The Marian and Arthur Edelstein Virtual Library

Civil Societies North-South Relations:

NGOs and Dependency

Bernardo Sorj

Working Paper 1, November 2005

The Edelstein Center for Social Research

http://www.edelsteincenter.org
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 Civil Societies North-South Relations:
NGOs and Dependency

Bernardo Sorj1

Introduction: Civil Society: the next steps

An historical and socially contextualized concept

Civil society’s current “prestige” as well as it’s polysemic use is the product of
a strange convergence of different political traditions and social actors

Views on Civil Society

Towards a sociological delimitation of Civil Society

NGO’s are the main novelty of contemporary Civil Societies

There isn’t a homogenous and predefined political role for NGOs

The so-called Global Civil Society reproduces the North/South divide

NGOs currently confront multiple challenges

Conclusions: Advancing national agendas in global contexts and global agendas

based on national realities

Bibliography

1
Professor of Sociology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Director of the Edelstein Center for
Social Research (www.bernardosorj.com).

1
Introduction: Civil Society: the next steps 2

“Civil society” is supported by such disparate groups as big corporations, the European,
Japanese and USA governments, the World Bank, the Social Global Forum as well as
right and left wing political parties around the world. For some it is a catch- word
without precise meaning, while for others a new concept which illuminates the path to a
better world. Whatever its precise meaning, and as we will see it is far from precise,
one cannot dismiss the fact that “civil society” is in the center of current sociological
and political science debates on democracy and democratization processes and has
become the symbol of solidarity and social change in the post-cold war global pub lic
debate. As such, due to its evocative power in expressing the hopes of a better world it
has a strong influence in organizing the perception of citizens as well as enhancing the
importance of the various actors claiming to be part of civil society. Besides this
evocative power there is a fundamental political issue: are civil societies capable of
effectively expressing, organizing and advancing the demands of citizens? Can they
fulfill the role of intermediary spaces between individuals and social groups and the
political power structures, in a context in which political parties are increasingly
devalued?

The concept of civil society cannot be simply set aside using the argument that it
doesn’t fulfill the basic standards of scientific social theory as demonstrated by the
increasing criticism of social scientists on the limited usefulness of the concept. 3 A
critical approach in addition to scrutinizing its scientific explanatory relevance, needs
to: 1) understand why the concept has become so important, 2) explain why and how
it has been appropriated by so many different actors , and 3) analyze the role and
position of the different actors who claim to be part of or representative of civil
society and their role in the making of the contemporary political system.

This paper claims that the current theoretical debate has arrived at a cul-de-sac and the
actors of civil societies themselves, in particular independent NGOs in developing
countries, have begun to realize that they are confronting a crisis of growth and
increasing criticisms from the outside, in particular regarding their lack of transparency,
relative ineffectiveness and representation deficit. At the same time from the inside
there is frustration with the dependency on external donors and the overall poor results
of most of their actions, expressed in the dissonance between what it is expected of civil
society to produce and what it actually delivers, or between their high capacity for
raising issues and their low capacity to change entrenched inequalities in society and
the appropriation of the state by private interests. 4

2
In this work we return to and develop the arguments I have advanced in Sorj 2003 and 2004. I am
grateful to Joel Edelstein, Bila Sorj and John Wilkinson for their fruitful comments on an earlier version
of this paper and the discussions with Miguel Darcy and the members of the “Working Group on Global
Governance” of the Institute Fernando Henrique Cardoso and of several NGOs with whom I discussed
the arguments of this paper. It goes without saying that the responsibilities for any mistakes are only
mine.
3
For critical analysis on the concept of civil society see David Chandler (2005), Adam Seligman (1992)
and Neera Chandhoke (2003).
4 See, for instance, the Conference on Civil Society, Governance and Integration in Africa
http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=29034

2
This is especially true in developing countries where the expectations for the new
democratic regimes were strongly related to the role of civil society in consolidating the
democratization of social life. As an example of this dissonance, in Latin America, the
number of NGOs after democratization grew exponentially ( in Brazil alone there are
half a million non-profit entities) 5 while social inequality and political instability
continue to feed the growing support for populist leaders who appeal directly to the
poor, using symbolic and material cooptation, weakening democratic institutions.
Although NGOs have become an important employment niche, thus becoming self-
centered and oriented toward their own reproduction, their future lies in their capacity to
continue to be legitimate social actors.

