The Political Price of Aid?

NGOs and Political Engagement

Joanna Blake MSc Social Research Methods (International Relations and Politics) Sussex University Sept 2005

Acknowledgments I would like to warmly thank my supervisor, Roddy Loeppky for all of his support, encouragement, and inspiration during the last year. The Austrian botanist, Richard Frisch also deserves my sincere gratitude. He sparked my interest in NGO interventions in Guatemala and highlighted the local, political complexities involved. I will remember my time spent at his placid retreat in San Jose with great fondness.

Contents Pg. Abstract 3. I. Introduction 4. 2. Feeble politics

2.1 The politics of NGO­ing 8. 2.2 The political engagement of aid’s recipients 14.

3. Legitimate interventions

3.1 NNGOs and depoliticisation 20. 3.2 The phronetic turn 24. 3.3 The case for indigenous organisation 27.

4. Local via global

4.1 Beyond sovereignty? 33. 4.2 Global civil society – domestic politics denied 37.

5. Conclusion 46. Bibliography 48.

Abstract

Politics and NGOs have made awkward partners in much development theory

and practice. Literature on NGOs has focused largely on whether or not

organisations live up to their mission statements or whether they succeed in

fulfilling the ‘non­governmental’ part of their adopted label. The arguments

advanced in this paper do not aim to contribute to this corpus but instead,

problematise the relationship between NGOs and political engagement.

Grounding the present debate are two case studies about NGO interventions in

post­conflict Guatemala in which Northern­run organisations are contrasted with

Mayan­managed ones. This paper seeks to examine and challenge the

seeming dichotomy between the two organisational processes. I aim to

interrogate the so­called boundaries through which NGOs construct themselves

as legitimate actors. This necessarily analyses the paradigms through which we

conceptualise ‘civil society’ and the state. Against charges of de­politicisation

through intervention, focusing on how actors in and around NGOs deal with local,

international and global complexities exposes the political nature of NGO work

that is often denied.

1. Introduction

“Politics not aid” was Bob Geldof’s cry as he returned to our screens, twenty

years after Live Aid (1984/5), with Live 8 (2005). As part of the Make Poverty

History Campaign (MPH), a consortium of about 450 NGOs, Live 8 intended to

pressurise the G8 members into putting the plight of Africa’s poor at the forefront

of their agenda at the Gleneagles summit. Live 8 followed Live Aid’s winning

formula of holding music concerts and media events and popularised its cause

with wrist­band sales and celebrity endorsements. To turn on the television

during the run up to the summit, one might have felt that the nation had been truly

galvanised by a desire to “end poverty”, if only for a month.

Behind the scenes of Geldof’s self­described “war against poverty” was

warfare of sorts going on within the MPH campaign between a handful of NGOs

and Oxfam GB. Discontent had been growing because some NGOs feared that

MPH had been co­opted by the government. Oxfam GB, the UK’s largest

development agency, has been singled out and accused of allowing the

movement’s demands to be diluted by that of the government because they are

often asked to speak on behalf of MPH. On issues such as trade, Oxfam’s

position is much closer to the government’s than that of other groups such as

Focus on The Global South and Christian Aid. In a report published three years

ago, Oxfam GB’s line was strikingly similar to Gordon Brown’s, when it

advocated liberalisation of markets in wealthy nations and identified market

access as a key mechanism for eradicating poverty. Similarly, Oxfam GB was

one of the first charities to welcome the EU announcement to double its aid

budget by 2010 whilst other development groups were more cautious.

Organisations such as War on Want questioned Tony Blair’s renewed

enthusiasm for the deal and worried that it might be an attempt to salvage

something for his foreign policy after the Iraq war as well as a device to deflect

attention away from the more problematic issues of debt, trade and arms deals.

One development official described Oxfam’s dilemma as paying the ‘political

price’ of working alongside people to get things done but risking its credibility

amongst other agencies in the process.

The reputation of NGO’s as prominent actors in the global political arena

as well as many local and national ones has arrived at a time when traditional

professional political actors such as parties and governments, have fallen into

disrepute (Acosta 2004). The recent Oxfam GB and MPH melee demonstrates

that explicit proximity to the government is seen by some development agencies

as de­legitimising. It also demonstrates that the power of NGOs to influence

other members is paramount. That the UK’s Department for International

Development is Christian Aids’s largest donor by far (34% according to

Christian Aid’s website) does not appear to compromise the oppositional

stance the organisation adopts. NGOs rely upon market visibility for survival,

which means that establishing their value as legitimate representatives of civil

society is capital. In this move, they hope to evade the widespread mistrust of

politicians. Underlying their theorising is the assumption that these domains of

collective existence; development agency, civil society and the state do not

influence or affect each other.

Modern modes of analysis perceive phenomena in terms of discrete

categories, where NGOs are autonomous from the state and the market

(Chandhoke 2002). Exposing the contradictory donor/organisation relations

inherent in an organisation’s public denigration of the funder for whom its very

existence relies upon is the concern of much literature about NGOs (Hilhorst

2003). The more pertinent enquiry is after the political motives and implications

of the very construction of the politics/aid dichotomy. The separation of human

existence into mutually exclusive spheres elides the way in which each of these

areas is constructed by power that spills over arbitrary boundaries. This paper

works with simplistic binaries in order to reveal the limited success that analyses

in this mode has of transforming lives. The present debate is premised on the

assertions that the aid interventions in the lives of the southern poor poses some

vexing questions for issues of political representation and agency. Indeed,

solution­finding paradigms might be part of the problem. The complexities of the

issues involved elude a northern versus indigenous organisation schism although

it is a crucial point of departure.

I focus on Guatemala because I was inspired by a trip to Latin America

last year during which I spent time in the village of San Jose, in the district of

Flores and Santa Elena, in the North Eastern region of Guatemala. There, I

caught a glimpse of macro NGO (of both local and foreign nationality) activity

interfacing with the intense struggles that constitute a country in the throws of

democratisation. The Guatemalan civil war began after the failure of a

nationalist uprising by military officers in 1960. It formally ended on 29th

December 1996 with the signing of The Agreement on a Firm and Lasting

Peace. While there are no reliable figures on how many people died in this war,

current estimates suggest around 180,000. In addition, 40,000 people

‘disappeared’ during the conflict, over 400 villages were destroyed, at least

100,000 became refugees in Mexico, and a further million were forcibly

displaced within the country (Costello 1997). The challenges facing a country

and its people, so brutalised by conflict are immeasurable. An analysis of the

specific practicalities of social change affords a greater understanding of the

nuances involved.

This paper hopes to build upon recent attempts (Acosta 2004; Biekart

1999; Chandhoke 2002; Cooke 2003; Etzioni 2004; Hilhorst 2003) to

reconceptualise certain notions of ‘knowledge’, ‘power’, and ‘agency’ in relation

to NGO interventions. By the mid­1980s, the comforts of totalising ontological

and epistemological claims had been threatened by post­modern theory

formation in the social sciences to the point where a ‘crisis’ in development

theory was declared (Schuurman 1993). In the aftermath of the so­called

‘impasse’, notions that no meta­discourse can be located, but only the

micro­politics of a power that is heterogeneous and dispersed have emerged. In

response, a more sophisticated treatment of social change and intervention has

emerged that emphasises the interplay and mutual determination of ‘internal’

and ‘external’ factors and relationships.

One of the principal attempts to move beyond the development theory

impasse is Norman Long’s ‘actor­oriented approach’. Although Long developed

his approach as early as the 1970s, it has enjoyed renewed vigour, particularly

within ethnographic research. His approach is based on the idea that where

structural conditions and types of external impulses are relatively constant,

behaviour of actors can take a diverse range of forms. The interest is in

interface situations where life­worlds interact and interpenetrate.

Methodologically, Long stresses the interconnections between theory and

practice. Rather than viewing intervention as a plan for action, it ought to be

viewed as an ongoing transformational process in which different actor interests

and struggles are located. That is, macro phenomena are only intelligible in

situated contexts. An actor­orientated approach does not provide the tools to

‘empower’ people, in the sense that people are powerless and therefore need to

be ‘trained’ to become powerful. Instead, it explores the boundaries where

people establish their own projects and where a joint construction of meaning

takes place at the interface with ‘outsiders’.

This paper will firstly establish the ways in which NGOs avoid the political.

Here, it is analytically useful to distinguish the political engagement of the

organisations from the spaces for political engagement of the communities in

which the organisations intervene. I will then suggest some ways they

interconnect and the implications for alternative conceptions of the

organisational processes of development. This will form the theoretical

backdrop to the successive substantive chapters. The first explores the

construction of legitimate NGO interventions in relation to the two case studies. I

will identify dominant discourses within two seeming convergent articulations of

organisational processes NGO interventions, namely, that local organisations

enhance political engagement and northern ones hinder it. I make the case for a

more dynamic view of the dialogical interpenetration of different accounts of

‘reality’, from those offered by local actors and those emanating from outside.

This in turn, questions the separation of so­called ‘local, or ‘indigenous’

knowledge versus external/scientific knowledge.

The final two sections of the paper will broaden out the debate to consider

the issues around aid and political engagement in the context of the modernist

framework of the nation state. The issues raised stem from certain post­modern

strands of international relations theory that advocate a ‘Global Civil Society’.

Local conceptions have the capacity to absorb and network external models, just

as the latter necessarily incorporate localised ideas and representations.

