant to orient rather than dictate behavior, are one of the most powerful tools of governance within participatory communities. Many groups should have more guidelines and fewer rules. Guidelines empower people to think for themselves, use their own judgment about what a situation requires, and take responsibility for that choice.

But guidelines need to be clearly delineated from rules. Rules promise enforcement. Guidelines do not. Creating a rule without enforcing it fairly and consistently breaks an implicit promise, and that can erode trust in ways that are difficult to repair. If a group wants to govern behavior through rules, it should be aware that it is also assuming responsibilities for monitoring, investigation, and enforcement.