In this paper we argue that civil society’s most vocal expression in developing
countries, independent NGOS, although sharing some common elements with their
counter –parts in advanced countries are dependent NGOs. The concept of
dependency was elaborated mainly by Latin American social scientists to characterize
as developing countries those whose economic structures lack the capability to produce
locally technological innovation. 6 By extension we define dependent civil society
organizations as those whose main source of financing and political-social agendas
come from advanced countries. This, as we shall see, does not mean that it is impossible
to increase their space of autonomy and creativity. In fact, quite to the contrary, the
practical aim of this paper is to contribute toward renewal and to increase the political
role of civil societies in developing countries both in national and global affairs.

To achieve this aim civil societies will need to advance beyond the current political and
ideological discourse within which they are trapped, that of being by definition
essentially do- gooders against the evils of the state, politicians and civil servants. This
only delegitimates the democratic regime. In developing countries the poor people
know better than the ideologists of civil society, that private solidarity will not solve
their needs for an efficient legal and public security system, education, health, sewage,
electricity, water and urban services. Civil society will only be an important
democratizing factor if it becomes actively involved in the political system and the
transforma tion of state institutions and political parties.

To advance the debate on the concept and the role of actors claiming to be part of civil
society, social scientists need to engage in conceptual and empirical research, avoiding
theories based principally on wishful thinking and moral claims that substitute the
complexities of the real world with well intentioned rhetoric regarding the value of civil
society or of denunciations of the practical limitations of it’s activities. It is not that
moral orientations do not inform social analysis, on the contrary, but the XXth century
has taught us that if we want to be faithful to our values we need to mistrust social
processes, and understand that cooptation, deformation and unforeseen consequences
are the rule in social life, that intentions are only a starting point, and that “the road to
hell is paved with good intentions” both for individuals and organizations. Exercising
critical thinking can be seen as a negativist exercise and sometimes indeed it is. Without
the optimism and pragmatism of will, reason only produces linear deterministic

5 According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics – IBGE (2004) in 2002 there were
500.157 non-profit entities, of which 45.161 were devoted to “development and rights defense”, the
majority of which were created after 1990.
6
In the parlance of that period, developing countries were mainly producers of raw materials and final
goods, but were dependent on importing capital goods.

3
analyses that may tend toward paralysis and lead to defeatism. We need to do our best
to overcome both naïve optimism and negative criticism, although they are unavoidable
dangers in the art of understanding social reality.

We are conscious that classificatory systems and social concepts - be it, for instance, the
working class, religion, peasantry, enterprise, democracy- are precarious and can’t be
completely separated from their common sense meanings nor can they be defined in
such a clear way that their contours and content allow a clean cut isolation of the
phenomena in society. Social realities are plastic, changing and full of noise, and
defining what is the working class, religion, peasantry or democracy, always implies a
good measure of discretion by the social scientist. The best one can hope for is that the
definition will be as clear and inclusive as possible, acknowledging the complexities
and the lack of clear boundaries within social realities.

It can be argued that we are confronting a proto-reality, a new social phenomena in its
making and therefore unable at this moment to be easily grasped and conceptualized.
However with the concept of civil society these problems are magnified by the fact that
its various definitions (almost each author on the subject has his/her own) include the
most varied sets of actors and the concept is generally loosely related to wider
theoretical frames of social theories on contemporary society, in particular, the
functioning of the political system. However, social proto-realities cannot be an alibi for
intellectual confusion.