However, some argue that the emancipatory aims of development interventions

are frustrated and constrained by a statist geometry that dichotomises from the

outset. My paper aims to add to a growing body of literature that rethinks the

nature of development initiatives and intervention processes away from a

zero­sum, sovereign view of power.

2. Feeble politics 2.1NGOs ­ ‘agents of consent’

In the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section of Christian Aid’s website is the

enquiry as to whether or not the agency ‘gets involved in politics’. The staged

Q&A format (insofar as Christian Aid supplies both the question and answer)

responds by stating that it is never party political and always works within the law.

However, it continues, issues such as debt or trade are essentially political in

origin and it is their duty to address the causes of poverty. To summarise:

Christian aid is political in the general sense of being ‘against poverty’ but not

party political, despite campaigning for changes in economic policies regarding

debt and trade that are necessarily arrangements between governments. By

identifying a lack of transparency about the necessarily political nature of

decisions made concerning the nature of interventions; who and who not to work

with, for and with funding from whom, one highlights the underlying construction

that NGOs are apolitical. This section will locate and then interrogate some of

the multifarious identities that NGOs adopt in order to function as

fund­generating, ‘do­gooding’ organisations. Focusing on Guatemala

throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, I will demonstrate how, far from

being apolitical, NGOs have often been at the centre of highly intricate web of

political motivations and decisions that have wide­ranging influence.

Firstly, it is necessary to clarify what I mean by ‘political engagement’ and

‘NGOs’. Politics is usually defined as ‘the art or science of government or

governing, especially of a political entity such as a nation’. Throughout this paper

I do not confine the meaning of ‘political’ to its narrow liberal conceptualisation

as an autonomous sphere of social activity defined by the formal political

processes of states. Rather, I define politics as involving all aspects of

interpersonal and intercommunity social arrangements, including, in the

international sphere, the ‘private’ or domestic activities of peoples and states.

Providing services and advocating on behalf of the poor is political practice

because it consists of negotiations towards decision­making that affects a social

group. The professional political arena consists of a series of rules laid out as

laws or treaties that specify procedure and negotiations. NGOs have recently

played a notorious role in that arena by trying to design new rules or laws that

help their aims. In what Acosta (2004) describes as the outward denial of the

political, NGOs avoid a clearly political stance as they work outside a formal

legal arena that could help their long­term goals or ultimate ideals. Inwardly,

Acosta’s thesis continues, the political is denied, as there is no legal framework

within the NGO community that would oblige them to work for the benefit of the

society in which they intervene.

The issue is complicated further when we attempt to define ‘NGO’.

Although often understood as essentially a ‘good thing’ and synonym for

‘liberation from oppressive situations’, the term should be carefully defined, as it

is a complex and ambiguous concept. Virtually any citizen’s organisation; sports

club, neighbours’ association or academic group can fall into this category and

some are even founded by governments, defying the term that names them

(Acosta 2004). Biekart (1999) finds the term ‘NGO’ insufficient, and instead

labels what are commonly understood as development orientated NGOs, ‘private

aid agencies’. Others (Glasius 2002, Kalder 2002, Oliviero 2002) prefer the

term ‘civil society organisations’. They find ‘NGOs’ an inappropriate label for two

reasons; it fails to express the richness and variety of organisations as diverse

as all­volunteer groups and cultural associations, and secondly, because they

see it as conceived in the narrow sense, as biased towards a particular

neo­liberal vision of global civil society in which the role of the state is minimised.

The second point will be addressed in more detail below. Throughout this paper,

I employ the term NGOs because it is the banner under which the various

different organisations described above elect to assemble under, at international

conferences, and during campaigns. My thesis is premised on the assertion that

the very act of adopting the term ‘NGO’, and by extension ‘INGO’ (International

Non­Governmental Organisation or ‘NNGO’ (Northern Non­Governmental

Organisation) rather than any other is itself an important political decision made

by development organisations. Furthermore, I treat with caution attempts to

establish a neutral vocabulary.

A broad historical view places the political role and function of INGOs into

perspective. The claim to operating apolitically must also be assessed in

relation to longer­term processes and trends. Turning to a brief history of the rise

of the non­governmental sector demonstrates the inextricable link between

politics and aid. The idea of internationalism has been central to politics since

the end of the nineteenth century (Chandhoke 2002). In parallel, Henri La

Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations in 1913, to link

up NGOs in different counties. The United Nations institutionalised procedures

for consulting with these organisations in 1945. It is estimated that whereas in

1948, 41 NGOs had consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of

the UN, by 1968 the number had risen to 500. By 1992 the number had risen to

over 1000 and if the number of NGOs that interact with other bodies of the UN,

the number rises to tens of thousands (Chandhoke 2002). Arguably, it is

indicative of the power of the non­governmental sector that civil society has

come to be identified with NGO activism both in policy prescriptions and in

influential tomes on civil society, even though other actors, such as political

activists networking across borders were playing an important role in this

sphere.

The claim that NGOs operate outside of intense political (and

governmental) developments is untenable in light of NGO responses to

economic trends. The essence of globalisation is marked by a distinct

phenomena known as the neo­liberal agenda, or what John Williams coined, the

‘Washington Consensus’. This is the understanding that the legitimisation of the

ability of the market to regulate itself, as well as provide for both growth and

well­being, demanded the delegitimisation and the consequent retreat of the

state from the market. The state had to be rolled back both to encourage the

unhindered flow of capital and to enable the market to display its dynamics.

Regarding aid, the consensus manifested itself in the form of ten policy

recommendations, imposed on particularly debt­ridden developing countries by

international financial and lending institutions, among them the notion that people

in civil society should organise their own social and economic reproduction

(Chandhoke 2002). Ironically, the idea emerged at exactly the same moment as

globalisation has drastically eroded the capacity of the same people to order

their affairs. It was in this historical juncture that NGOs emerged on the horizon

to take over some of the functions hitherto reserved for state, such as providing

health and education, instituting income­generating schemes, creating safety

nets, and encouraging people to become self­reliant. For Chandhoke, the

Washington Consensus has to some extent actively facilitated the growing

power of NGOs.

Democratisation is a process in which power relations are shifting both

within and between the realms of civil society, political society and the state. The

particular model of democracy favoured by international actors, including INGOs

was closely tied to Western political ideology during the Cold War: liberal

democracy with its emphasis on civil liberties, private ownership, and electoral

competition, pitted against communism. This model of liberalism was

particularly favoured by the US whereas Europe, usually social democratic,

considered socio­economic equality intrinsic to democracy. The differing policy

agendas became visible in politically sensitive areas such as Central America.

International actions that promoted democracy predominantly came from the

Western industrialised world and directed at poorer countries with less political

stability. A centre­periphery aspect is at play, where ‘catching­up’ in economic

terms often implied the introduction of authoritarian measures to pursue national

unity and international order.

During the Cold War, world powers frequently employed ideological

rhetoric to justify the forceful pursuit of perceived geopolitical and economic

interests and the Guatemalan War, ran roughly parallel to the Cold War and in

some ways was paradigmatic of these trends (Costello 1997). The end of the

Cold War is seen by many (Chandhoke 2002, Edwards and Hulme 1995, Roy

2004) as the moment when the world witnessed a veritable explosion of NGOs.

The polarised global political climate of 1970s and 1980s, displayed in

ideological confrontations such as Chile, Israel, and Angola widened the gap

amongst policy orientations of NGOs. The US congress issued new legislation

to increase co­funding opportunities for NGOs, while urging the agencies to stick

to humanitarian assistance. European and Canadian NGOs evolved in an

opposite direction. Growing income from official funding was allocated to longer

term development objectives with more explicit political components such as

support for organisations linked to democratic opposition movements, often

under the banner of ‘solidarity aid’. European NGOs were generally critical of

US foreign policy towards the South, and actively supported domestic

campaigns against US interventionism in Central America, Southern Africa, and

Southeast Asia. The US NGOs tended to avoid controversial issues in public

education and lobbying activities as it negatively affected their income from

private donation. Contrastingly, European and Canadian NGOs assumed more

political roles (Biekart 1999).

The political divisions of the Cold War impacted upon the agendas of the

NGOs. Biekart explains the ‘politicisation’ of European NGOs in the late 1970s:

different political culture between Europe and the US and the broader

awareness of Europeans and Canadians of the root of causes of poverty. This

does not explain why politicisation occurred in the late 1970s , and not before. A

second set of explanations should therefore consider two elements: the

particular position of Europe during the Cold War and the conditions for official

grants to NGOs. Public opinion in Europe was preoccupied with the offensive

character of US foreign policy, in which Europe figured as the battleground in the

preparations for the next World War. Active US involvement in conflicts in the

South, it was perceived, could very well spark off nuclear confrontation with the

Soviet Union on European soil. European governments tacitly supported

opposition movements in these conflicts, often using NGOs as temporary and

alternative aid channels to bypass authoritarian or incompetent governments

(Biekart 1999). This happened with opposition movements against Marcos in

the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, the Apartheid­regime in South Africa, and with

authoritarian governments in Central America.

NGOs acted as informal diplomatic channels for European governments

during the last decade of the Cold War (Biekart 1999). By the end of the Cold

War and the new hegemony of market­orientated aid strategies would rapidly

reverse these ‘chains of solidarity’ prospects in the 1990s. The post­Cold War

identity crisis within development organisations had many roots, among them,

stagnating growth of agency income, serious doubts about their legitimacy,

particularly from the Manchester Workshops of 1992, the rise of Southern

counterparts wanting money from NGOs, rather than intervention.

