Accountability and governance Accountability is about answerability. The international accountability standards create a framework which sets out voluntary restructured rules and procedures for conducting assessment and measurement, and for communicating activities and practices that business undertakes in order to meet its social and environmental goals. A good understanding of accountability notes the important connotation that stakeholders have a legitimate to make right to hold corporations to account for their behavior and for the decisions and actions which might impact them negatively. In the context of governance in a situation when an effective government is absent we see a shift in how business is regulated. It moves from a state secret model to a multilateral mode of regulation without any territorial specification, involving the participation of private, public and the civil society actors. Effectively this type of governance mechanism is a complex form of government's arrangement known as soft laws in which different standards of behavior are selected, measured and enforced through a combination of varying efforts from the government, from business and from the non- governmental organisations. Soft laws are often made up of different combinations of private and voluntary courts, and certification and labeling systems.