Our analysis is informed by the fact that our perspective on civil societies is that of a
person living in Latin America. As a sociologist I have experienced for decades the
tendency of our countries to be colonized by well- minded theories and theoreticians
from advanced countries who, in spite of their best declared intentions, disregard the
different local, social and political realities and the invisible relations of forces in the
production of knowledge and practice supported by the north/south and national
divides. But the main reason behind assuming a contextualized perspective is that
political theory is not disembodied from the societies in which it is produced and the
uncritical importation of concepts from different contexts can be, as we will see,
wasteful of human and material resources if not plainly harmful.

An historical and socially contextualized concept

As the bibliography on the subject has extensively explored, 7 the contemporary revival
of the notion of civil society is related to the opposition movements to communism in
Eastern Europe and to military dictatorships in Latin America. 8 What was the civil
society in these contexts? In the Polish case, for instance, the main actors were a trade
union (Solidarity) and the Catholic church, both strongly interrelated, while in Brazil
they were trade unions, professional associations (in particular lawyers and scientists),
sectors of the church, entrepreneurs and “alternative” (as well as mainstream) privately
owned press supported by the allowed opposition party.

7
See, inter alia, John Ehrenberg, 1999, Adam Seligman, 1992, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, 1992.
8
As well as in Cuba and China nowadays.

4
Most of these actors wouldn’t be included in current country reports being produced by
research centers on civil society, although in most of developing countries, religious
organizations are the main source of voluntary associations, solidarity and
philanthropic work, while privately- owned journals would be automatically excluded
as being part of the market or profit- oriented sector and trade unions might be
mentioned or not, but placed in limbo due to most civil society theoreticians’ diagnoses
which throw them into the waste bin of history.

Furthermore, the meaning and main actors of civil society today, in Poland and Brazil,
are quite different from that of the period of struggle against authoritarian states. In fact
civil society is an historically changing concept, it's origins are related to the work of
social philosophers in the XVIII and XIX century trying to define the sources of social
solidarity in a world where society, religion and the state, were split in separate sub-
systems and individuals had become autonomous and oriented by self-centered values
and aims in a market economy. 9 In the context in which the state, for most authors
(with the important exception of Hegel) 10 was to be reduced to a minimum program of
assuring law and order, the source of solidarity was sought in some characteristic in
human nature or transcendental dimension that would counteract the egoistic tendencies
produced by the market orientation. Civil society for most authors of the XVIII and XIX
century was comprised of all the forms of association present in society, including those
related to the market, with the exclusion of the state.

It is important to recall that most of these theories were produced much before the
explosion of the industrial revolution and the rise of social democracy. In the XX
century the old civil society theories became obsolete by a double transformation in
social theory and society. Social theory, which began to take shape in the second half
of XIX century, abandoned the idea of a human nature or transcendental force as the
basis for understanding social behavior. The source of solidarity, trust and social
integration was to be explained in terms of social processes linked to the structures of
societies and its institutions (for instance, division of labor, socialization, shared values,
shared interests, ideological domination). More importantly, from the second half of the
XIX century onwards, new realities like the workers’ movements, trade union and
socialist political parties created a new vector of solidarity in which the state itself
became both the main target and actor in the making of social welfare policies. This
new vector of social transformation was symbiotically associated to the national state,
itself interested in consolidating national unity and preempting social conflict.
Therefore, the questions posed by early liberalism found new answers in the increasing
complexity of political structures through the transformation and democratization of the
state. 11

The importance of labor social movements during most of the XX century obfuscated
the continued importance of other forms of associations and institutions of solidarity –
the family, local communities, friendship, religion, ethnicity, diasporas- and the various

9 See, inter alia, Simone Chamber and Will Kymlicka (2002), Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani,
2003, Neera Chandhoke (2004), Adam Seligman (1992) and Nancy Rosenblum, Robert C. Post (2002).
10 For whom only the state could reintroduce a universalistic ethos beyond individual or group interests.
On Hegel’s theory of civil society and the role of the state to overcome the particularistic orientation of
civil society, see Shlomo Avineri (1972).
11
On the process of the irradiation of the workers movement struggles on the whole of society and the
creation of the welfare state see Bernardo Sorj (2004).