Post­Washington consensus, the idea that the market and process of

globalisation had to be governed because the doctrines of free trade and

unregulated markets had run into trouble since 1994, when Mexico was hit by

financial devastation. That led to a radical shift in rhetoric, from that of

governance, accountability and transparency and democracy to the adoption of a

new language of sustainable development, preservation of natural resources, in

order for the international financial institutions to cushion new­liberalism with the

slogan “Fifty years is enough”. In an attempt to legitimise the bank, the President

engaged NGOs in dialogue.

The political agendas of the European (and Canadian) and US NGOs

have differed historically; the former have generally been orientated towards

social change and US NGOs have worked more closely within the limits of

official foreign policy objectives (Biekart 1999). The international ‘police role’ of

the US in the South was often welcomed and tacitly supported by European

governments, although often domestically criticised. During the 1970s and early,

when European (Social Democratic) governments were more critical of US

foreign policy, Europe was not unhappy to perform a so­called ‘third party’ role in

Cold War conflict areas. In this period, the role of non­governmental actors

proved to be quite useful for European governments. Many NGOs flourished in

the international arena because of the dynamics of the Cold War. Biekart

describes them as ‘agents of consent’ as governments secretly made use of

informal diplomatic channels such as NGOs, human rights organisations or

churches to intervene in societies with which bilateral relations were politically

sensitive.

However, Biekart argues that the end of the Cold War as a single variable

does not satisfactorily explain the increased relevance of international

no­governmental actors. He identifies three organisational peaks in

establishment of NGOs: one after each World War, and one in the early 1960s.

The first two peaks can be explained by the increase in relief activities for victims

of these wars, whereas the third was a response to the process of

decolonisation. NGOs started before the First World War were part of a major

philanthropic as well religious enterprise, coinciding with colonial expansion. A

well­known example is the Swiss International Committee of the Red Cross.

Global NGOs possess a property that happens to be the hallmark of ethical

political intervention: moral authority and legitimacy. In addition, they possess

moral authority because they claim to represent the public or the general interest

against official – or power –driven interests of the state or of the economy. In

Central America during the latter decades of the twentieth century democracy

was being constructed, rather than reconstructed as other Latin American

countries such as Chile and Argentina. NGOs performed tasks of mediating and

articulating the demands between civil society and the state, which is normally

the preserve of political parties. Biekart argues that European and Canadian

NGOs simultaneously managed to neutralise and marginalize popular

organisations and more radical left­wing opposition parties. Indirectly, he

continues, they contributed to a scenario prioritised by the US government: a

smooth democratic transition without challenging the neo­liberal model.

2.2 The political engagement of aid’s recipients

Civil society in classic political theory is conceptualised as the space where

ordinary people through daily life acquire political agency and self­hood. That is,

it is conceptualised as occupying political space outside the realm of traditional

democratic transactions. Arguably, the binary suggests that civil society

possesses a discrete and distinct raison d’etre that marks it out as autonomous

from the state and the market, yet a participatory democracy relies upon it for its

effective operation. Civil society is regarded here as a third sphere of collective

life and as a normative moral order, diametrically opposed to the state and

economy, representing the public against the official power­driven interests of

the state. Since the publication of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work in

1993, the concept of ‘social capital’ has come to the forefront as a crucial

ingredient in achieving equitable and sustainable development and many

development theorists and practitioners have accepted the pertinence of social

capital as an essential component of a strong civil society. Putnam draws from

de Tocqueville to argue that civil society influences the success of democracy. In

his study comparing government performance in different regions of Italy, he

observes that regions with higher levels of associational activity also have

greater social capital and thus, he claims, more successful regional

governments.

Like many countries in Latin America, Guatemala continues to live

through the legacy of an authoritarian past. Strong norms of social organising

and community and civic engagement have not been part of the landscape and it

remains to be seen to what extent the new space and opportunities opened

since the signing of the Peace Accords 1996 will catalyse new forms of social

capital. However, tensions between civil society and the state persist and are

complicated by the presence of international actors. The area of ‘justice in

transition’ is often one where civil groups are least effective in shaping peace

negotiations, partly because amnesties usually come at the very end of talks,

when international donors shift their support to governments and the influence of

civil society wanes (Wilson 1997:1). Putnam’s investigation in to what fosters or

impedes social capital is causal, that is, it is theory­testing rather than

theory­forming. This stands in contrast to questions that might have been asked

such as; ‘how do the organisational processes of NGOs impact political

engagement’? As I shall argue in more depth in section 3, the methodological

priorities of constitutive, rather than additive questions emphasise emic issues,

those concerned with value and are more pertinent to the enquiry in hand.

If social action is linked with change, not a single variable can be

adequately indexed, rather, it is a historically contingent, complex confluence of

socio­cultural power relationships. Some theorists avoid the notion of social

capital on the basis that social networks are not some kind of social bank that

one can draw on whenever necessary (Hilhorst 2003). NGOs are not a single

entity, and the reason an organisation chooses to become one is a political

decision because an alternative label could have been adopted. An NGO’s

wider legitimacy is morally derived, based on the values of human equality,

dignity, justice, freedom and personal and collective responsibility. This is

particularly important because simply being part of what Slim (2002) describes

as the new ‘sacred space’ of civil society, is not enough to guarantee an NGO’s

legitimacy.

At a recent workshop at the Institute of Development Studies Robert

Chambers commented that whilst the current trend in development is

de­centralised, stressing grassroots participation and community­led initiatives,

it coincides with an unprecedented push towards centralisation ‘from above’, of

donor agencies and financial institutions. There is a delicate tension between

legitimacy by and for whom. The power relations inherent in the label­adopting

and ascribing of benefactor/NGO/donor agency are complex and fluid and

therefore require an understanding of the complexities as they relate to specific

problems. Norman Long (1994) asserts that this is particularly urgent since we

are presently confronted with, on the one hand, a resurgence of simplistic

systems thinking and on the other, a stress on ethnographic particularism

associated with the deconstructionist mood of the post­modern era. Tracing

hegemonic development discourses and comparing them with theories that

avoid totalising claims situates the debate regarding political space and NGO

interventions. It will also introduce the next substantive chapter in which specific

NGO interventions are assessed in relation to the space afforded for political

engagement.

Arturo Escobar (1995) contends that since the Second World War a

global language has emerged that creates development, underdevelopment, and

the subjects of development. It is a revealing omission that within development

theory we talk of development policy, theory, intervention, subject but never

directly of ‘developing people’ despite the implicit denotation. The suggestion is

that people are ‘catching­up’ with those further along the development stratum. In

the 1990s, several studies focused on regimes of development discourse that

identify legitimate ways of practising development as well as speaking and

thinking about it and deny political agency to its subjects (Cooper 1997).

Ferguson (1990) analyses, for the case of Lesotho, how development policy

constitutes its subject as ‘Less Developed Country’. Deprived of its dynamics,

history and politics, this subject becomes a proper target for the technical

development interventions that agencies have to offer. From this language a

whole body of practices has followed centred around planned development

interventions. Ferguson likens the discourse to an anti­politics machine,

‘depoliticising everything it touches’. NGOs are important to neoliberal policies

because they can provide services that receding states are no longer able to

deliver. Although many celebrate the role of development NGOs in civil society

for its potency to advance human rights and development, this has also evoked a

critical view of NGOs as advancing the neoliberal project and collaborating in the

depoliticisation of development (Roy 2004).

These works on development discourse may explain the rise of NGOs,

and why so many organisations choose to adopt that label. By claiming that they

are the outcome of a hegemonic development discourse, it is implied that NGOs

operate according to a single discursive framework. The changes that local

responses make to development interventions are ignored. Lately, the very idea

of a hegemonic discourse of development has been discredited. Due to the

influential work of Foucault, discourse has come to be seen as closely

interweaving knowledge and power, Foucauldian discourse analysis, (emanating

mainly from his History of Sexuality 1976 lectures) is interested in how versions

of reality are manufactured. The effect of discourse is that certain ways of

understanding society, including its organisation and the distribution of power,

become excluded, whereas others attain authority. Pervasive among

researchers has been the zero­sum, sovereign notion that attributes power to

those who exercise control over others, thus polarizing domination and

resistance (Masaki 2004). Consequently, development theorists and

practioners have stressed the need to initiate a distinct set of activities to correct

power ‘imbalances’ for the empowerment of those ‘barred’. The language and

emphasis by NNGOs (Northern­led NGOs working in the South) in terms of

fund­and awareness­raising, is predominantly ‘’bottom­up’ and discusses

development in terms of self­advocacy, participation and empowerment, rather

than just resource wealth.

According to Foucault, (e.g 1980, 1982) ‘disciplinary power’ not only

pressurizes individuals to conform to prevailing norms, to subjugate them to

constrained positions, but also provides a common frame of reference that

serves as a medium for the renegotiations of the interpretations of social

standards. It is the idea that taken­for­granted norms are ceaselessly being

remoulded because dominance is interweaved with resistance in on­going

power contestations. The idea of hegemonic discourse implies that such

development discourse is incommensurable with local knowledge, and therefore

no interpenetration takes place. Recently it is increasingly recognized that there

is an interplay of discourses, which necessarily challenges the passive role

awarded to ‘developing people’ (Hilhorst 2003). The meanings of development

notions are renegotiated in the local context. Social interface analysis reveals

that within both ‘top­down’ and ‘bottom­up’ discourses, the agency of the actors

in development is suppressed, but this is not to claim that they are not politically

engaged at every stage of NGO interventions. The following section will identify

in order to interrogate dominant discourses within seeming competing claims

regarding legitimate interventions.

