Critiquing the Role of Civil Society in Implementing the SDGs

Perspectives on Civil Society

Social Movements

Advocating for Policy Change

Advocating for Wider Societal Changes

NGOs

CS as Associations (Putnam)

CS as Sites of Rebellion (Gramsci)

Introduction:

  • In addition to state-led negotiations at the UN HQ, a wider set of processes aiming to include civil society in the discussion occurred
  • Myworld2015: What people thought the important issues were for them – telling in the fact that no one on the course has heard of it
  • Criticism: Overcoming the digital divide - need access to internet to voice opinion
  • Opinion of Robert Putnam, Harvard Professor
    • Collection of different associations and groups within society
    • E.g. sports/political groups (not parties) etc.
    • How these groups are really important for CS
      • Important for building trust within groups, creates sense of solidarity
      • Important for democracy; not just about the market and politics
  • Often seen as synonymous with NGOs
  • Easier to define as what they're not: Not state nor market entities
  • It’s the CS as associations which is given a prominent role in achieving the SDGs – e.g. using NGOs to put forward projects to help achieve SDGs - unlike Gramsci's version (little room for debate of alternative options)

  • Campaigns such as Justice for Cleaners campaign – association/group of people that came together quite informally – link with the political nature – not a benign group trying to play a sport together for example:


    • Sports organisations
    • Religious associations
    • Music
    • National/cultural societies – e.g. the Nordic society
    • Meet-ups
    • Language groups to improve language skills

  • Putner argues that all these are needed to create a rich society

  • People within these groups will make links between groups
    • All of this helps create ‘social capital’
      • Bonding capital: Within groups
      • Bridging capital: Between groups
  • Gramsci: Italian Marxist
  • Vision was more arguing that CS isn’t necessarily about groups but about a political space
  • A space in society in which people can come together to think about how society can be organised differently
  • Somewhere where people can protest and present alternative views

Hironaka (2014)

  • sees social movements as a bee swarm
    – together, if all the bees sting, it would have a large impact
    – small impacts add up to a large change

Charles Tilly: Important in this topic – looks at SMs as networks that have particular types of campaigns/actions
– call on solidarity and unity to have empathy with those affected

Effectiveness of SMs:

  • Literature argues that 4 aspects are needed for successful SMs:
    • Network of long-term leaders
    • Community centres (aka an offline presence)
    • Resource base
    • Institutions – rules of the game- to provide meaning and structures
      • Rowing at the same pace in the same direction as it were --> create norms - norms vary across cultures – in terms of social movements, it may be a norm that the group comes together to discuss future action – would be unusual for one person to make all the decisions – if everyone responds in a way you’d expect via norms, it allows faster effectivity
  • Effectiveness depends on the goal of the movement: is the aim for policy change or wider societal change?

Can SMs be a part of what they're trying to change?

Example: Forest Rights Act (2006) - Increased recognition that communities are disadvantaged by colonialism – labelled encroachers and imposters/ anti-modernists / traditional

  • Recognition of individual and community rights over the land
  • Civil society-led coalition (CSC) advocating for the full implementation of the FRA (includes journalists, NGOs, etc.)
  • Here, the push is for a policy goal

Policy Design

  • Long debate
  • Coherent coalition of people’s movements, NGOs, Academics successfully pushed for FRA
  • Shared policy beliefs
  • Non trivial coordinated behaviour

Policy Implementation

  • Implementation shifts to States
  • Sluggish implementation
  • FD generally resisting
  • Many in civil society not completely satisfied (Bhullar, 2008)
  • What is the CSC doing?