5
forms in which these associations and institutions were differently absorbed by each
national political tradition. As we know, for instance, in the United States voluntary
participation in local associations had a major role in the maintenance of civic values
while in France the republican tradition stressed the state as consubstantiating the values
of freedom, solidarity and fraternity and centralized state institutions regulated
(generally weakening) most of the intermediary social institutions. In fact each
European democratic country offered variations of the ways in which the different
organizations of social solidarity (including trade unions and labor- based socialist
parties), were integrated in the creation of democratic societies, not to mention the
different realities of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the XX century.

Transferring the aura of XVIII and XIX century theories to current phenomena
doesn’t solve the problem of the contemporary meaning of civil societies in which the
state plays a central role as provider of public social goods, where social conflict is
politically and legally channeled and access to government is organized through the
confrontation of political parties’ in periodic elections. In this new context civil
societies’ role has deeply changed, and each national civil society is related to the
specific formation of it’s local socio-political structures, constitution of identities and
forms of trust and solidarity. 12

Instead of searching for one universal model of civil society we need to recognize that
there are a variety of civil societies. The historical roots of state formation, the national
political traditions and the ways that social conflict is organized, all these components
will define the specific place and meaning of civil society in different national contexts.
A concept of civil society detached from the different social and historical context needs
to be, as we will see, minimalist. Only after a systematic effort of identifying the
different meaning of civil society in contemporary societies, one can develop
typologies of civil societies related to their different socio-political contexts and try to
find out what are the common threads between them.

Civil society’s current “prestige” as well as it’s polysemic use is the product of
a strange convergence of different political traditions and social actors

After a century of latency civil society has become a fashionable concept, principally
due to the struggle against authoritarian military regimes in Latin America and
totalitarian communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In those contexts it represented the
highly heterogeneous universe of actors who shared the common aim of fighting to
democratize these political regimes. In so doing, with the end of communism and
(re)democratization of Latin American countries, civil society was in principle doomed
to be a short lived phenomena. But instead it has become a central concept in the
political life of developing and developed societies. What happened?

Civil society’s new central role in capitalist democratic societies began to rise both with
the criticism of the welfare state from the right and the crisis of the left produced by the
fall of communism and the crisis of socialist utopia. The criticism from the right came
12
See for instance Adam Seligman (1992) reflections on the impact on civil society of the particular
ways of formation of communal identities in eastern Europe and Israel .

6
as an attack on the increasing expansion of the state and its costs, on the welfare policies
that were argued to increase the incentive to stay out of work and the rise of single-
parent families, diminishing entrepreneurship and individual autonomy. The concept of
civil society, which this type of thinking supported was a return to solidarity- based civil
associations (be it the family, local organizations, the church or philanthropy). While in
the British tradition this was a return to classical liberal thinking in the United States it
was theorized as a return to Toquevillean democracy based on a myriad of local
associations as the main source of civic values and participation. 13 This trend of thought
became entangled with communitarianism and with the much publicized but
problematic concepts of social capital and trust, generally linked to a diversity of
political orientations.

On the left, the discovery of civil society was related to the abandoning of hope in the
working class and socialism as well as increasing criticisms to the welfare state as a
form of bureaucratization and invasion of creative social life. 14 Civil society from this
perspective was a way to struggle against the oppressive tendencies both of the market
and the state, creating a space of autonomy and free communication.

These two very different ideals of civil society were conflated in everyday life and
media, and in fact, in spite of their different origins, have some real convergences. Both
are a symptom, and an attempt at a solution to the current crisis of representation in
contemporary democracies, where political parties tend towards the center and the
political programs both of right and left wing offer minor differences losing their appeal
to mobilize and their capacity to produce new visions of society.