3. Legitimate interventions 3.1 NNGOs and depoliticisation

The issue of the effectiveness of international development in reaching its target

population and effecting change for the good is not new. On the contrary, it could

be described as being inherent in the very concept of development; for we need

to be able to know what something is before we can decide whether it has

changed into the thing that constitutes a development. Development work is

usually characterised as work with/for/on behalf of the materially poor and

marginalized by those who are not materially poor or oppressed themselves.

The label of this type of work has metamorphosed numerous times, from

charitable or religious duty, to aid, technical assistance, and through to

development. Each reincarnation is claim­making and often defined solely by

what the previous incarnations are claimed not to be. Questions of authority are

necessarily political because from where do development agencies derive their

power to speak.

Development is a discourse because it denotes an assemblage of

complex interests, interventions and agendas. Current literature in this area is

divided; that the primacy of the issue of legitimacy and accountability for

development agencies marks a step away from, or a step closer to the

transnational corporations at the heart of our capitalist and globalised world

system and a step away from, or closer to more nebulous concepts such as

moral authority. The following cases will show that increasingly, the voice of the

poor has replaced fundraising and administration as the critical criteria for the

legitimacy of development interventions in the new century (Slimm 2002). The

two cases under review compare and contrast what they argue are different

types of NGO interventions in relation to political engagement fostered or

impeded. The politics of methodological positionality is pertinent to research

findings and will be discussed in some length. Concluding this section, I locate a

common discourse underlying the seeming divide between organisational

structures in order to highlight the implications of conceiving political

engagement within a polarized framework.

Bill Abom (2004) carried out a piece of research about the interventions

of eight service­providing Northern­led NGOs (NNGOs) in a low­income urban

settlement in Guatemala. His study indicates a complex and diverse range of

social, cultural, political, and economic issues that contributed to low levels of

‘broad­based’ social capital. The long­standing fears related to violence and

corruption within a historically top­down authoritarian state are identified as the

most significant factors impeding social capital, social organising, and civic

participation. The eight service­providing NNGOs investigated also curbed

broad­based social capital by fostering dependency through intervention

strategies that were external, top­down, non­participatory, and not community

based. Abom makes the case that social capital is increased by the political

engagement of actors and that this is impeded by such NNGO intervention

because it de­politicises poverty. Abom makes a series of proposals that NGOs

could follow to help community groups ‘exercise their own power’ and ‘broker a

place at the table’ (Abom 2004: 342). This primarily involves holding back on

short­term support and services may well assist in the creation of space for

collective solutions.

Firstly, I will analyse not the findings of Abom’s research but the

methodology and method that underpins it. I will redefine ‘research results’ as

the identification of processes of knowledge production and dissemination,

rather than the outcome of a kind of fact­finding mission. I maintain that Abom

overlooks the critical relationship between participatory research and the

participatory NGO interventions that he advocates. This omission strikes at the

heart of the problematics involved in measuring social capital. Underscoring

such debates is an interest in the implications for the knowledge produced and

disseminated and what this reveals about power relations. Tracing a brief

genealogy of the theoretical underpinnings of Abom’s research serves to identify

his methodology and impacts upon his conclusions that the non­participatory

nature of NGO interventions impede social transformation.

Abom applies social and political capital to his specific research

question, rather than investigates phenomena, in this case, the interventions of

eight service­providing NGOs in one area. His question therefore, is casual; ‘is

social capital impeded/fostered by these specific NGO interventions?’. This

stands in contrast to alternative, constitutive questions that might have been

asked, such as; ‘how do the organisational processes of NGOs impact upon

political engagement’. Abom draws upon a piece of research into

social/political capital and how it contributes to successful governance and

democracy. The study by Booth and Richard is a piece of comparative research

entitled ‘Civil Society, Political Capital, and Democratisation in Central America’

(1997) and takes Putnam’s concept of ‘social capital’ and add to it a new

‘political capital’ variable. They investigate the effects of civil society and

social/political capital upon levels of democracy in Central America and finds

that while higher levels of formal group membership and several political capital

measures are associated with higher levels of democracy, social capital does

not have the relationship that Putnam predicts. Booth and Richard conclude that

political rather than social capital links formal group activism to democracy.

The work of Abom, and Booth and Richard is ‘classic’ research in the

hypothetico­deductive model, asking causal question rather than analysing

specific NGO interventions and then exploring social capital as one theory

concerned with political participation along with many. This approach is

insufficient. Aboms’s application of concepts using a formalistic methodological

approach removes the possibility of firstly interrogating the notion of social

capital. It could be argued that constructing a research programme using

theories that might already provide a set of answers to the questions, risks

ignoring methodological sensitivities that are key to the investigation. Social

capital might be more usefully posited as an exploratory rather than independent

variable. The eight service­providing NNGOs researched worked primarily in

health and education and the only case of local participation in NGO activity was

of two organisations with a policy of having two or three beneficiary members

participate on their local board. Abom’s case concludes by asserting that NGOs

can play a role in encouraging social capital between the community and the

state by fostering inter­sectoral cooperation and standing with grassroots

community groups.

My critique of Abom’s study is that he makes claims about participation

and NGOs based on a piece of non­participatory research and exposes himself

to charges of reproducing dominant discourses of knowledge production. The

semi­structured interviews (SSIs) intervene in a development context with a level

of expertise that is at odds with Abom’s stress on grass roots participation. The

study is self­described as seeing the path to social change through a ‘social

capital lens’, that is, the logic of Abom’s research design prescribes a certain

epistemology, methodology, and method. ‘Social capital’ has not been

identified by the recipients of NGO services as missing from their lives and by

his own admission; the concept is difficult for his respondents to grasp.

Furthermore, the case lacks the reflexivity that would identify Abom’s fraught

position as a development expert producing an academic text claiming to

advocate on behalf of the poor. Identifying the immanent conditions of a piece of

research firmly establishes the political processes at work. That Abom entered

the field to test a hypothesis about a concept derived from peer­reviewed

literature is a political act as it excludes ‘the community’ from the

problem­identifying stages of research.

The politics of methodological positioning in research is particularly

pertinent in the current publishing climate that is less likely to print an in­depth

ethnographic study whose thesis challenges rather than supports dominant

theories (Hilhorst, 2003). Arguably, Abom’s was an excursion into assessing

NGO impact in terms of social capital and fits snugly into neo­liberal reform

policies. Hickey and Mohan’s immanent/imminent divide between

‘development’ in the form of specific interventions and ‘development’ as a

historical process of change can be extended to the research processes. I hope

to have shown that by contextualising Abom’s case study in the broader debates

within development theory a level of analysis can be reached and this might have

wider implications for participatory research and research about participation.

Whilst the two need not always be conflated, I would argue that the self­reflexive

vigilance at the heart of participatory research requires that the researcher be

keenly aware that no intervention is apolitical. Abom proposes that NGOs

become more ‘participatory’, but arguably the SSIs he carried out raised hopes

for imminent changes. In addition, the case does not discuss the knowledge

produced going back to the respondents. Adrian Adams’s influential ‘Letter to a

Young Researcher’ points to the dangers of expert­driven policies, that often fail

the communities with which they work. Arguably, dissemination was intended as

a one­way process, i.e emanating from and returning to elite institutions in the

West.

3.2 The phronetic turn The methodological approach of Putnam, Booth and Richard and Abom is

neo­positivist. Scientific success is not the attainment of objective truths but of

wider agreement of descriptive facts and causal relationships based on

transparent and replicable methods ­ the research strives to be ‘as objective as

possible’. The structure of the Booth and Richard study followed that employed

by experimental science:

Theory ­ Hypotheses ­ Data ­ Analysis ­ Conclusions

That is, it makes a conjecture about causality, formulates the conjecture as a

hypothesis consistent with established theory, specifies the observable

implications of the hypothesis, tests whether those implications obtain in the real

world and reports the findings, ensuring that the researcher’s procedures are

publicly known and hence replicable to other members of a particular scientific

community of scholars. It formulates hypothesis and provides evidence that can

test, falsify and validate. An emphasis is placed ‘generality’, that is, the extent to

which the researcher can know a priori what the case is a case of. Cases are

utilised to illustrate a general hypothesis or theory. Theories provide social

scientists with a set of questions, and to some extent, also a set of answers for

issues they may encounter. The underlying assumption is that political science

of the hypothetico­deductive model is not a product of a particular political

intellectual culture and is as value­free as possible; “cultural bias is definitely not

a component of the prescribed toolkit” (Guy Peters, 1998; 155).

