Power relations within the NGO community

Within the global NGO or CSO "community" there are vast discrepancies of power between NGOs, frequently reflecting a North-South split, and there are strong differences in perception between Northern and Southern groups about the role of civil society. Naturally the flow of funds to the largest international NGOs, all of which are headquartered in North America or Western Europe, create structural problems for CSOs elsewhere. Access to these NGOs in itself becomes a strategic issue (see section 3), but it also creates a major problem for the question of representation.

Further, prejudices of racism, sexism and colonialism still endure. At the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in March 1995, The Norwegian FORUM sponsored a seminar on NGO's Role in Civil Society — Common and Opposing Interests? The workshop was so crowded that the room had to be changed and even then, people had to be turned away. In the end, some 300 people crowded in to hear a structural critique of fractures in the NGO community caused by Northern NGO attitudes of racism, patriarchy and colonialism.

The view from the South presented at this seminar was clear: that Northern attitudes to the South and to Southern development issues and Southern civil society organizations are characterized by a mixture of sensationalism and romanticism designed to provoke feelings of guilt and charity. Neither the image nor the reaction are based on any understanding of the conditions of the South, and Northern interventions therefore simply perpetuate structural Southern underdevelopment and dependency.

Thandiwe Motsisi, a South African and member of the International South Group Network (ISGN), has outlined two paradigms of civil society work: the charitable model and the transformative model. The charitable model fails to recognize the capacity of communities for transformation, and works within the "neo-liberal paradigm of global development [that] continuously undermine[s] the activities of those NGOs which struggle against racism, gender-based oppression and marginalization of people with disabilities, children and elderly in society".⁴¹ As an example, she cited the donation by World Vision of bibles valued at US$ 1.5 million to the Mozambique people at the height of the Frelimo/Renamo conflict in 1984-85, when the Frelimo government had asked for food aid.

The transformative model is collectivist at its roots. It often starts with a local focus group and the building of community assets, and may gradually extend its links to a wider community and potentially also to wider issues, without losing its original raison d'ętre. Motsisi calls for more transparency from Northern NGOs to their Southern counterparts, more accountability, and more appropriate support. In this view, Southern NGOs and NGOs that work within the transformative model that is participatory and empowering have more to teach the dominant NGOs that function from the charitable paradigm.⁴²

The 1995 Benchmark Survey of NGOs asked NGOs whether they felt restricted by any of the following: larger NGOs, English-language run NGOs, Northern NGOs, accredited NGOs, white-run NGOs, or male-run NGOs. The range of "yes" responses was consistently between 40 and 76 per cent — even staff from these types of organizations recognized this as a problem. The organizations of greatest concern to the respondents were the larger NGOs, English-language run NGOs and Northern NGOs: identified as dominating by 76 per cent, 75 per cent and 71 per cent of respondents respectively. Less problematic but still "dominating" were the other possible options — accredited NGOs (57 per cent), white-run NGOs (50 per cent) and male-run NGOs (40 per cent)⁴³ (see figure 2).

Within this picture of inequity and frustration, several points should be made. First, there were no statistically significant variations in these perceptions within the key sub-communities surveyed. In other words, Northern and Southern NGOs, large and small, whatever racial origin or gender, the majority of NGOs share this perception. Second, the key issues appear to be North-South concerns (larger NGOs, English language NGOs and Northern NGOs and accredited NGOs) and other forms of dominance (English language NGOs, white NGOs). Sexism was a relatively less significant feature, but with 40 per cent of respondents still a significantly high proportion of NGOs — and there were no significant differences between male and female perceptions on this point.

Equity of representation is a key issue in the movement towards a democratic civil society. Survey results such as these could subject the NGO community to criticism on the grounds that its own house is not in order. Since inequality at all levels is an issue that civil society feels is important, it should receive greater attention within the CSO community.

While creating links between civil society organizations, globalization also creates different economic realities that are fraying relationships between Northern and Southern NGOs. Martin Khor has noted that, at the final meetings of the GATT ministers in the first half of 1994, questions emerged on international labour standards. At issue was whether lower labour standards and costs in the developing world provided an incentive for foreign investment, and whether this would result in unemployment in the North as jobs flowed to the South. Khor argues that these questions were raised by Northern governments (the US and France) and unions, and appeals made for support to Northern NGOs, on the grounds of minimum labour standards. Khor's position is that the intention was "to prevent or reduce the inflow of cheaper Third World products into their markets, and thus protect their jobs" — a tactic that needs to be understood in light of deep problems of structural unemployment in the North and attendant concerns about social stability and economic welfare there.⁴⁴ In consequence, some views are very pessimistic about the possibility of building enduring links between Northern and Southern civil society at all.⁴⁵

