Introductory Paper
by Dr Michael Williams

In the modern world civil society plays an increasingly important role in global governance through NGOs. Examples abound. Amnesty International has more staff and funds than the UN’s Human Rights Commission. The Red Cross, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund are bigger than most intergovernmental organisations such as the WTO, UNCTAD or UNIDO.

Whatever the problems of classification, in the past few decades the growth in number and influence of NGOs has been remarkable. In 1960 the then largest UN peacekeeping mission to date, ONUC based in the Congo, found its military commander complaining of the difficulties of working with and alongside four non-governmental organisations. In any conflict or post-conflict situation today that number could easily be multiplied hundredfold. Their characteristics of course differ enormously from small domestic NGOs to large national and international NGOs, rich Northern NGOs, relatively poor – but locally influential – Southern NGOs, advocacy and aid delivery NGOs – a myriad groupings that we have come to call Global Civil Society.

Already in the nineteenth century, private NGOs often pioneered global governance through international conferences, agreements and pressure for state action. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society of 1839 was perhaps the first of some 400 permanent associations or unions established before the First World War. The International Committee of the Red Cross (formed in 1863) promoted the Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, 1929 and 1949. The International Maritime Committee promoted conventions on safety at sea in 1914 and 1929. Some NGOs led to the establishment of state institutions. Thus the International Congress of Weights, Measures and Moneys (1867), an NGO, was the forerunner of the Metric Union, while the International Association for the Legal Protection of Labour led to the formation of the ILO. Other important and influential early NGOs were the International Law Association (1873), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1889) and the International Chamber of Commerce (1919).

While some NGOs, including several operating internationally, can trace their roots back many years – Save the Children, for example was founded in 1919 and the Anti-Slavery International goes back even earlier to 1839, it is the last three or four decades that has seen a truly exponential growth. Amnesty International, incomparably the most important human rights NGO, was established in 1961, while a decade later in Paris Medecins Sans Frontières was founded. The impact of both on the international landscape has been immense. In the 1960s, throughout the developed world, NGOs emerged domestically to tackle areas of social exclusion and neglect that the welfare states founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were not addressing. In the United Kingdom, in this context, two pioneering NGOs were Shelter and Help the Aged. At the same time concern about the disadvantaged domestically was coupled in the wake of decolonisation with the growing realisation of the magnitude of the development problems faced by the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. Oxfam, founded in 1942 to assist victims of the terrible famine in Greece, was amongst the first to focus on development. From the 1960s onwards hundreds more were to emerge in the developed world anxious to assist the world’s poor and address the root causes of global inequality. At a slower pace non-governmental organisations began to emerge too in the developing world, particularly in countries like India with strong democratic traditions.

The most spectacular growth in NGOs – in their numbers, quality and influence – was however yet to come. Today the context in which they are now operating is markedly different in several important respects from what it was in the late 1980s.

The most dramatic contributor to the growth of NGOs has, paradoxically, been globalisation and the seemingly relentless march of democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The end of the Cold War and the removal of the threat of nuclear exchange between the superpowers opened up new areas for social and political activity that could not be monopolised by traditional political parties. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, followed quickly by the demise of the Soviet Union, coincided with the denouement of authoritarianism on the right, exemplified by the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and of Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia. For the first time democratically elected governments ruled throughout Latin America and in Africa too, elections rather than coups d’etat were becoming the preferred mechanism of political change. In the West, the role of governments has generally declined as has respect for their authority. In the last general election in the United Kingdom in 2001 the turnout was only 59%, the lowest since 1945.

From Norway to Niger, from Indonesia to Indiana, despite enormous inequalities, a vast space has opened up which traditional politics cannot wholly dominate. Moreover, this has occurred at a time when the IT revolution has given unprecedented access to information to millions of people world-wide together with the ability, instantly, to transcend national boundaries in coordinating views and lobbying tactics among like-minded groups. The power of the Internet has allowed NGOs to fill vacuums left by political parties and governments who have moved much more slowly in addressing the environmental, economic and human rights concerns of their electorates.

Today there are about six thousand international NGOs, and millions of national and local NGOs which address international issues through global networks and alliances. Their role in global governance has been widely discussed; this section aims only to draw out a few key points.

In recent years, NGOs have had a major impact on world politics by, for example:

• Agencies like the Red Cross, Christian Aid and Oxfam pioneered emergency relief as well as long-term development assistance – which are now core functions of intergovernmental cooperation – and are currently leading global campaigns on specific issues such as universal provision of primary education, regulation of the pharmaceutical industry or control of the arms trade;
• When the UN was formed, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and other NGOs lobbied hard for NGO access, which was enshrined in Article 71 of the UN Charter and the creation of ‘consultative status’‘ to the UN;
• Pressure groups like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have pushed environment issues up the international agenda. The environment was not mentioned in the UN Charter but is now a major concern of governments and international agencies;
• The global coalition Jubilee 2000 made debt cancellation for the world’s poorest people a high priority for the world’s richest countries, even if it did not fully achieve its objectives;
• A world-wide coalition of NGOs cajoled a majority of the world’s nations to create an international Criminal Court, which will be set up in The Hague.