The thesis advanced in this part of the paper is that the basic ‘method’ of

social science is instead the ‘methodology of scientific tradition’ and that no

research perspective is value­neutral. This has important ramifications for the

findings of the comparative research under review. For instance, NGO’s are not

a single unitary entity, and the reason an organisation chooses to become one is

a political decision because they could have chosen to adopt another label. This

is power­bearing label and therefore research questions concerned with

assessing NGO impact, as Abom’s is, ought to emphasise emic issues, those

concerning value, behaviour, and language. This would have involved Abom in

firstly problematising the term NGO and exploring why the eight service­providing

NGOs choose to identify as such. Abom draws primarily on Booth and Richard’s

findings, that is, it is explicitly located within the framework of existing social

science literature. Tickner (2005) argues that using experiences as indicators of

‘reality’ against which conventional hypotheses are tested and unconventional

questions are formulated is an important commitment of research that is used by

people to change whatever oppressive conditions they may face. This, she

maintains, builds upon the deconstruction of previous knowledge. Booth and

Richard base their analysis and findings on research data gathered from

surveys. The data they gathered was from urban populations alone, yet from this

they conclude that political rather than social capital fosters civil engagement.

One could argue that different results might have arisen from survey data from

rural or semi­rural populations, or a combination of the three.

Hammersley (1999), describing himself as one of the ‘few defenders of

value neutrality’, argues that researchers must not seek to ‘promote practical

values’ through research. According to his thesis, bias is one of several forms of

systemic error in procedures that produces spurious results. It is the idea that

researchers must build­up knowledge from bedrock, by logical means after

stripping away his/her assumptions. Arguably, the Booth and Richard’s research

makes a systematic error by sampling from one type of population. Robert

Chambers works explicitly with pro­poor bias and argues that those at the wrong

end of development bargain are often those whose village is inaccessible by

tarmac roads. Researchers and development practioners, he argues have been

biased in their researching of communities in more accessible locations. These

people already have better access to infrastructure than their more remote

neighbours, who are often more neglected. The issues of agency and power

relations within research are critical as the decision the researcher makes

regarding population type, size etc, cannot be a neutral one and the attainment of

predictability and control is arguably less likely.

Concepts such as ‘participation’ and ‘social capital’ are concepts open to

deconstruction within various settings, rather than causal questions such as

‘does x cause y’. Flyvbjerg argues that we cannot start from explicit theoretical

assumptions and that narratives develop descriptions and interpretations of the

phenomenal perspective of the participants. Likewise, Tickner is suspicious of

Cartesian ways of knowing, or of the high science model (hypothetico­deductive)

as knowledge obtained through measurement. She maintains that emotion and

intellect are mutually constitutive and sustaining rather than oppositional forces.

A pragmatic, multi­method approach that stresses practical knowledge and

allows the subjects to document their own experiences is emphasised. If the

researcher explicitly links social action with change, not a single variable can be

adequately indexed, rather it is a historically contingent, complex confluence of

socio­cultural power relationships. Social capital is therefore not something that

is measured but rather, value­rational questions ask who gains and who loses,

by which mechanisms of power and what should be done about it? Hilhorst

(2003) argues that social networks are not some kind of social bank that one can

draw on whenever necessary and for this reason avoids the concept of social

capital.

Flyvbjerg highlights the three intellectual virtues, namely, episteme,

techne, and phronesis and argues that the instrumental rationality of the first two

is balanced by the value­rationality of phronesis. Comparative research that has

a convergent focus arguable contributes more to social and political praxis

because of its emphasis on context and judgement. However, a concern with

interpretation and value does not restrict the methods employed to traditionally

qualitatively ones. Flyvbjerg argues that the case’s proximity to real­life

situations prevents research leading down academic blind alleys. This notion

relies on a theoretical framework that stresses the mutuality of structures and

agents. The rationales behind this approach is that people exercise agency and

disseminate the knowledge produced. Flyvbjerg asserts that Foucault’s analysis

of power is instrumental to developing a more adequate conception of phronesis

as he has made it difficult to think unhistorically, non­politically, and nonethically

about praxis. Hilhorst asserts that decentring conceptions of power has

methodological ramifications for studying NGOs because it entails studying the

details of their everyday practices. Hilhorst claims to move beyond the tradition

of Foucault, in which she argues discourses act like structures, and closer to

Anthony Giddens’s notion of the duality of structure. In order to deal with these

questions, Hilhorst employs the concept of social interface. This bears heavily

on issues surrounding the generalisability of cases. If the politics of the dispute

work on many levels simultaneously, with actors imbuing events with a multiplicity

of meanings, generalising this specific interface onto other NGO relations might

prove contradictory. Flyvbjerg does not think so and argues that the inability of

context­dependent knowledge to extend to making claims that are more general

is a common misconception. The way out of this cul­de­sac for Flyvbjerg is to

use ‘theory’ in the soft sense. This way the researcher is not appealing to

predictive theories and universals but is still able to test a theory for validity.

3.3 The case for indigenous organisation

Felix Alvarado (2004) critically reviews the challenges facing indigenous peoples

in Latin America in their need to manage organisations in the context of a

system built on cultures very different from their own, namely, the heritage of the

encounter between Spain and the Americas. His thesis is premised on the

assertion that there are important differences between ‘Western’ and ‘Mayan’

management of indigenous peoples’ organisations in Guatemala, where around

half of the population belongs to one of twenty­two different ethno­linguistic

groups. The received knowledge of conventional management promoted by

management schools and the assumptions about the constitution of the

organisations in the Western world, do not necessarily offer the best solutions,

and cannot be adopted uncritically by indigenous peoples bent on taking more

control of their own development. Culture, Alvarado contends, is a critical factor

in addressing a variety of organisation and performance differences.

Alvarado draws on one study carried out (Rodas, Alvarado and Chaclan

1998 in Alvarado 2004) a set of managers from NGOs self­defined as ‘Mayan’

and officers serving them in international cooperation agencies were interviewed

from which a series of issues were identified in which differences between the

two groups were identified as decision­making, criteria for recruitment, oral

versus written commitment. The empirical features of Mayan organisations were

identified as an understanding of actions and results as part of a longer­term

process than the project linking them to any specific cooperation agency.

Additionally, perceptions about the time ruling their transactions are cyclical, (in

terms of agriculture and cultural rituals) rather than linear, making it difficult for

them to make sense of donors’ expectations concerning discrete products that

come from clearly differentiated short­term activities.

Palencia Prada (1997) supports this assertion by pointing to changes in

the financial commitments of INGOs to Latin American countries, including

Guatemala, that coincided with the peace negotiations. Moving away from more

ideological priorities of the 1970s and 1980s their aid is now increasingly driven

by market­orientated criteria of efficiency and effectiveness. She identifies three

key problems with the relations between local and international organisations: a

lack of training of Guatemalan NGOs, a lack of organisational autonomy,

management and decision­making capacities within community groups and

poor state/civil society communication and coordination as the key problems.

An institutional strengthening programme for NGOs run jointly by United Nations

Development Programme (UNDP) and MINUGUA has mostly supported

short­term institutional activities at the expense of mid­long term

capacity­building. Palencia Prada concludes that because support from the

International Financial Institutions is channelled almost entirely into state reform

via structural adjustment, it is especially crucial that the UN sponsor grassroots

participation in the reconfiguration of Guatemalan political life.

The difference between Mayan and Western organisations might be one

of cultural values argues Alvarado. An analysis of the educational systems of the

indigenous peoples in Guatemala identified educational practices currently

maintained within Mayan communities. First, there is an emphasis on those who

occupy positions of authority as teachers: they are the ‘elders’, literally or

figuratively, who provide moral instruction. Second, the preferred medium for

teaching is oral. Finally, education, rather than the theoretical transfer of

knowledge, is a process of learning in practice, for work and in the context of

daily life. Sieder (1997) corroborates this by arguing that in the re­framing of

citizenship during the 1990s, it was claimed that Mayan traditions could provide

a framework for reconstituting social structures that had been destroyed by the

war. Throughout this period, many indigenous Guatemalans deployed a

strategic shift from the centrality of human rights issues to putting forward

national proposals for reform based specifically on ethnic interests. One of the

motivations was the belief that ideologies emphasising indigenous world­views

as harmonious and conciliatory resonated deeply with the majority of

Guatemalans and stood in stark contrast to the discriminatory Guatemalan state.

The role of the Mayan Manager as opposed to the practice of

management in the West generally implies showing results whereas Mayan

organisations see means of evaluation (such as the logframe) as rigid, focused

on the short term and leaving little space for process results. Most donors prefer

to see products corresponding directly with previously specified objectives in

one to three­year cycles. Mayan managers tend to appreciate the incidence of

the actions of their organisations upon a broad and unspecified agenda for

cultural and political development. This underscores a notable difference

between Mayan and non­Mayan organisations concerning preferred

communication technologies. Mayan organisations tend to prefer oral over

written means, not just as a way to communicate, but also as a way to commit, in

other words, verbal agreements are considered more credible than those

requiring written formalisation. In relation to monitoring, evaluation, and

reporting, Alvarado asks whether international cooperation agencies should

adjust to local cultural systems in requiring reports and implementing monitoring

systems and whether local organisations should accept the current system

uncritically?

With the signing of The Peace in 1996 it became increasingly necessary

to enhance the capacity of Mayan organisations to manage development

projects and switch from a position of confrontation with the state to one of

collaboration in initiatives for reconstruction and development. Palencia Prada

(1997) asserts that throughout the first half of the 1990s international donors

found their Guatemalan counterparts increasingly claiming their right discuss the

terms of funding. It is more common, now, she continues, to find donors using

consultation procedures with local organisations. In this context, the

organisations began to recognise the need to strengthen their management and

administrative capacities, given that preparing and managing productive and

social projects required efficiency and effectiveness that had been a secondary

consideration in organisations dedicated to lobbying, with their focus

inter­institutional negotiation and fundraising among donors committed to a

specific political agenda. In this, their challenges equal, in purpose, if not in

content, those faced by their ‘Western’ peers.

