NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics / Edition 1

by William E. DeMars

Overview

Challenging both views, DeMars irreverently reveals the political claims implicit in every transnational NGO. They are best conceptualised, he argues, not in terms of either principles or power, but through the partners they make in transnational society and politics. NGOs and transnational networks institutionalise conflict as much as cooperation, and reshape states and societies, often inadvertently. NGOs have overthrown dictators, provided life support for collapsed states, and reengineered the family. Their historical origins contrast sharply with current realities, and show signs of radical change in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745319056
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	05/25/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

William DeMars is chairman of the Department of Government at Wofford College in South Carolina. Previously he has taught International Relations at the University of Notre Dame and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He has observed NGOs operating in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central America and East Asia. His publications have addressed humanitarian politics, the changing face of war in Africa and intelligence issues.

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CHAPTER 1

Your NGO Starter Kit

"Mister," he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax, 1971

NGOs are increasing in number and influence in all regions of the world, and across a growing roster of issue-areas. The primary geopolitical focus of their normative agendas is to influence the "Third World" of former European colonies, and the "Second World" of former (and remnant) communist states. The broad turn to NGOs reflects a largely unexamined faith that they are the most effective vehicles for social and political transformation. Does NGO proliferation necessarily contribute to progressive change? This chapter examines an assortment of NGO claims and discovers some contradictions lying just beneath the surface.

NGOs are so numerous, operate in so many countries, and address so many disparate issues that most accounts of NGO politics follow conventional approaches to partition the NGO world for easier study. Four well-worn premises frequently serve. First, NGOs are divided between international agencies based in prosperous Western countries and local or "grassroots" organizations working directly with the poor or the victimized. Second, much is made of the "issue-areas" that are assumed to be hermetically sealed from influencing each other. Third, there is a strong assumption that NGO influence on how the world works follows automatically from NGO participation in formulating "global norms" in international conferences and treaties. Finally, a sharp distinction is drawn between service NGOs presumed to work in partnership with governments, and advocacy NGOs presumed to challenge government policy and legitimacy. All four premises, which are drawn directly from NGO self-understandings, conceal much more than they reveal of the politics of NGOs. NGO cases and vignettes recounted in this chapter illustrate why these conventional premises are illusory and misleading for research.

Most observers assume that the best answer to the question "What do NGOs do?" can be found in their normative principles, that is, in what NGOs say. This assumption is fundamentally misleading for understanding NGOs in world politics. For example, the development fundraising technique of individual child sponsorship, pioneered by Save the Children Fund U.S. in the 1940s, provides the donor with a photo of the sponsored child, a family history, and even personal letters. Implicit in the idea of sponsorship or adoption is a direct line between one donor and one child. This approach is fraught with controversy, however, even among the NGO professionals who use it. In reality, the organizations themselves often have no way of tracking whether or how the contributions affect individual children. Nevertheless, NGOs are unable to give up the direct mail and televised appeals because child sponsorship raises an estimated $400 million each year in the United States.

In this case, and generally in international NGOs, the beneficiaries are separated from financial donors by thousands of miles, and the NGO staff is positioned between beneficiaries and donors, controlling the flow of information, funds, and services. In this far-flung organizational formation the professional NGO staff wields tremendous discretionary power, unaccountable to either beneficiaries or supporters, to massage information to reflect the expectations of the partners rather than the reality of the mission. No NGO can continue to exist for long without the generosity of donors, the cooperation of home and host governments, an identifiable beneficiary population, and a societal pool from which to draw committed staff members. Each partner must be given a plausible rationale for cooperation with the NGO, or nothing happens. To make far-reaching normative claims is built into the structure of NGO action. It is simply the price of admission to the NGO game. NGOs must mislead in order to exist.

At the theoretical level, leading interpretations testify to the primacy of principled ideas about right and wrong, justice and injustice, in NGO activity, with causal ideas about how the world works taking a decidedly secondary place. From this premise, much of the leading research proceeds logically to emphasize how NGOs and their networks frame normative appeals and implant their principled ideas in the minds of target audiences. Such research, while interesting and useful, does not, in my view, reveal the full significance of NGO activity in world politics. Instead, I would argue, all transnational NGOs make causal claims about the structure of the problems they address and the solutions they offer, but these causal claims are veiled behind their normative appeals. The causal claims must be obscured because they cannot sustain close scrutiny.

In the debate on normative frames versus causal claims, I argue for the primacy of the latter. This chapter shows how NGOs smuggle in implicit causal claims under the noise and fury of their powerful normative appeals.