CSC Strategies:

  • Cognitive:


    • Shared local knowledge with each other
    • Presented to officials at conferences

  • Conflictive:


    • Rallies, joint letters, conventions

  • Collaborative:


    • Some members participated in government led review committee - i.e. worked WITH the state

  • Normative:


    • Media hardly used

NB: Within the CSC, there were clear divisions on what their purpose was:

  • Some wanted FRAs for the protection of the environment that they believed would follow
  • Some wanted them to ensure the people were given control of their own lives
    • 14/44: Corrects historical injustice
    • 12/44: It allows communities to live in harmony with the forest
    • 11/44: It's a first step to giving forest-dwellers control over their resources
    • 7/44: It recognises rights of forest dwellers stimulates good forest governance

Occupy Movement (2011-2012)

  • Started in Wall Street to protest against capitalism, banking irresponsibility and generally trying to push for more equality and worldwide justice
  • Outside St. Pauls – tried outside stock exchange but it was private land and they were removed
  • Had an online presence to link up movements around the world – they were there from 2011 to 2012
  • 951 cities across the world were involved at its peak – there from October to February

The Process:

  • Strategies:


    • Pre-figurative politics
    • General Assembly
    • Tent City
    • Most of the critiques are around it not being clear enough disbandment (but argument is that it’s about the process not the goal)
    • Showed the world about what they wanted within their own movement – had a general assembly to indicate the kind of democracy that they wanted – no fixed agenda, fluid membership

  • Outcomes:


    • Changing political discourses
    • New generation of politically engaged citizens
    • Highlighting process above tangible outcomes

Criticisms (Howard and Pratt-Boyden, 2013)

  • Directionless – what do they actually want?
  • Leaderless
  • Ultimately hierarchy and representation needed to avoid long frustrating discussions
  • Fleeting and small-scale

Relation to the SDGs

  • SDG 5: Gender: End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
  • SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth: Sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7 per cent gross domestic product growth per annum in the least developed countries
    ^ Two possible goals where social movements may help address the SDGs - do they therefore have a place in discussions?

View in the 1990s

  • Also important for political reasons – promoting democratic development and ‘good governance’, promoted:
    • Transparency
    • Accountability
    • Rule of law
  • Representing wider civil society
  • International organisations like the WB seen as crucial
  • Critique: long arms of government and donors? NGOs taking more of a political role rather than just a service-provider role

View in the 1980s: The Glory Years

  • Seen as efficient - money sent to development causes via states thought to result in additional admin costs or perhaps corruption
  • Idea that NGOs would save the world was quite strong
  • Closer to the people: reaching places government can’t
  • More democratic: being trusted where government’s aren’t
  • Critique: crowding out governments? E.g. schools

View in the 2000s onwards

  • Evidence coming through of where it wasn’t always the case that NGOs were good and Gs' were bad
    • NGOs now may run the risk of accountability issues
    • Are they accountable to donors giving money or to the people on the ground/ beneficiaries?
  • Large issue with the Boxing Day Tsunami
    • Coordination of who was getting the money was messy
    • Questions of whether the money was used effectively or not
  • Tension between goals of donors and the larger structural changes that may need to happen in society
    • E.g. A donor may want to provide a load of vaccinations (easily measured, can achieve short-term wins), whereas the money may be better spent on say the structural changes that need to be put in place to ensure that women can join the workforce of teachers who can then educate on issues of vaccinations)
  • Banks et al.: Trying to advocate for a return of NGOs as having a role of somewhere between grassroots/on the ground and other levels up to governmental levels – rethinking their role in enacting structural changes – how these operations would be intertwined with one another

Categorising NGOs

Scale: International, national, local

Funding: Membership or Government-supported

Ways of Working: campaigning/ political vs. service delivery/ technical approach

Campaigning (e.g. Greenpeace) – more involved in the pushing of particular normative views of the world into the mainstream versus Service Delivery – trying to provide on the ground services

Campaigning: Greenpeace campaign against the sale of Lego in Shell garages - camped outside offices, got the word out, released a promotional video

Critique of Campaigning: - They're able to create a big noise with a small budget

  • Awareness raising through 'mind bombs'
  • Use digital media to 'level the playing field'
  • Perhaps not as effective as working with companies?
  • “As societies, we have complicated and possibly inconvenient choices to make about our energy future. To think we can deal with them by stigmatising the oil majors is childish – an acceptable quality in young Lego builders, but not in the rest of us.” Skapinker (2014) Financial Times

Service Delivery/Technical Approach:

  • NGOs often work on projects
  • Development seen as a technical process
  • Activities --> outputs --> outcomes --> impacts
    • e.g. provision of high-quality teacher training direct output from training  knock-on effects  ultimate, wider impacts