Abom’s study of the interventions of eight service­providing NNGOs and

Alvarado’s study of Mayan­managed organisations highlight different between the

two types of organisational processes. To summarise their findings: NNGOs and

Mayan­managed organisations differ in terms of leadership and organisational

culture, accountability structure, project target and evaluation systems, levels of

local participation, and the cultural practices and values of staff. However, the

thesis I would like to advance is that through the identification of dominant

discourses, Abom’s and Alvarado’s conceptualisation of the two organisational

processes can be shown to be convergent. Both pieces of research construct a

binary between Western and Mayan knowledge. Here, we can read Western or

Northern, as powerful and indigenous as lacking. Both authors treat ‘NGO’ as an

unproblematic and unitary entity. The two studies essentialise concepts of ‘local’

and ‘community’ when they talk of a ‘Mayan’ and a ‘Northern’ modus operandi.

The studies attempt to establish hegemonic truth­claims as both authors uphold a

static view of power, whereby the changes that local responses make to

development interventions are largely ignored. This is insufficient. As Long

stipulates, social life is never so unitary as to be built upon a single type of

discourse and however restricted their choice, actors always face alternative ways

of formulating their objectives.

We should abandon the binary opposition between Western and

non­Western epistemologies and practice, and instead attempt to deal with the

intricate interplay and joint appropriation and joint transformation of different

bodies of knowledge. ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ have been in dialogical

relation since at least the fifteenth century as colonial and market interventions

are never simplistic or totalising. Alvarado’s claim that the situation of

colonialism was external first, but later insidiously internal and still shapes a

considerable part of Latin America, is untenable. As Biekart (1999) reminds us,

the solidarity campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded by European

and Canadian activists influenced and were influenced by indigenous struggles

in Guatemala throughout that period, along with political contests at home. The

view that scientific knowledge is impartial, and indigenous knowledge is more

common­sensical or rooted in experience rather than theory, might fail because

of heterogeneity amongst the elements Agrawal (1995). The idea that

indigenous populations meet the overriding means and interests of Western

culture and society works within narrow insider/outsider categories that risks

lapsing into a reductionist discourse of ‘otherness’. The next section will widen

the debate and question whether the ability to conceive of NGO interventions

outside of binary oppositions is stifled by statist logic that boundaries those

included and those excluded.

4. Local via global

Throughout this final substantive chapter, I will situate the debate about INGOs in

the wider context of discussions concerning the nature of the state. It might be

the case that the space for the political engagement of aid’s recipients might be

curtailed at its elucidation. This is because working with concepts such as

non­governmental versus governmental organisations might construe aid’s

recipients as necessarily lacking and therefore limit the possibility any

transformation of their own agenda. I will proceed to ask whether appealing to a

‘Global Civil Society’ easily negotiates the polarised categories previously

discussed or, as Chandhoke (1997) argues, merely reflects the power

constellations of existing institutions. The positions adopted by post­structuralist

and universalist­cosmopolitan thinkers are reviewed. I will interrogate attempts

to by­pass the state and discuss political engagement on micro and macro but

not meso­level: that is going local via global or vice versa. The approach I will

advance is Foucauldian in the main, and reconceptualises power struggles in

their historical and personal contexts.

4.1 Beyond sovereignty?

Indigenous people in differing contexts are engaging with their governments over

constitutional claims for linguistic and territorial rights and political sovereignty. It

is not possible to live anywhere without regular encounters with agents or

institutions of the nation­state as it was during the heyday of anthropological

functionalism and cultural relativism of the early­mid twentieth century (Wilson

1997:2). Palencia Prada asserts that the central concerns of the Guatemalan

Peace Accords included the need to transform existing relations between the

state and society so that political institutions are capable, for the first time, of

mediating the interests of all social groups. Today more people are interested in

political involvement and new bodies, with increasing input from NGOs have

come to hold the substantial share of the state social investment budget. There

have been some advances. In the legal arena, by recognising customary

indigenous law, it has legitimised community­based efforts of a number of

indigenous organisations seeking to employ culturally acceptable, non­coercive

means to resolve local conflicts. However, Palencia Prada argues, the ways in

which the funds have been dispersed have not enhanced local implementation

capacities, nor has there been adequate opportunity for grassroots involvement.

The Guatemalan government has tended to only conduct ‘real’ business with

funders and electoral allies, which has brought it into conflict with political and

civic groups. Palencia Prada concludes that little bridging between the rupture

between state and society has been advanced by the Peace Accords. Sieder

(1997) echoes this sentiment when he argues that whilst there is room for

optimism at the local level, a general increase in indigenous participation

promised by the Accord will require a more substantive administrative overhaul.

Underlying the above conceptions of political engagement in

democratising Guatemala is a fettered belief in the possibility of emancipatory

change at state­level. Robert Walker (1993), a dissident voice within the

International Relations discipline, advocates a radical reorientation of our

understanding of political space that challenges the sanctity of the nation­state.

His thesis states that the territorial terms that we have inherited from

early­modern Europe no longer answer questions about political identity and thus

the legitimation of forms of inclusion and exclusion. The secular substitutes for

God in modern political thought; Reason, History, the sovereign state, the

sovereign individual and the universal class have come to seem problematic in

the light of post­structuralist suspicions of a logic that polarises

identity/difference, self/other, inside/outside. For Walker, to ask how theories of

International Relations demarcate the horizons beyond which it is dangerous to

pursue political action that aspires to the emancipatory, is to become aware of

the discursive framing of spaciotemporal options that has left its mark in the

schism between theories of political possibility and theories of mere elations

beyond the confines of the modern state. He contends that accounts of

modernity depend upon a prior claim that there is a political community in which

reason, progress and Enlightenment might unfold and that this assertion is not a

given, but is instead, historically contingent.

Walker advocates problematising theoretical and practical horizons that

continue to be taken for granted. To refer to international ‘Relations’ is to

suggest that what goes on between states is in principle quite different to what

goes on within states. Spacially, he maintains, the principle of state sovereignty

fixes a clear demarcation between life inside and outside a centred political

community. If we apply this mode of analysis to the concept of ‘NGOs’, it could

be argued that the term constructs an artificial dualism between governmental

and non­governmental life. ‘Political’ is in the realm of the governmental whereas

civil society occupies the space outside of the formal arena. Working within this

structure, how are the people in whose lives NGO s intervene imagined? As

mentioned above, the implied concept of ‘developing people’ is pervasive within

development literature because of its absence. To emphasise the need for

indigenous people to press for state justice and the rights of citizenship, (as

Costello, Palencia Prada and Sieder do) might suggest that only power vis­à­vis

the state is conceivable, or indeed desirable.

To become a recipient of aid through the channel of a non­governmental

organisation stratifies the power dynamics involved as it works with a narrow

inside/outside of the state articulation of space. Arguably, it demotes the power

constellations at play in ‘NGO­ing’ to less relevant than say, the politics of the

public sector or the formal economy, as if there were no intricate relation

between them. As I have demonstrated above, power in the Foucauldian view is

not a right or possession to be orientated or transferred as in the Enlightenment

tradition of political economy, but rather it leaks out and within the multiplicity of

‘forced relations’. The interest is in how they transform in each complex strategic

situation. I maintain that Walker’s urge that research interrogate concepts for

polarised categories is instrumental to a praxis­orientated approach to

development.

The logic of the nation­state fixes a temporal moment as a source of

power and authority. A specific account of political identity is affirmed as

inevitable and other identities are marginalized. Sovereignty, according to

Walker is neither defunct nor permanent but discourses that work with a

zero­sum view of power necessarily place firm limits on how we understand

contemporary trends and future possibilities. Silence is thereby affirmed in

space, in the otherness beyond the authentic political community of the state and

to claim sovereignty is already to know what lies beyond, for there can be nothing

beyond its horizons. If culture is read through the principle of state sovereignty, it

can only refer to the diversity of national cultures. If culture is read through a

geometry of territorial exclusions, it can only be understood through a non­identity

and referring to an absence of community. In support of this claim, Wilson

(1997:2) maintains, the whole concept of ‘indigenous people’ is now inseparable

from human rights discourses, which represent them as victims of abusive

governments.

In the extreme, to talk of the political engagement of aid’s recipients might

prove difficult as they are bounded by a logic that narrowly conceives of political

engagement and also excludes them from governmental organisation. Their

struggles are promoted as for inclusion within the state, but by defining them by

their lack of participation with formal democracy, it squeezes out the room for

political manoeuvre around and through those limits. Arguably, the global

‘NGO’d’ are simultaneously defined by what they are not and by what they ought

to strive to become. This is not to suggest that ‘host’ communities are passive

recipients of aid, as I take it as given that they are political at every level. Rather,

I contend that certain discourses regarding self­representation are disallowed by

conceiving of NGO interventions as filling an apolitical void.