As the Washington Consensus reforms didn’t produce the expected results through
structural reforms delivering economic growth and modernization of the state and new
ideas were needed to transform social institutions, civil society matched the demand for
a malleable concept, with non- direct involvement in local politics, being supported
both from the right and the left. The consensus around civil society as an actor capable
of short-circuiting the state institutions (considered to be a source of corruption and
inefficiency) made of it the right idea for appropriation by international institutions (the
World Bank, the United Nations system, even the FMI). For the United Nations
system NGOs are an ally in their struggle to organize a transnational agenda that
bypasses national states’ monopoly on decision- making based on the principle of
sovereignty.

Thus civil society is related to very different ideologies and international actors. Does
this mean that we have different civil society organizations, each with a clearly defined
ideology? Not at all, many civil society organizations themselves and the majority of
citizens do not clearly identify with a given view of civil society. The ideologies and
theories of civil societies are only relevant to the extent that they capture the attention
of the major political and economic powers on the direction that these societies should
take. The effective reality of civil society cannot be reduced to the influence and wishes
of ideologists or social thinkers. Its practical dynamics do not fit either the desire of

13
See Peter Berger and John Neuhaus (1996) for a pioneer work on this kind of thought.
14
On the last point Jürgen Habermas (1989) had a central importance in advancing a left wing criticism
of the tendency of the welfare state to colonize social life. See also Pierre Rosenvallon (1984, 1995)
and Anthony Giddens (2000).

7
right wing thinkers of civic associations to diminish the role of the state, or the model
from the left of a radical space separated from the market and the state.

Understanding and defining the role and function of civil society is part of the
contemporary struggle for the reorganization of the political system both nationally and
internationally. Civil society becomes a privileged common field through which
different actors negotiate and advance different interpretations of social reality.
However it is not a neutral concept as it is embedded with strong connotations of
mistrust in relation to traditional political institutions.

Views on Civil Society

At the center of the civil society debate is the fundamental problem of the social
sciences: by which processes capitalist democratic societies, in spite of their natural
tendency to create possessive individuals, 15 produce institutions that aim toward
altruistic behavior, in which people are ready to invest their personal resources and even
their life, in advancing freedom and solidarity. The point is not so much why there is
altruistic behavior, an issue still in the philosophical (or, for others, biological sciences)
realm, but rather what are the specific characteristics of solidarity- oriented institutions
and their (effective) capacity and limitations to change society.

Insofar as civil society is an institution of modern democratic capitalist societies, an

explanation of what it is and how it works should be related to the overall social-
political and cultural context. As we have previously indicated, in authoritarian and
totalitarian regimes civil society refers to those groups or individuals who fight to open
the political system in order to create an effective public space and the promoting of
free associations of citizenship. The issue nowadays is to understand the role of civil
societies in contemporary democratic regimes.

Before advancing in the direction of characterizing contemporary civil society in

democratic countries we will discuss briefly the main theories of civil society. 16

a) Civil society as an autonomous actor - Much of the bibliography on civil society,

especially that coming from the left, emphasizes not only the autonomy of civil society
from the market and the state, but also its different logic, one in which individuals
communicate freely, giving voice to the excluded, without the barriers of economic and
political power. Does this ideal of civil society have any relation to what goes on in
reality?

Consider this: the Global Social Forum’s (which designates itself as the radical
expression of civil society) main venue has been the city of Porto Alegre. 17 The

15
On the concept of possessive individualism see C. B. Mcpherson (1962).
16
We have tried to separate different types of arguments although most authors use more than one, and in
some cases, like Michael Edwards (2004), explicitly assume an eclectic definition of civil society as an
agregate of various dimensions. For a useful annotated bibliography on Civil Society and NGOs see
Devora Seade, 2000.