The transformative model does not exclude Northern civil society organizations or Northern funders, but does set terms for their use. In one case, a Zimbabwean women's organization refused outside funding completely until it was sure it could overcome the dependency such aid could bring.⁴⁶ The "trickle up" effect of building from the local to the global can be effective. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan former university professor, began organizing a tree planting initiative to halt the desertification that threatens food and water supplies in her country. The resulting Kenya Green Belt Movement has grown to over 1,500 nurseries and 50,000 members, who have planted over 10 million trees.⁴⁷ Maathai notes the role of the local in addressing global issues, including desertification, resource depletion and in challenging foreign investment practices and their connection to a corrupt political élite:

The philosophy behind the movement was to try to make people plant trees because they saw the need for it. We started with helping people plant trees for their own needs.... It is like starting with a very local concern, and then moving to the community level, national level, and then global level. There are many of us who plant trees because we are concerned about the global changes, but it has to start from personal needs. And we are still very much at the personal level.⁴⁸

There are also disagreements on what constitutes democratic and/or effective participation in international decision-making, not only on Northern vs. Southern lines. Historically, for example, Greenpeace has not favored coalitions and networks with other NGOs, is highly campaign-driven, and highly effective at different times at all points along the decision-making spectrum. The organization's perspective is illuminated in the discussion about the formation of an Environmental Advisory Council of NGOs (EAC) to the OECD (see section 4). Greenpeace argued against its creation on the grounds that such a body was exclusive, and that any interested party should be allowed to attend. However, it is also the case that the perspective of Greenpeace comes from its position as, in its own words, a "large" NGO — and a relatively powerful one. While its model of participatory democracy may in theory allow more people to fill up the "back of the room" in international decision-making, it may not allow new and weaker NGOs entry at all. Nevertheless, direct and participatory democracy remains a strong model for smaller, developing country NGOs.

Alliances

Several initiatives are in progress to create alliances that overcome such problems in form and in substance. The International NGO Forum (INGOF) conference is one example of a process to facilitate North-South dialogue. In March 1995, INGOF called a meeting in Manila of 77 representatives from NGO networks to continue discussion of effective co-operation. Meeting the Challenge of the Emerging Global System, a document outlining networking strategies for international action, was drafted. This document suggests three areas of concentration: enhancing the capacity of regional and national NGOs to work together; identifying gaps where there is no strong international network dealing with a specific issue; and building alliances through creating a co-operative structure.⁴⁹

Similar sentiments were expressed by an informal working group of Southern environmental NGOs discussing global civil governance. A key recommendation was that Northern NGOs working in the South first take stock of the existing capacity there, and build on that, to achieve mutually agreed objectives, rather than simply establishing new structures and personnel that either duplicate existing services or functions, or disempower the local capacity to provide these in the short- or the longer term.⁵⁰ This model could be extremely powerful. Friends of the Earth International, for example, has affiliate organizations in over fifty countries. In Indonesia, its affiliate is WAHLI: Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment. WAHLI in turn is a network of some 300 NGOs who are active in a range of environment-related activities in Indonesia as well as regionally and internationally.⁵¹ Such a network could, in principle, allow NGOs to network quickly and effectively and make links between local and global principles and campaigns.

The revolution of power

The desire of people to be involved in the management of their affairs, the need to be active in areas where government is unable or unwilling to act, and the development of new communication technologies that convey information broadly and help people interact across national borders are encouraging what some have called a global associational revolution. This is fueled by the realization that so many issues requiring attention are global in scope.⁵²

Despite its complexity and contradictions, the international CSO community sees itself — and is increasingly seen by governments — as representative of embryonic institutional structures that could define a different form of global governance, a model in which citizen action occurs both at local and global levels. In 1995, the independent Commission on Global Governance, comprised of 28 respected global leaders, came out with a report that explored the relationship between the declining role of the state and the emergence of civil society.

The Commission's thinking is replicated in many voices sharing a vision that civil society offers creative and appropriate new models for governance at all levels. There are, nevertheless, two quite different strands of thinking to this position. One set of players, including free market advocates, argue that CSOs are more effective at public service delivery than the state or the intergovernmental apparatus. They view CSOs as "operational" service providers. A quite different view, and one that spurs the energies of many CSOs, is an advocacy position, often coming from an anti-free market ideological position.