Is there a way out? Walker imagines a convergence theory of ‘world

politics’ that acts in, around, and through the artificial boundaries of statist

geometry. The politics of refusing modernist categories that define other as

Other might take the shape of privileging the particular struggles of national

citizenship or liberation, he argues. It was not Walker’s aim to prescribe a

course of action but instead, reorientate the way we conceive of political

engagement. In this, he joins Foucault (Chomsky and Foucault 1974:171), who

calls ‘the political task’ the criticism of the workings of institutions, which appear

to be both neutral and independent so that the political violence which has

always exercised itself through them, obscurely, is unmasked, so that one can

fight them. Foucault is not committed to an anti­statism, as Walker arguably is,

but interested in understanding actual power relations in specific contexts. For

Foucault, praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories, but

instead, freedom is a practice. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to

consensus, is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Both

Walker and Foucault promote a shared emphasis on substantive micro­politics

and ‘bottom­up’ thinking regards both process and content. However, neither

thinkers define the actual content of political action and prescribe neither

process nor outcome. Foucault would only recommend a focus on conflict and

power relations as the most effective point of departure for the fight against

domination.

This might open Foucault and Walker to charges of relativism, or worse,

nihilism. Flyvbjerg (1998) counters such criticisms by arguing that despite more

than a thousand years of attempts by rationalist philosophers, no one has been

able to live up to Plato’s injunction that to avoid relativism our thinking must be

rationally and universally grounded. The reason, he suggests, is that Plato might

be wrong and that the polarity relativism/foundationalism is just another artificial

dualism that simplifies things conceptually but with little reference to actual

phenomena. Employing this line of reasoning, Foucault replaces the dualism by

situational ethics, i.e., by context and where any form of government – liberal or

totalitarian – must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a will not to be

dominated, voicing concerns in public and withholding consent about anything

that appears unacceptable. Foucault argues that the search for a moral

censuses would endanger, rather than empower civil society.

4.2 Global civil society – domestic politics denied

Struggles for indigenous rights are embedded in local normative orders and yet

are caught within webs of power and meaning which extend beyond the local.

Increasingly indigenous people actively seek representation at international for

and attend such bodies with legal advisors in tow (Wilson 1997 2). The

realisation that research must abandon its pretensions to bounded holism and

embrace transnational relationships still leaves open the question of how to

conceptualise the relationship between local and global discourses. Whereas

Walker exposes the multifarious workings of the state to argue his case for

‘world politics’, other theorists discuss global politics as a negation of the state.

In this section, the discussion will turn to INGOs in relation to what is termed

‘Global Civil Society’ by a group of theorists largely coming from the London

School of Economics’ Centre for Civil Society and Centre for Global Governance

and The Transnational Institute in the Netherlands and falling within the

cosmopolitan universalist camp. With Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor at the

fore, it is argued that a new global consciousness and set of social and political

cleavages has emerged that no longer fit into traditionally bound categories.

It is argued that alongside this growing global consciousness, INGOs

have substantially increased in number. The global unilateralism of the US

Administration undermines both the concrete achievements of global civil society

and the values and norms promoted by global civil society and marks a return to

geo­politics and the language of ‘realism’ in international achievements (Glasius

and Kaldor 2002). The events of Sept 11 2001 are instrumental to their

Weltanschauung. In the post 9/11 climate, their argument continues, global

polarisation has resulted from both terror and the war on terror and squeezes the

space for global civil society. They read this moment as exposing the

vulnerability of all states, demonstrating the reality of global interdependence,

and representing an opportunity to set a new global agenda. The heavy

penalties incurred by Greenpeace, when their liberation vessels are caught in

illegal territory and the strict security measures enforced at global summits

against protestors are cited as examples of the real threat to state sovereignty

posed by this growing global consciousness.

Chandhoke (2002) is unconvinced by the visionary global euphoria

espoused by Kaldor et al. Her argument asserts that our normative expectations

of civil society might blind us to the nature of real society, national or global. For

Chandhoke, global civil society may less represent a new consciousness, but

instead reflect the power constellations of existing institutions. Furthermore, to

what extent can global civil society be autonomous of a state­centric world

system, she asks. Global civil society organisations such as INGOs and

anti­capitalist groups that convene at places such as the World Social Forum,

claim to represent the global public against official, power­driven interests of the

state. As demonstrated earlier, the post­Washington consensus shifted the

rhetoric of globalisation to sustainable development, good governance and

accountability. NGOs were integral to this change when they became partners in

decision­making activities, attending annual meetings of the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund as special guests. Chandhoke maintains that this

raises an important methodological question: can we call agencies that become

part of the global decision­making structures ‘civil society’ organisations that

challenge the workings of the global order? The idea that they transcend

national boundaries is untenable in light of the fact that global civil society actors

need states and their institutions to substantiate and codify their demands in law.

They require the political and legal frameworks that facilitate setting up the rule of

law and states provide the conditions within which civil society agendas are

realised.

Tracing a brief genealogy of the discourse of management confirms that

a global civil society and the accompanying discourse of accountability and

transparency does not represent a new impetus but is instead, inextricably linked

to earlier, historical trends. Cooke (2001) identifies continuities with

development management, (previously development administration) with

processes of imperial rule known as Colonial Administration and argues that a

literal as well as metaphorical relationship exists. He challenges the orthodoxy

that the language of good governance and transparency that is central to

governmental/non­governmental relations implies a clear break with

colonial/neo­colonial administrative practices. Missionary work formed part of

the British Colonial Service, later transformed into the British Development

Programme in 1948, which marked the beginning of a more structured and

formal development work undertaken by colonial administrators (Bebbington and

Kothari 2004). The shift from ‘aid’ to ‘development’ marks the utilitarian turn in

domestic and foreign policy, where ‘what is right’ has transformed into ‘what

works’.

The language and emphasis by NGOs, (in particular international

development agencies working in the South) in terms of fund­ and

awareness­raising, is predominantly ‘bottom­up’ and discusses development in

terms of self­advocacy, participation and empowerment, rather than just

resource wealth. This can be viewed as an attempt to counter charges of

patronage and move away from imperial and missionary interventions of the

past. The emphasis on the telos of development informs present political

strategies. Focusing on the end rather than the means of interventions enables

governments to shirk uncomfortable analyses that identify continuity rather than

change in foreign policy. Positioning itself within a discourse of ends, present

governments arguably attempt to feel less colonial guilt. Underlining the

discursive strategies identified above is the tacit assertion that colonialism was

not a positive part of a nations’ history.

The arrival of global NGOs may carry not so positive implications for

political agency. Ordinary people who have experienced injustice in their lives

are denied opportunities to frame their responses in their own terms.

Associational activity at a global level tends to acquire a life of its own and

people might become disempowered when highly specialised professional

actors tell them what is wrong with their daily existence. When individuals come

together and think about resolving situations they are politicised. It is precisely

this notion of politics that is devalued when global civil actors commandeer

political initiatives and constitute human beings as subjects of political ideas or

as consumers of agendas finalised elsewhere (Chandhoke 2002). Arguably,

NGO activism, which straddles national boundaries is no substitute for

self­determining and empowering activity born out of specific experience.

Alongside the change in rhetoric, the international policy community now

concentrates on the management of discontent because protest and struggle

has to be ‘managed’. Chandhoke echoes Foucault when she asserts that the

current excitement surrounding global civil society does not recognise that

democratic civil society is about struggling for a better world, that is, it is about

politics and governance.

The term and idea of ‘Global Civil Society’ is a dangerous fallacy given

that the absence of representative institutions at a global level (Anderson and

Reiff 2004). The various groups that identify themselves with this ‘movement’

claim to represent world opinion and act as a substitute for the functioning of

representative democracy at national levels. Cosmopolitan universalist

reformers embrace interconnectedness and believe that we are moving towards

a world government. The principle contradiction inherent in this logic is that in

advocating that political struggles by­pass the state (going global via local) the

shape this would take mimics statist geometry. Regarding the promotion of the

rule of international law and through the medium of international forums, the

content alters from domestic to international, but the form remains bounded by

the same insider/outsider categories.

Claims of a ‘world government’ are profoundly anti­democratic as ‘social

movement missionaries’ have arrogated to themselves a supposed legitimacy

that does not reflect the aspirations of individuals worldwide. Arguably, greater

democracy would involve devolution to a local level. Municipalities have been

able to strengthen their positions vis­à­vis national governments and respond to

the needs of citizens through global links and fair­trade arrangements (Anderson

and Reiff 2004). If we agree that democracy has not eroded at a national level,

the issue is how to choose national representatives at the global level through

elections and how to maximise the possibilities for individuals to debate and

influence significant decisions. This might be one of the chief concerns for those

serious about keeping global and local debates in symbiotic relation.

The notion of a ‘global state’ follows logically from the identification of the

current lack of governance that accompanies conceptions of transnational

politics. Etzioni (2004) argues the case for transnational governing capacities

on the basis that both national governments and intergovernmental organisations

are unable to cope with rising transnational problems. INGOs and informal

transnational networks are described as informal communal bodies that are

expected to help with transnational problems such as the spread of HIV/AIDS

and the trafficking of sex slaves. Transnational interpersonal bonds and

social/moral norms are believed to nurture the kind of informal social controls

that work well in smaller communities. Etzioni quotes Lester M. Salamon who

describes the phenomena of the profusion of the nonprofit sector as an

‘associational revolution’ that may prove to be as significant to the later twentieth

century as the rise of the nation­state was to the later nineteenth (Salamon 1994,

in Etzioni 2004: 342).