Following these insights, we can identify the essential components of "Your NGO Starter Kit." Imagine you are creating your own NGO. Whatever your personal motives — to make a better world, make a name for yourself, or simply make a living — what must you possess to get started, even before you seek out partners? Joining the NGO game requires four normative claims: a global moral compass, a modular technique, a secular sanction, and a representative mandate. Each of these normative claims serves in part to mask an underlying causal claim about how the world works.

GLOBAL MORAL COMPASS

A global moral compass says something about the world and something about the people initiating the NGO. Concerning the world, it makes a claim of universal, cosmopolitan human needs or rights (or biological rights in the case of environmental causes). It also says something about the NGO leaders — the integrity of their conscience and the intensity of their commitment to spread the universalist faith. A moral "compass" provides direction to NGO strategy, and also encompasses a potential global constituency of rights or needs bearers to whom the NGO is dedicated. In this way an NGO is commissioned for a global scope of action, to be able to go anywhere and assert confidently, in effect, "We already know what is needed here, and we have been sent to help provide it." Claiming a global moral compass is, therefore, an act of self-authorization, appointing oneself as a moral authority in a given issue-area. ("I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.")

However presumptuous the moral compass asserted by an NGO leader may appear, organizational progress depends entirely on the voluntary assent to this claim by a cluster of partners in several countries. No one is forced to support an NGO. In gaining this cooperation, some NGOs have the advantage of a persuasive and emotionally moving origin story. For example, Amnesty International began in 1960 when London attorney Peter Benenson read a news report of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven-year prison terms by the Salazar dictatorship for raising a toast to freedom in a Lisbon restaurant. Angry at the injustice and frustrated by the lack of a means to respond, Benenson and friends fashioned the innovative tactic of an international letter-writing campaign to pressure governments to release "prisoners of conscience" — people imprisoned for their beliefs who had never used or advocated the use of violence. In the decades since, tens of thousands of Amnesty International letter-writers have been moved to imitate Benenson's spontaneous response to injustice. In so doing, they have accepted the authenticity of Amnesty's global moral compass.

Within an NGO's global moral compass is hidden an implicit causal assumption about how the world works. There is always some form of claim that progress can be achieved in a selected issue-area with autonomy from the contingencies of the local political and social context. Every NGO must assume this, whether they are addressing infant feeding, peacemaking in civil wars, whale species survival, or any other issue-area. The causality of both the problem itself and the NGO solution must be autonomous from the social context in both directions: the context must not invade or disrupt the circumscribed issue-area, and action on the issue must not produce significant negative effects in the local context. This claim of circumscribed causality is essential to NGO action because, if the claim fails, so too does the normative authority of the NGO's global moral compass. If issue causality cannot reliably be circumscribed from the local context, then an NGO's moral commission to go anywhere and generate progress becomes impossibly presumptuous. The normative claim depends utterly on the causal claim, but also serves to screen the causal claim from scrutiny.

Your NGO Starter Kit must include a global moral compass, which comes with a claim of circumscribed causality attached. You will want to keep the latter in the background by drawing attention to moral issues. To see how this can be done, there are no better examples than the Titans of recent NGO history.

NGO TITANS

A handful of individuals have achieved global influence through the power of a persona — projected onto the world stage by an NGO, conveying a contagious moral conviction, and offering a simple and readily imitated technique for action. Peter Benenson provided such a persona for Amnesty International, until he was forced out of the organization in 1965. In half of the 26 years from 1974 and 1999, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to either an international NGO or an individual closely associated with an NGO cause. In 1997 the prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, whose influence owed much to highly publicized visits to landmine victims in many countries by Diana, Princess of Wales.

"NGO Titans" illustrate the complex interplay between the projection of a global moral compass and the claim of circumscribed causality. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his research on high-yield wheat at the Center for International Maize and Wheat Improvement, an NGO in Mexico City. Borlaug not only contributed to the scientific development of high-yield strains, he personally promoted their adoption by India and Pakistan during the 1960s. Despite recurrent famines on the subcontinent, India and Pakistan resisted Borlaug's proposals until their 1965 war created emergency conditions. Progress was rapid after both governments put their full support behind the "Green Revolution" strains of wheat and rice. India had become self-sufficient in all cereal production by 1974 and eventually multiplied its wheat production six-fold. The specter of recurrent famine disappeared from the Indian subcontinent as a consequence of the work of Borlaug and his colleagues.