The "efficiency" view is expounded by management guru Peter Druker. In a 1994 essay, "It profits us to strengthen nonprofits", he comments that governments have proved incompetent at solving social problems. Virtually every success, he says, has been achieved by nonprofits, who spend far less for their positive results than governments spend for failures (see box 3). This has become the dominant conservative ideology of state disengagement, privatization, competition, individualism and market liberalization, and it is expressed at many levels in international organizations and rich country donor institutions. It is quite interesting to note, as Peter Uvin does, that "one of the main reasons for the prominence of a discourse of participation, empowerment and self-help [which is quite radical in nature] since the 1960s is the neo-conservative forces behind structural adjustment and privatization".⁵³

Harnessing the operational capacity of civil society is now big business. International CSOs are being brought into service delivery work in humanitarian relief work in war zones, reconstruction programmes and economic development programmes. Grants from the 21 country members in the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to DAC-country CSOs grew from 0.2 per cent of development assistance in 1970 to over 10 per cent in the 1990s. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has changed its policy of granting funds for development assistance to include CSOs, not just governments, and the World Bank now routinely integrates CSOs into its development planning.⁵⁵ Much of the development assistance money flowing to CSOs goes through a small group of international CSOs to help carry out projects on the ground in developing countries.

It is also the case that funds for development activity are now flowing at an accelerated rate to large private companies. According to the US Treasury, between 1993 and 1995, the multilateral development banks channeled nearly US$ 5 billion to private US firms, including General Electric, General Motors, IBM, AT&T, Cargill and Westinghouse. In the view of Nicholas Hildyard, editor of The Ecologist in London, the multilateral development banks are using the private sector and multinational corporations, ostensibly to deliver development and social welfare, while really providing corporate subsidies.⁵⁶

When used for operational purposes, international CSOs are often brought in because they may deliver services more creatively, more inexpensively and more effectively than the state or the intergovernmental apparatus — not to work on governance and policy arenas because of their claim to represent global issues. The overuse of operational international CSOs can be antithetical to democracy and development. In Mozambique, for example, some international NGOs have supplanted the local state apparatus in the provision of social services. This may inhibit the state's potential for reconstruction.⁵⁷ Based on observations like this, Joanne Landry of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy has taken the view that humanitarian intervention in national sovereignty, even in cases of severe human rights abuses, can impede the growth of local democracy and is justified only in the rarest of cases.⁵⁸ Landry also feels that using international CSOs to deliver humanitarian relief over long periods of time is undesirable because it reduces the capacity for local CSOs or CBOs to develop, and takes pressure off the state to take on the job of national governance.

A distinction needs to be made between the welcoming of international CSOs into global governance because they represent more effective service delivery capacity; and their welcoming on the grounds of democracy and participation, which could include service delivery work. Can international project-driven groups with purely operational functions and working almost entirely on public funds really be called NGOs or CSOs?⁶⁰ The basic model for global civil governance insists that there is a dialectic relation between service activities, lobbying work and civil governance (see box 4).

Business groups as CSOs/NGOs

Accountability is a key element of democracy, and it covers a range of expectations. Representatives of an issue or an institution need to be legitimately and authoritatively able to "represent" it to others. The question of what is a "legitimate" NGO, however, is variable. One of the biggest questions in this area relates to the representativeness of private business and industry groups (BINGOs), particularly trade associations. These groups technically are NGOs and are increasingly visible at international political events, but their credibility as representatives of civil society is frequently challenged.

Given the enormous economic disparities between big business and the global poor, the lack of distinction between groups associated for profit (BINGOs) and those associated for public interest (PINGOs) rankles NGOs struggling to put development issues on the international agenda. This problem was addressed, for example, at a preparatory committee meeting for NGOs in March 1995 for the Fourth World Conference on Women. The women's health organizations from the public interest sector adopted a resolution banning the participation of transnational corporations from their caucus meetings and asked that those organizations representing the infant formula, pharmaceutical, tobacco, pesticides and other industries meet in their own caucus in order to ensure that public interest NGOs were free to meet, reach consensus, set policy, plan and strategize without the presence and influence of organizations formed to protect the financial and business interests of their members. One NGO stated "it is unconscionable that people-centered groups should have to share their one channel to policy makers with profit-making concerns".⁶¹

The current loose rules of participation allow such a broad definition of NGOs that these can be abused by business groups. Noting the proliferation of representatives of transnational corporations (TNCs) at the UN as NGOs, WEDO produced a special education primer, Transnational Corporations in the United Nations: Preventing Global Civil Governance. It describes how the rules allow TNCs to masquerade as NGOs. Their disproportionate financial power gives their legitimate lobbying activity far more efficacy than that of other NGO groups. For example, once a business association has official NGO status, such as the International Chamber of Commerce, it can decide which business members participate on its behalf. This results in waste traders participating as ICC members in negotiations on follow-up strategies to the Basle Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes, and producers of ozone-depleting substances presenting the ICC position on issues related to the Montreal Protocol. More troublingly, some TNCs can use their disproportionate power and influence to shape UN opinion (see box 5).