Etzioni is sceptical of the idea of ‘governance without government’ and

argues that such observations and analyses do not take into account the

significant role that the state plays in enabling networks, voluntary associations,

and communities (the civil society) to perform. The argument is circular, he

points out, as national states (and intergovernmental organisations) are unable

to cope with rising transnational problems. Transnational Communitarian

Bodies are supposed to carry some of the ‘burden’ when states cannot.

However, such bodies turn to states to help them carry out their missions. The

case he puts forth is that if transnational problems are to be effectively treated,

still more governing capacity will be needed. In effect, his thesis runs, there must

be some measure of global authority with state­like features.

Global civil society enthusiasts view new social movements, to which

INGOs are central, as heralding new forms of emancipatory political action that

build forms of global ‘counter­hegemonic’ politics ‘from below’. David Chandler

(2004) interrogates these claims and strongly disagrees. He argues that the

political ethics it advocates are deeply corrosive of social engagement and

prone to elitist rather than inclusive consequences. The so­called ‘bottom­up’

approach of global society locates a radical ethics in the methods and

organisation of its members from their refusal to play by the rules laid down by

state­based territorial politics. It is the rejection of state­based approaches

which marks out this project as distinct from those of the past, and its

development can be traced from the post­1968 ‘new left’ through the 1980s civic

‘oppositionists’ in Eastern Europe to the Seattle protests and the

anti­globalisation and anti­capitalist movements of today. They claim to extend

the ideas and concerns of political community beyond the state and demand a

new type of political activism which prioritises the ethical individual over political

collectivity. For Chandler, the arguments that the individual should have no

higher political allegiance beyond their own moral conscience merely replaces

collective political engagement by elite advocacy and personal solipsism. As

Kaldor claims, ‘anti­politics is the ethos of civil society’ (Kalder 2002:57). The

radical self­constitution of the political subject avoids the mediating link of the

political process. Political legitimacy is no longer derived from the political

process of building support in society but rather from recognition of the

movement’s social isolation. This, Chandler argues is a consequence of the

new left’s rejection of any legitimate collective political subject.

The thousands of NGOs, social movements, leftist academics and

alternative media representatives that gather at the World Social forum have one

political goal: to make the world a better place. Their stated aim is to discuss

ways in which the world works can be changed to end severe inequalities, social

injustices, labour exploitation, poverty, hunger as well as environmental damage

(Acosta 2004). The forum has been the target of criticism from outside and from

within. Many of those present at any or all of the four editions held so far have

called the forum a talk shop, without any real strategy or specific proposals.

Internally, one of the major conflicts is between social movement activists and

NGO volunteers or professionals. The former accuse the latter of apolitical

stances on many issues because of what they call the conditional funding that

NGOs receive from multilateral or private aid agencies. In other terms, the

conflict is also between reformers and revolutionists, as one group (mainly

NGOs) says that what is needed is to reform current international institutions, and

the other, (mainly social movements) argue that a complete dismantlement of

those institutions is the only way to ensure a better world.

NGOs pushing for institutional reform accuse international governmental

organisations of not being democratic, of lacking a transparent decision­making

system and not being accountable to those they claim to represent. All these

have proven to be dangerous criticisms that could backfire on the NGO sector as

a whole. NGOs are attempting to obtain political reform from governmental

organisations whilst reserving an apolitical position for themselves. Most NGOs

are neither democratic, transparent in their decision­making, nor accountable to

anyone, and their lack of coordination and long term planning also erode their

credibility. Building upon the growing distrust against governments and

multinational corporations and focusing on analyses and criticisms of current

policy decisions, a sense of community among those that attend the forum is

created, but there have been few, if any, specific proposals for change (Acosta

2004). This sense of community is too vague and slippery as there is no formal

follow­up procedure nor an overall strategy that would give clarity for further

action. What can thousands of NGOs achieve with their particular projects

without a long term agenda other than the marginalisation and then denial of the

possibilities for emancipatory political action?

‘Citizen pilgrims’ of the new global mission have in common their isolation

from and rejection of their own political communities. The transfer of loyalties to

an invisible political community is a radical re­representation of their rejection of

a real and visible political community – namely, the electorate. Chandler

maintains that the weakness of the domestic position of global civil society

activists advantages the politics of ethical advocacy. The fiction of global civil

society as an ethical alternative approach to the problems of the political, has its

roots in the political of the left, whose lack of support within their own societies

was historically softened by the illusion of being part of an international

movement. While their own groups may have been marginal to domestic politics

adherents took heart in messages of ‘solidarity’ or success from other parts of

the world. These international props were initially the mainstay of the ‘old left’,

dependent on the Communist International or international trade union

federations. The post­‘68’ ‘new left’ followed the trend as peace, environmental

and women’s groups sought legitimacy more in their international connections

than their capacity to engage in a political struggle of ideas with a domestic

audience. The transformations in Eastern Europe in 1998 leant new life to this

form of internationalism.

A new ‘East­West’ dialogue between Central and East European

dissidents and the West European peace movement gave an international

legitimacy to both sets of participants which were marginal in their own states.

Chandler points to Kaldor’s own experience of active involvement in the waning

European peace movements in the 1980s as instructive. The new strategy was

a sign of giving up on winning the argument at home. Perceiving themselves as

isolated due to being ‘unpatriotic’, the European Nuclear Disarmament (END)

literally went Eastward. The international realm is arguably not a sphere of

political struggle but rather, an easier option with less accountability and little

pressure for representational legitimacy. Compared to ‘political’ social

movements of the past, new social movements based on advocacy pose much

less of a threat to the status quo and limit the opportunities for real political

change. That considered, global challenges persist and are only likely to

increase. My argument is that the ways in which INGOs respond necessarily

requires that they cease hiding behind an artificial global/local schism. In this

move they are able to engage more thoroughly with the interplay of political

contestations at micro/meso/macro levels.

5. Conclusion

The heritage of Victorian philanthropy is well and truly behind us and has given

way to a culture of caring designed for the consumer age. In the second

generation of aid events spearheaded by Geldof, the slogans have turned from

‘aid’ to ‘politics’ and the abilities of Band Aid’s (now aging) rock stars to

mesmerise the crowd have substantially waned. A sceptical observer might

argue that MPH’s success in redrafting the political agendas of the wealthy

nations might rival only that of applying a bandaid to famine. For celebrities,

consumers and businesses alike, charity is the ‘hot look’ that everyone wants.

Charities have struggled with the modern malaise of ‘compassion fatigue’ and

the solution has been to draw on commercialism, glamour and entertainment to

give ‘giving’ a certain pizzazz (Blackburn 2005). Here is a new kind of new kind

of philanthropy refracted through a lens of showmanship: media sells celebrity

sells charity sells business. A conscience industry has been created that

arguably transforms our notion of charity into a lifestyle concept, conveniently

packaged and highly desirable, particularly when the likes of Bono from U2

(following from his 1984/5 Band Aid fame) talks poverty with President Bush.

For $3 a silicone wristband tells the world ‘I care’ – about what, it does not

always seem to matter. Arguably, the political has been removed from both

parts of the ‘politics not aid’ slogan.

This paper has brought out the political nature of NGOs in response to the

de­valuing of interventions to public performance devoid of meaning and

credibility – an ethical version of the emperor’s new clothes. By creating an

illusory culture of ‘apoliticalness’, of uncritically ‘doing good’ we risk leaving the

status quo firmly intact. The power dynamics that sustain concepts of developed,

developing and a community of the global underdeveloped rely upon binary

categories for their affirmation, and therefore reproduction. This is particularly

pertinent concerning research whose epistemology is based on

Western/indigenous polarity. Little room for political manoeuvring beyond and

between these categories is granted. Reconceptualising power as based not on

universals but also on the complex milieu of the local allows for a better

understanding of the dynamics of social and cultural interfaces that open up

space for self­organising processes. Attempts to imagine a global civil society

beyond the nation state fall short on the grounds that the power to appoint

non­state actors and lobby groups to advisory committees ensures that states

control the policy process through determining which groups should be

recognised. A more inclusive, non­totalising understanding of power that

considers the local, state and global dynamics in dialogical relation and

challenges the taken for granted classificatory schemata has been argued for

throughout this discussion.

Guatemala is an important country to examine because The Peace is still

very much in its infancy, celebrating its 10th year in 2006 and actors are

negotiating the fraught areas of personal, local, civic and international political

contestation. Future directions of my research, at doctoral level, would take me

back to the village of San Jose de Lago de Flores in the El Peten, North Eastern

Guatemala and involve studying the local practices of NGOs. New challenges

are identified in light of the recent influx of North American Evangelical

missionaries who attach stringent educational, cultural and spiritual conditions to

service provision. Tensions would be identified in relation to indigenous

struggles for rights and citizenship. The situation is further complicated by shifts

in the cultural landscape brought about by the relocation of populations during

and after the war, and the inter­ethnic struggles that have ensued. El Peten is

one of the few areas of Guatemala where virgin forest remains, yet precariously.

The wider issues of severe environmental degradation and cattle farming for

foreign markets would broaden the study to consider global trends in relation to

context­specific negotiations. My overall aim, as it was in the paper in hand,

would be to make explicit the political nature of NGO interventions for, as

Foucault reminds us, the danger of its denial is the reduction of the space for

change.

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