While the work of most NGOs such as Oxfam or Amnesty International is incremental, when NGOs have come together in a common campaign their achievements have often been extraordinary. NGOs have had notable successes, in particular in the environmental and women’s movements, the campaign for land-mines and third world debt relief. The Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 was probably a defining moment for government recognition of NGOs as powerful players on the international stage. The campaign which led to the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning the use or manufacture of landmines represented another highpoint in their development. They are increasingly regarded as part of a vibrant democracy.

But there must surely be limits to their growth. While there are few governments or international organisations in the world that can now ignore them, NGOs would be deluding themselves if they thought that they could, at present, rival governments in their ability to execute policy or command material resources. They needed to learn how to change outcomes as well as win arguments.

Some may be familiar with Isaiah Berlin’s use of the ancient Greek parable of the Fox and the Hedgehog, the title of one of his finest books. NGOs have been compared to the hedgehog in the Greek saying, who knew one big thing and concentrated all their energies on a single goal while governments were like foxes who knew many things – and had the complex task of balancing priorities in order to come to a policy which took account of a wide range of interests. In their relations with governments, NGOs need to be both professional in their advocacy and disciplined in the presentation of their case. It was easy to swamp a government with a “swarm” of e-mails but an understanding of how a government bureaucracy handles information would pay bigger dividends in changing policy. An unstated thought is that NGOs would also do well to try to understand the limits of governmental power and freedom for action. Perhaps the best outcome an NGO could hope for is to find that it is no longer the sole champion of a particular issue which has been taken up by the public at large and by the government on their behalf.

Relations with governments are highlighted by the phenomenon of NGOs fulfilling the role of agents of Aid Ministries in delivering humanitarian assistance. This has advantages in that NGOs might know the local circumstances of the country receiving the aid better than many aid officials. But it creates a number of other problems. An NGO could imperceptibly find its independence of thought and action being eroded. It also raises the whole question of the interaction between “Northern” and “Southern” NGOs. The former have greater material resources, the latter greater knowledge of the local community and usually a greater potential to find solutions for the longer term by harnessing local energies and enthusiasm. The key to this relationship, and indeed the wider relationship between Northern and Southern agencies, depends on whether the transaction is seen as one of “assistance” or one of “solidarity”.

In Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, there has been an explosive growth in the presence of Western as well as local non-governmental organisations. NGOs today form a prominent part of the ‘development machine’, a vast institutional and disciplinary nexus of official agencies, practitioners, consultants, scholars and other miscellaneous experts producing and consuming knowledge about the ‘developing world’. According to recent estimates, there are as many as three thousand development NGOs in OECD countries as a whole. In Britain alone, there are well over one hundred voluntary groups claiming some specialism in the field.

According to the British Overseas Development Institute, NGOs in 1992 distributed somewhere between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of all aid transfers to ‘developing countries’. While most of this money comes from private donations a significant proportion also comes from official sources. Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) allocates around eight per cent of its aid budget to NGOs. The United States government transfers nearly 40 per cent of its aid programme through NGOs. The scale of official funding has increased considerably over the past two decades. In the early 1970s less than two per cent of NGO income came from official donors. By the mid-1990s this figure had risen to 30 per cent. In the ten years between 1984 and 1994, the British Government increased its funding of NGOs by almost 400 per cent to £68.7 million. NGOs in Australia, Finland, Norway and Sweden all saw similar increases in official funding from the early 1980s onwards. As a consequence of increased levels of funding and increased attention, the number of development organisations in Western countries mushroomed and many established NGOs experienced spectacular growth. The number of NGOs active in African countries had grown equally. About 40 per cent of the development NGOs working in Kenya today are foreign organisations, 204 out of a total number of 511 according to the most recent survey. The number of international NGOs operating in Kenya, for example, increased almost threefold to 134 organisations during the period from 1978 to 1988. In OECD member countries as a whole, the number of NGOs increased from 1,600 at the beginning of the decade to 2,970 by 1993

In the advocacy arena it is acknowledged that NGOs have made remarkable strides in recent years. Cross-national, and some cross-sectoral, NGOs have emerged with enhanced influence on governments and large corporations. But just as “joined-up” policy making had become necessary in domestic politics as an acknowledgement that problems seldom allowed for simple single-dimensional solutions, so the same is true of major international problems. Not many NGOs are building connections across a range of issues to create the capacity to influence governments and multilateral institutions across a whole area of policy.

In an age of “small” government and privatisation of increasing areas of state activity, NGOs need to understand and influence the private sector more than they have in the past. There are signs that some large firms are becoming increasingly aware of the need, in their own corporate interest, to take civic and environmental interests into account in their activities. There are some of course who take a more pessimistic view that the exploitative nature of free-market economics was by no means balanced by a general obligation to societies in the developing world. Both sides are agreed, however, that NGOs would do well to spend more time trying to understand and enlist the efforts of the private sector in support of their causes.

