Thu
30-Jun-2005

ngo conference

I’ve spent the last three days up in Manchester at an NGO conference on ‘Reclaiming Development’ – it’s been lovely having time to think about things and to read. There were many interesting themes that were explored throughout the event. This was the fourth of a series of big NGO conferences that have taken place since 1992 and it was prompted by a number of broad contexts. These are: the rise of the security agenda in international development; the internal ‘neoliberalisation’ of NGOs as they adopt the practices of liberal managerialism; the increasingly conservative academic environment; and the agreement that poverty persists, and may be deepening, despite the poverty reduction and democratisation agendas that characterise international development.

A big question was whether NGOs have, broadly speaking, failed and whether international development is in need of being ‘reclaimed’ from the neoliberal agenda. On the whole, there seemed to be a feeling that the appropriate question was not “have NGOs failed?” but “have NGOs done the right thing?” – and here the answer was broadly positive. NGOs have grown in influence over the last twenty years, becoming global players and keeping the spotlight on global governance and states and international institutions. A human rights-based agenda with poverty reduction at its core has become development orthodoxy thanks to NGO efforts.

But, people reckoned that NGOs needed to get to grips with the rise of religion as a potent global force in the world today; NGOs are too preoccupied with guarding their market share to engage in effective broad civil society coalitions or concede ground to other actors like community groups, people’s organisations and trade unions; and a new challenge is presented in the rise of the organised non-governmental right, exemplified by organisations like the American Enterprise Institute or NGO Watch. It was pointed out that academics find it hard to think of such organisations that do not have a liberal or progressive agenda as even being ‘NGOs’.

In looking at the success of these right-wing NGOs and the way that conventional NGOs seem to have become more distant from grassroots social actors as they have become more professional, there seemed to be a general consensus that NGOs need to be more explicit about how ideas and truth are constructed, and need to repoliticise themselves. Right-wing NGOs have partly been successful because they have invested money in trying to co-opt key ideas and words. One speaker described the battle in 1980s and 1990s Brazil between the project of expanding democracy and redefining citizenship and the project of the selectively minimalist neoliberal state. The battle saw both sides attempting to define ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ in very different ways. The neoliberal definition of ‘participation’ is an individualist take associated with voluntarism and the sphere of formal democratic institutions, rather than a broader understanding of collective communication in the whole arena of public politics. The neoliberal definition of ‘citizenship’ presents the citizen as a consumer or producer, which tends to cut out notions of labour rights, redistribution or equality.

In seeing NGOs as engaged in discursive battles over such terms, the conference was trying to promote a movement away from an understanding of ‘civil society’ as a juridical and organisational category, where nongovernmental activity – the ‘third sector’ – is alternative to the state and market by definition. Taking inspiration from Gramsci or Habermas, civil society is seen less as an institutional location, more as a terrain on which debates occur about how to organise society, the state and the market. The contest of ideas then becomes central to the role of NGOs. One can also more easily understand that civil society may contain hegemonic neoliberal think tanks as well as counter-hegemonic progressive social movements. This perspective also helps to conceptualise how the state is intricately involved in the terrain of civil society, in a way that the institutional, mutually exclusive categories of ‘state’, ‘market’ and ‘third sector’ do not. This could help NGOs deal with the fact that elements of the state may act in a counter-hegemonic fashion as key proponents of more progressive development projects.

As part of the conference, we also went on a field trip to a regeneration project in north Manchester, which I really enjoyed. There were many parallels between the role of international NGOs in other countries acting as intermediaries between community organisations, donors and governments and the respective roles of local councils, residents associations and the voluntary sector in the regeneration project in Manchester. I really felt the dull hand of liberal managerialism though. Because it was Manchester and I was vaguely familiar with the area, I was finding it hard to think of everything as a ‘development intervention’. As my colleagues asked what the ethnic makeup of the area was, or about strategies for reducing conflict between people of different incomes, I had a little voice screaming in my head “these are real people, not statistics!” It all seemed so top-down at times, describing the area using the tools and statistics of social science and prescribing solutions, developing ‘strategies’ with local people rather than just helping local people do it themselves. This was in a project in a city where I used to live! This was an area I could see myself living in, and the academics seemed to describe it so coldly. It made me think what a terrible gulf of power divides northern development professionals from the southern communities for whom they draw up plans and strategies.