E.g. Provision of toilets; Toilet Twinning.org/Tearfund: (''flushing away poverty')

  • activities (construction of toilets)
  • output (gives access to toilets over using open areas for people)
  • outcomes (saves time finding alternative place to use toilet/ decrease diseases and illness and may incentivize people to come to the area e.g. if it’s in a school)
  • Impact (wider consequences include reduction of days spent dealing with illness which frees up time for education/income generation)

Critique of Technical Approach

  • E.g. with toilet; why doesn’t the community have a toilet in the first place?
    • Presumption that people are going in the open and therefore the way to stop this happening is provision of a toilet
    • Shouldn’t there be more engagement with the politics behind this to ensure that the government takes this responsibility?
    • What we often see is that the activity doesn’t lead to the output – the toilet may not match the problem
    • According to the people, what often happens is that the women don’t use the toilet – for the women, one of their only moments to relax with each other was when they went off to find the toilet
    • Provision of a single toilet is ignorant then, of the politics and the culture of the area

Critique of Project Approach:

  • Ramalingham: Aid on the edge of chaos looks at the potential value of complex adaptive systems research for how aid should be conceived, analysed and delivered
  • I.e. that perfect understanding of the individual does not lead to perfect understanding of the whole
  • Some international organisations beginning to apply idea: UK Department for International Development, the World Bank, the United Nations and Oxfam.
  • Does the organisation do the same thing everywhere? Issue of site-specificity – link to the desertification combatting schemes
  • Lack of appreciation for local context and local politics
  • Duncan Green's 'How Change Happens' looks at the major themes that make change happen in the world:
    • Identifies systems as complex and no simple cause and effect relationships
    • Looks at change as slow and steady, punctuated by occasional sudden events
    • Power is central and resistance is normal - need to avoid working only with 'people like us'
    • Social change is deep rooted and requires shifts in ideas through issue-based campaigning

Conflict or Collaboration? Indian Forest Rights Act

  • Barnes et al (2016)
  • Found that CSOs (Civil Society Organisations) often band together to form CSCs (Civil Society Coalitions) to shape forest policies in their favour
  • They state that whilst this often works during the policy design phase, there are questions raised over the influence of the CSCs during the implementation phase

  • Found that the CSC employs a range of conflictive and collaborative strategies in its attempts to influence state-led implementation processes, at both national and state levels


    -It draws on a loose, heterogeneous network with ability to connect internally and a clear moral justification of its involvement in FRA implementation.


    • However the diverse range of views on the implementation issues held by CSC members, lack of dedicated funding for coordination, limited legitimacy in the eyes of some state actors and a constricting wider institutional setting, impedes the CSC’s ability to make coalition-level strategy decisions.
    • Our results lead us to argue that CSCs are undoubtedly active in forest policy implementation at the national level and in the two states analyzed, though limited coordination of strategies potentially restricts their impact on the policy implementation process.

  • Links to the literature's suggestions of the 4 principals needed for effective social movements

A new way of working: NGO Give Directly in Kenya

  • $700 lump-sum transfers which are explicitly unconditional in what they can be used for
  • Half of the households with a thatched roof (poorest) in each village received the transfer (approx. 10 households per village of approx. 100 households)
  • Households with heterogeneous needs may be better able to turn cash into long-run welfare improvements than transfers of livestock or skills
  • Psychological benefits by allowing recipients to choose how to spend money
  • Lower delivery costs – no conditions to be monitored

Result (Innovations for Poverty Action, 2015):

  • More money spent on food, healthcare and social events
    • Dispelled assumptions that perhaps they’d find that people spent the money on alcohol and other bad things
  • Reduced conflict – they thought only giving to some people may lead to tension – this wasn’t the case and the culture was such that they were quite happy that there was money coming into their villages
  • Found decreased stress hormone (Cortisol) levels
  • Especially effective when going to a female-headed household


Critique

  • Will people give as much money if they don’t know what the money is going to be spent on/ if they know that the money isn’t going to be managed by the charity
  • Not much analysis yet on the LT impacts

Challenge for all NGOs: Communicating complexity of operations to donors - can't detail exactly how much £20 will do - Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save attempts to address this and quantify how much it costs to save a life

Class

Core Points:

  • NGOs have pressure from donors to function in a certain way
  • Are NGOs in a position to confront power structures or are they themselves, a part of those power structures?
  • NGOs seem to proliferate within neo-liberal policy regimes – means that NGOs should be therefore understood as related and not independent
  • Should civil society organisations be trying to pursue policies of accommodation or antagonism?
  • Is in effect NGOs’ work palliative or transformative?