Borlaug's achievement grew out of his personal commitment to feed the hungry and his technical expertise. His persona fused the authority of science and humanitarianism, both of which reside "above politics." Because he had no political agenda, his innovations could be more acceptable to political actors. At the same time, however, the Green Revolution both depended upon political support and profoundly transformed the context of politics on the subcontinent. The high-yield wheat and rice required new farming techniques and greater use of chemical fertilizer and herbicides, the distribution, finance, and implementation of which, in turn, demanded governmental action on a large scale reaching into the hinterland. The Indian civil service was well placed, relative to many other newly independent countries, to effectively implement such an ambitious bureaucratic program.

The political consequences of this success have been enormously far-reaching, if rarely remarked upon. Had India continued to be plagued by recurrent famine until today, its internal stability would have been severely and chronically shaken, and its relations with outside powers would have been supplicant rather than assertive. India's bold leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement, its military buildup and effectiveness in wars with several neighbors including China, its playing off the superpowers from a position of strength during the Cold War, its economic and technological achievements in the 1990s, and its credible appeal for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council — all of these would be almost inconceivable for a country unable to feed its own population.

The irony is that Borlaug's narrow, apolitical concerns for crop science and feeding the hungry transformed the internal and external politics of the second most populous country in the world. His avowed goal to create a tightly circumscribed effect instead generated the broadest possible scope of influence. Borlaug deserves to be called an NGO Titan because his actions shaped nations and fortified governments.

Yet Borlaug did not work alone, either scientifically or organizationally. His research center in Mexico City had been established in the 1940s by the Rockefeller Foundation, which sent him to India and Pakistan in the 1960s to promote the wheat strains he had developed. More broadly, the Green Revolution as a global phenomenon can be traced to the initiative of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, which together established a loose, global network of similar nonprofit agricultural research centers, cultivated additional funding for them from the World Bank and major governments, educated a generation of agricultural scientists from throughout the developing world to understand the technical innovations, and directly promoted the high-yield seeds. The vast growth in agricultural productivity to which the Green Revolution made a crucial contribution means that "Despite a doubling of world population since 1960, the food supply per head for the world has increased, calories by 13%, protein by 8%, and both by even greater margins in the developing countries as a whole."

The executives and program officers of major foundations are anonymous NGO Titans, who project no public persona, but can dramatically shape the ideas, institutions, and even the physical sustenance of nations and governments. Borlaug learned this anew in 1984, when he came out of retirement to team with Ryoichi Sasakawa of Japan and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to promote high-yield agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations now opposed bringing the Green Revolution to Africa, under the influence of environmental activists who believed that the chemical inputs would destroy the fragile ecology. For a time, the three veteran NGO Titans found themselves outside the Ford and Rockefeller consensus, and therefore without donors beyond Sasakawa's own Peace Foundation. A modus vivendi was reached when the environmentalists ascendant in the Foundations were convinced by Borlaug and others that higher crop yields would help Africa protect its remaining forests.

NGOs can profoundly shape ideas, institutions, and practices on a global scale even when they claim to pursue only a narrow, circumscribed agenda. The key protagonists of the Green Revolution in Asia were NGO Titans like Borlaug, whose persona projected a global moral compass. Ironically, he used the apolitical authority of science and humanitarianism to promote a profound economic and political revolution in the subcontinent.

A global moral compass is an essential tool in Your NGO Starter Kit, but it also reveals something about NGO research. The top-down power of NGOs based in the global north to shape societies in the global south is no less real when development theory emphasizes the opposite, bottom-up relationship — the power of the "grassroots NGOs" and "transnational civil society" in the south. Such discourse about empowering global civil society often originates precisely with the foundation managers, think-tank intellectuals, and northern NGO leaders who are empowering themselves to reshape the south. The discourse masks the real flow of power. This is why the conventional distinction between international NGOs and grassroots NGOs is misleading: the distinction prejudges the flow of power, which should be a matter for empirical investigation. This distinction may be accepted uncritically by researchers who want to promote a particular NGO project, but should not be followed by scholars who want to reveal the politics of NGOs.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2005 William E. DeMars.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Your NGO Starter Kit
2. Partners in Conflict: A Structural Theory of NGOs
3. Ironic Origins of Transnational Organising
4. NGOs vs. Dictators: Argentina’s Dirty War Revisited
5. Dancing in the Dark: NGOs and States in Former Yugoslavia
6. Engineering Fertility
7. Changing Partners, Shaping Progress: The Future of NGOs
Appendix A: Active NGOs Discussed in This Book
Selected Bibliography
Index