Even the BINGO-PINGO distinction, however, is not always useful. There are as many varieties of size, political perspective and power within the BINGO community as in the PINGO community. Arguing that international corporations were exercising too much power and influence at the United Nations, the WEDO Primer was careful to distinguish between the reality that large firms have more resources to lobby effectively than small and medium-sized enterprises, which is one problem; and quite another problem of the illegitimate use of corporate power and influence at the UN — the abuse of their access as NGOs to intergovernmental decision-making.⁶²

41 Thandiwe Dodo Motsisi, The Role of NGOs in Civil Society: Common and Opposing Interests in South and North, op. cit.

42 Also see Peter Uvin, "Scaling up the grassroots and scaling down the Summit: The relations between Third World non-governmental organizations and the United Nations", in Thomas Weiss and Leon Gordenker (eds.), Non-governmental Organizations, the United Nations and Global Governance, op. cit., pp. 495-512.

43 Benchmark Survey of NGOs op. cit., pp. 26-28.

44 Martin Khor, "The World Trade Organization, labour standards and trade protectionism", in Third World Resurgence, No. 45, reprinted as Third World Network Briefings for the Social Summit, No. 2, TWN, Penang, March 1995.

45 Yash Tandon, presentation to the seminar on The Role of NGOs in Civil Society: Common and Opposing Interests in South and North, WSSD NGO Forum, Copenhagen, 6 March 1995.

46 ORAP, the Organization of Rural Association in Progress in Zimbabwe, cited in Motsisi, op. cit.

47 Jennifer Mitchell, "Women and natural resource management in Sub-Saharan Africa", Courier, No. 154, November-December 1995, pp. 58-59.

48 Steve Lerner, "The Green Belt Movement in Kenya - Interview with Wangari Maathai" Beyond the Earth Summit: Conversations with Advocates of Sustainable Development, Common Knowledge Press, Bolinas, California, 1992.

49 INGOF, Meeting the Challenge of the Emerging Global System, Report of the International NGO Forum Networks Meeting, December 1995, Manila, Philippines.

50 Benchmark Survey of NGOs, op. cit., p. 24.

51 Martha Belcher and Angela Genning (eds.), Southeast Asia Rainforests. A Resource Guide and Directory, Rainforest Action Network, San Francisco, 1993.

52 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, op. cit.

53 Peter Uvin, "Scaling up the bottom and scaling down the top: The relations between grassroots organizations, governments, and the United Nations", in Thomas Weiss and Leon Gordenker (eds.), Non-governmental Organizations, the United Nations and Global Governance, op. cit.

54 Peter Druker, Managing in a Time of Great Change, Truman Valley Books/Dutton, New York, 1995, pp. 273-278.

55 Leon Gordenker and Thomas Weiss, "Pluralising global governance: Analytical approaches and dimensions", in Thomas Weiss and Leon Gordenker (eds.), Non-governmental Organizations, the United Nations and Global Governance, op. cit., pp. 371-372. Also see Making Development Sustainable: The World Bank Group and the Environment, Fiscal 1994 Report, The World Bank, Washington, D.C., p. 174.

56 Nicholas Hildyard, "Public risk, private profit. The World Bank and the private sector", The Ecologist, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 176-178.

57 Antonio Donini, statement on NGOs and global governance at the conference on The Fate of Democracy in an Age of Globalization, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 15 March 1996.

58 Joanne Landry of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, statement at the conference on The Fate of Democracy in an Age of Globalization, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 15 March 1996.

59 Dina Abad, Executive Director, Philippines-Canada Human Resources Development Program, comment at the InterAction Conference on Democracy, Washington, D.C., 1995.

60 Antonio Donini, "Bureaucracy and the free spirits: Stagnation and innovation in the relationship between the UN and NGOs", op. cit.

61 WEDO, Transnational Corporations in the United Nations: Using or Abusing their Access?, Primer No. 2, New York, 1995.

62 ibid.

63 ibid.