One of the first organisations with which NGOs come into contact in a conflict or post conflict crisis, is the military. Military operations are usually carefully planned, involving a concentrated application of resources aimed at meeting urgent short-term goals. It is difficult for the military to appreciate the complexity of local societies or the need to build long-term structures if their efforts to re-establish order succeed. In Britain studies are under way to see if the local knowledge and expertise of NGOs could be more effectively combined with military operations to enhance the peace-building efforts of both.

The media also played an important role in the development of NGOs. Large, well-resourced NGOs early on understood the power of public presentation of their causes. They hired PR executives in the same way as other big organisations. From the point of view of the media generally there has been a gradual realisation that what had previously been dull technical gatherings to discuss international finance and trade questions, are now, thanks to the activities of NGOs, “good stories”. The WTO meeting at Seattle in 1999 followed by the joint IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington proved this point. But there needs to be a better understanding by the press of the issues, it is argued, not just of the theatre on the street. There also needs to be acceptance on the part of NGOs that criticism of their views and actions in the press is part and parcel of the discourse of contemporary political life and not an unacceptable attack on organisations whose motives are, by definition, benign.

In looking at global civil society today, two other key themes are important: accountability and trust. The increasing influence of NGOs has inevitability given rise to questions about their accountability. If democratic governments derive their legitimacy from their voters, and corporations are accountable to their shareholders, to whom are NGOs accountable? Some think that the most direct line of accountability is to the donors who support the work of an NGO with their contributions of money or time. Others argue that there should also be accountability towards the recipients of NGO assistance. Some urge that this accountability should also be extended to official aid-agencies and Governments. A few NGOs are membership based such as Amnesty International, but this is an exception.

The possibility and desirability of establishing codes of conduct or peer-group monitoring needs to be considered. Several examples of codes of conduct have been developed, but as yet there is little experience of how they might work in practice. We are warned against trying to stifle the free expression of views by applying formal sets of rules. Some NGOs are too small to be able to meet these obligations. It has been argued that since northern NGOs are already publicly established bodies subject to the laws governing such bodies, further regulation is unnecessary. Whatever the formal position, there is a general feeling that NGOs can only survive if they accepted the same rules of transparency and honesty as they were demanding of their official interlocutors.

Trust has emerged as perhaps the NGOs’ most precious asset. The influence they have been able to exert on public perceptions and Government policy was to a large extent based on the fact that NGOs are trusted more than most official institutions. Rightly or wrongly, NGOs are believed to express the “real” voice of the people while Governments are often viewed as being out of touch and more concerned with power than people. Those with experience of running NGOs have pointed out that trust in NGOs was built up in the same way as for other organisations serving or selling to the public. If an NGO were seen repeatedly to be wrong in its judgements, or inaccurate in its information, it would lose public confidence and would ultimately go out of business in the same way as shareholders would desert a firm whose product was found to be unsatisfactory. Trust does not, however, only apply between an NGO and its supporters. It is also a crucial element in all its other relations; with its partners in the south, with Governments, with the media etc.

The impact of NGOs on global governance has become a major issue, with governments, academics and even NGOs questioning whether their influence has sometimes been too great. Michael Edwards, Director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Unit, points out that NGOs “usually have a single constituency to satisfy or a single-issue focus, whereas governments must balance competing demands and trade of different interests. However well-intentioned, NGOs are special interest groups and cannot replace a single, strong voice in favour of the common good. It is governments’ responsibility to guarantee the universal rights and entitlement of citizens.”

Edwards advocates a ‘new deal for global governance’ to introduce greater democracy, legitimacy, transparency and accountability, including three principles for NGO participation:

1. A voice, not a vote: greater NGO involvement structured into informal political processes, “but with more checks and balances to ensure everyone’s voice is heard.” This could be set out in the form of a compact setting out roles and responsibilities.
   
2. Minimum standards for NGO integrity and performance, maintained “through self-regulation, with the possibility of independent verification or arbitration”, like the Philippine Council for NGO Certification or the procedures of the Commission on Sustainable Development.
3. A level playing field for Southern NGOs, who often do not have resources to represent themselves in global debates. This means foreign aid to strengthen their capacity for research and policy analysis, promote financial independence and sustainability. Of course, this raises questions about which NGOs are supported and the effect which foreign funding can have on the internal politics of both NGOs and governments in the South.

The extensive role of NGOs in global governance suggests that state-based structures alone are inadequate to relay people’s concerns at an international level. But it is important to remember that, at a national level, people’s views are channelled and mediated through political parties who compete for support, just like NGOs. The main difference is that political parties are closely scrutinised by the press and ultimately subject to election. Most NGOs are much less subject to these forms of accountability than governments.

© 21st Century Trust

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