MBO vs NGO:

  • Membership-based organisations are accountable to members, tend to tackle the root causes of poverty
  • MBOs tend to be oppositional whereas NGOs are more accommodating
  • NGOs are instead accountable to donors tend to be non-political in terms of community participation



Banks et al, 2015: NGOs face significant constraints and contradictions in their ability to strengthen civil society given the pressures they face to be non-political, their weak roots in society, the pressures they face to be accountable ‘upward’ to donors rather than ‘downward’ to beneficiaries, and their focus on short-term projects rather than long-term structural change.

The 'NGO-isation' of Resistance Roy, 2004:

  • Important to consider NGO in a broader context
  • Indian NGO boom in late 1980s - coincided with opening of markets to neoliberalism
  • At the time, India was trying to keep to SAP requirements --> withdrawal of funding for state provisions in agriculture, health etc. --> NGOs moved in to these gaps but had just a fraction of what the state had in funding
  • NGOs funded by western governments and the WB, UN etc. - a part of the movement that slashed government spending in the first place
  • Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Is it guilt? No, NGOs give the impression of filling state's void - they are but in a materially inconsequential way
  • Their real contribution is to diffuse political anger - dole out aid and benevolence which people ought to have by right
  • They alter the public psyche; turn people into dependent victims and blunt edge of political resistance - buffer between empire and subjects
  • In LR, NGOs are accountable to funders - they're an 'indicator species' - greater the devastation caused by liberalisation, the greater the outbreak of NGOs
  • E.g. US preparing to invade Iraq whilst simultaneously preparing NGOs to clean up the devastation
  • In order to continue to receive funding, NGOs must present their work in a shallow framework separate from political or historical context - apolitical distress reports eventually make the people of the countries seem like pathological victims in need of the white man's help - unwittingly reinforces racist stereotypes and white man's accomplishments
  • The NGO-isation of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well mannered, reasonable, 9 to 5 job with a few perks thrown in
  • Real

Follow the Frog (2012) campaign video:

  • Message is: You don't know what you're doing, we do - leave it to us and we'll sort it out so you can do what you're doing and not feel guilty
  • Argues that we shouldn't try to live out the 'cliche gringo fantasy' of becoming an honorary native and leading the resistance - Avatar style
  • 'So that you don't have to do the things you shouldn't do anyway'
  • Video delegitimises thoughts that we need to do more/can do more to help - removes our agency to make transformative change through ridicule
  • Suggests NGOs ARE part of the power structure they're trying to protect people from - links to Roy's speech - we deforest the rainforest then big multinationals band together, come up with the rainforest alliance, tell us that it's the answer to all our problems (whilst simultaneously getting us to buy their products), whilst diffusing resistance movements by relinquishing our feelings of more must be done
  • One of the closing scenes: actor lying face down with blood and dirt all over his face - implicit message of this is what will happen to you if you try and do more than you 'should'

Zizek on Charity and Consumerism:

  • Talks about Starbucks coffee - when we buy a starbucks coffee, we also buy quite a lot of ideology with it:
    • See the posters on the wall saying yes our drink is more expensive than others, but we give, say 1% of all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy etc.
    • Saves the forests and enables growth of organic coffee etc.
    • Old consumerism: Bought a product and then felt bad - thought of people that couldn't afford these luxuries and it made you not want to buy them
    • Corporations cannot allow this to continue and need something to counteract it
    • Starbucks enables us to simultaneously be a consumerist and have a clear consciousness - the price of the commodity also pays for your duty to the environment, the poor etc. - the ultimate form of consumerism
  • Analogous to the operations of charities - they're the antidote to cure the hangover of consumerism

Charities are the morning-after antidote to the hangover of consumerism