BY SOENKE ZEHLE
To approach the dynamic of so-called civil society organization in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), it might make sense to attempt to identify some of the trends occuring across what is often referred to as the ‘NGO community’ or ‘international civil society’ more generally.
Obviously, reference to a quasi-instutional dynamic of self-organization that remains, cooperations notwithstanding, distinct from a broader transnational social movement grassroots by way of such blanket terms can never do justice to its internal heterogeneity. On the contrary, the popularity of terms like NGO and civil society might create a false sense of communicability and comparability, glossing over incommensurabilities that originate in differences in agenda as well as access to the very arenas through which this dynamic reproduces itself.
And yet, whatever their conceptual utility, terms like ‘non-state’, ‘non-governmental’, and ‘civil’ at least suggest that it is a mistake to approach this dynamic nexus without attention to the role of the state, the (violent) transformation of its institutional makeup (neoliberalism, supranationalism), and a corresponding transformation of its conceptual articulation (de- and reterritorialization of sovereignty) - not least because there would be no ‘information society’ without it. While not altogether arbitrary, the following is by no means comprehensive:
Non-State and Non-Market
Beyond the difficulty of assessing the consequences of a reliance on corporate support by NGOs of all stripes, an autonomous corporate grassroots (astroturf) has emerged [1] whose complexity is little understood and requires, among other things, a meticulous detailing of ‘revolving doors’ between corporations, government, and the ‘non-profit’ sector.
NGOs as Geopolitical Instruments
Humanitarianism is often a harbinger of things to come for civil society actors in general, which is why I think that developments there deserve close attention. The dependence on support from development agencies and governments is not new, contemporary international civil society has its roots in post-WWII relief organization and remained, for better or worse, closely connected to shifting foreign policy agendas throughout the cold war. After the cold war, the quasi-subsumption of humanitarian civil society organizations to states-at-war has been actively encouraged by activists in support of the paradoxical politics of ‘humanitarian intervention’.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, this state-non-state nexus has both achieved a new quality and aggravated the constitutive crisis of legitimacy that (also) defines humanitarianism. The attack on the UN in Iraq has already been interpreted as a threshold event, as evidence that humanitarianism as such, less and less able to strike a credible balance between neutrality and security, is becoming the target of terrorism, and suggests that civil society organization will either have to ally its work even more with the geopolitics of security or, less likely, extricate itself from this nexus altogether. These developments are likely to be relevant to info-rights NGOs, for example, whose work on communication, transparency, etc. ties their efforts to the implementation of ‘good governance’ agendas.
The (Visual) Economy of Conflict
The famous media events associated with major international NGOs, often considered the hallmark of a media-savvy professionalism at the info-societal grassroots, also serve to sustain a general process of self-mediatization. Evidence of (short-term) NGO presence at sites of conflict and intervention, for example, is central to the political economy of fundraising and the costly maintenance of institutional infrastructures threatened by the vagaries of public commitment and empathy.
Media-Ecology of the Info-Society
Some suggest that the strength of NGO networks can best be understood in terms of a co-evolution of communications technologies and new organizational structures. Off-the-grid areas are often considered in terms of a techno-utopian not-yet of future incorporation into transnational ICT networks (‘digital divide’) rather than explored as possibly constitutive outsides they may also be.
Civil Society as the Master Idiom
Related to the false sense of communicability fostered by a shared ICT infrastructure, the growing adoption of ‘civil society organization’ as a means of self-identification signals a convergence of organizational idioms whose implications have yet to be fully understood. In what I simply think is a sad example of this homogenization, an information-rights campaign called ‘speaking for ourselves’ employs a completely formulaic idiom. While it is one thing to employ such terms in project applications as a consequence of a next-to-inevitable standardardization of donor criteria, it is another entirely to use them in the articulation of one’s agenda in general. The turn to a liberal interventionism suggested by the adoption of this idiom is facilitated, of course, by the focus on lobbying, expertism, and legal activism already inherent in the NGO approach.
Questions of Accountability
Contrary to popular assumption, the call for accountability and transparency is not (just) a ruse of corporate capitalism to divide and conquer an autonomous ‘third sector’ but comes from within the NGO community as well. Some consultants even interpret the accountability controversy in terms of a ‘paradigm shift’ central to the future of NGO work in general. The glorification of NGOs as champions of a politics of human rights - a role many of them undoubtedly play - homogenizes a contradictory dynamic of institutional self-organization and shields its image even from criticism from within. Often organized as dues- and donations-based membership organizations, many NGOs are nonetheless marked by a constitutive lack of accountability, slow to create their own mechanisms of accountability and therefore still vulnerable to criticism, however dubious the source of such ‘criticism’ may be.
Conservative challenges to ‘leftist’ civil society organization seem to seize the controversial issue of accountability to call into question the legitimacy of ‘civil society’ agendas in general. But questions of accountability and legitimacy are indeed intertwined. The chair of a new UN Panel on ‘Civil Society and UN Relationships’, ex-president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso, suggests that “[t]he legitimacy of civil society organizations derives from what they do and not from whom they represent or from any kind of external mandateâ€. Given the tremendous influence of many (northern) NGOs as de facto instruments of extended states, it strikes me as problematic to suggest that the question of ‘in whose name’ they work should not be a matter of concern. Somewhat paradoxically, Cardoso also notes that “contrary to an often idealized self-image, civil society is not the realm of ‘good values and intentions’ in contrast to the logic of power and interests ascribed to national states. Civic and community groups may also advocate for causes that are deeply controversial and, in some instances, incompatible with universally-accepted norms and principles†(ibid.). But beyond the generic idiom of human rights, what is a universally-accepted norm, and who is to decide?
In addition to legitimation from below, be it through an often mythologized ‘grassroots membership’ or support from the communities where the work actually occurs, the UN accreditation of NGOs constitutes an additional means of legitimation, complicating the economy and politics of recognition on which any ‘legitimation’ ultimately depends. The accreditation of corporate lobbying groups like the International Chamber of Commerce or subsidiaries of sects like the Moon-funded so-called World Association of NGOs (WANGO) raises complex questions about the standards of accreditation, but also indicates the limits of any call for accountability as well as the corresponding model of a politics of recognition: some of these organizations may have a perfect record of internal accountability and transparency, and it is perhaps no accident that the World Trade Organization (WTO) received rather high scores in a Global Accountability Report.
At summits, NGOs are given much more than the occasional seat at the table. They are also given an opportunity to share whatever legitimacy they have - and many of them enjoy greater credibility than the ‘official’ institutions of liberal democracy, a phenomenon that should be interpreted less as evidence of faith in a somehow inherently democratic ‘third sector’ than as a dimension of the ‘state failure’ occurring even in liberal democracies - as a symbolic resource to compensate for crises of legitimacy elsewhere: quite often, ‘stakeholder dialogues’ organized by corporations and intergovernmental organizations, who often think of NGOs as de facto proxies for ‘civil society’ in general, also serve to substantiate whatever claims to legitimacy these actors make themselves. Part of a complex politics of recognition, summits redistribute symbolic resources, and it will be quite instructive to try and track these flows in the context of the WSIS as well.
These are some of the elements that provide the context for new rounds of ‘civil society’ and ‘stakeholder’ participation in inter-governmental events in general. The dynamic nexus of ‘international civil society’ is inextricably intertwined with geopolitics and a new politics of war that is simultaneously a political economy and a visual economy. Like almost everything else that can be said on the topic of NGOism, this is a banality, but rather than constituting the point of departure, it often comes as an afterthought, if at all. Contrary to the self-celebration of the growing autonomy of an expanding international civil society, these concerns can neither be easily dismissed nor answered, as they go to the heart of the institutional logic of what ‘NGOism’ and civil society organization are all about. The very autonomy of ‘civil society’ may, for example, come at the price of a neoliberal transformation of the state whose agenda is perfectly compatible with a ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘devolution’ of elements of its sovereignty. Similarly, the growing support for NGOs from the UN may well be a sign of its own crisis of legitimacy and lack of funding, deliberately cash-starved by some of its member organizations.
In a commentary on the accountability controversy, Simon Burall, director of the UK One World Trust that supports the Global Accountability Project, writes: “There are no direct channels for democratic representation to global decision-making forums such as the UN General Assembly and associated conferences, the Security Council, the World Bank, the WTO or any of the 300 other intergovernmental organisations affecting the lives of individuals and communities the world. Without direct channels, there is no way for competing interests to be balanced nor for a global political consensus around issues as pressing as poverty, the environment and global security to be built. For better or worse, NGOs are the only organisations currently able to bring the views of interest groups to the global level and hence start the process of building consensusâ€. I doubt that it is a great idea to grant ‘NGO’ and ‘civil society organization’ such a central role in whatever conceptual and organizational idioms we might create. But even if we do, it seems all the more important to reflect on their constitutive limitations as well as the way they may impoverish our ethico-political imagination.