8
speakers in the Forum who attracted the most participants were President Lula in 2003
(who said that in Davos he will represent the voice of civil society!), and in 2005
President Chavez, two politicians. Most of the participants at the Fora were from
middle- class origin, and outside participants came mostly from NGOs with paid tickets.
Those NGOs were comprised of professional staff and their leaders who are not elected
by the members of the NGOs themselves. Although its stands are open to diverse
expressions and organizations, the structure of the Fora round-tables and the choice of
speakers are decided by a small committee without any wider mandate. Porto Alegre
2005 Forum’s main financial resources came from the Brazilian federal, state and local
government and Petrobras (an enterprise criticized by some Brazilian NGOs for
disrespecting the environment). What is even more paradoxical is that one of the most
applauded countries in the Fora has been Cuba, whose government systematically
denies a role for civil society in the UN meetings and, in addition, the Brazilian
Landless Movement -while being an extremely centralized organization defending an
old model of socialist ideology also assumes a place of honor.

In fact, civil society organizations may be viewed as part of a continuum between the
state and the market, rather than as a radical alternative to the m Not only do they exist
because of the legal conditions assured by the state, but also the state and private
enterprise resources are generally their main source of financing. The ideal democratic
environment of free and autonomous communication has little resemblance to the real
world of civil society organizations (be it NGOs or church associations) where internal
democracy is in most cases non-existent (most of the medium and large NGOs
leadership are not elected, bureaucratic rules govern their functioning). This doesn’t
negate NGOs importance, only that of the theoretical frames that derive social realities
from abstract elaborations. Neither the market, the state nor civil society operate with
just one rationality, as shown, for example, by the importance of trust in commercial
relations, of values in political parties and of economic and bureaucratic power in civil
society organizations. If most radical social theorists of civil society would confront
their definitions of civil society with actual reality they would realize that they are not
describing a proto-phenomena but rather imagining an actor that is to a great extent
simply a functional substitute for the previously idealized working class.

A main feature of contemporary societies, to which we will return later, is the increased
melting of frontiers between social subsystems (judiciary, economy, politics and
science) rather than their increased autonomy. The image of an independent civil
society was related to situations of confrontation with authoritarian regimes, in which
civil society was seen as an autonomous actor confronting the state. In contemporary
democratic states there are no walls protecting the boundaries of civil society.

Therefore the real challenge that NGOs nowadays face and increasingly debate
worldwide is how to negotiate their degree of autonomy in their relations with their
financial supporters (the state, international agencies, foundations and enterprises). This
involves their increasing bureaucratization due to the need to adjust to external demands

17
At the time of the first Forum the municipality of the city was under the control of the Workers Party.
Porto Alegre is known for being the birthplace of the “participatory budget”, generally presented as an
example of a civil society achievement (see Leonardo Avritzer 2002). In practice the participatory
budget reality is much more complex , an extremely expensive exercise , open to the manipulation of
local activists and dependent on budget implementation, which is defined by the ad hoc political realities
of the government.

9
of donors and the unequal power relations between NGOs from the North and the
South. Instead of ignoring current tendencies the challenge is to redefine the relation of
civil society to the state, the political system and the market.

b) Agents of the good society - Civil society in the media has become synonymous with
anyone that by definition struggles for the good society. 18 This approach is based on a
naïve Manichean view that social institutions can have an a priori moral nature, and that
it can be taken for granted what the good society is, or, more precisely, who has the
power to define what is good. In this view we will need to recognize as good any
definition produced by any civil society actor, and they have numerous definitions of
the good society, many of them contradictory.

The most damaging political consequence of defining civil society as a monolith

oriented by the same basic (good) values is that it denies its intrinsic pluralist and
diversified composition and confers moral authority to anyone who defines himself as
part of civil society. Furthermore it implies that good values constitute a coherent
package of values. However, the history of the XX century is witness to the conflicting
tendencies between solidarity and freedom. In the name of solidarity people were ready
to kill those outside their group while in the name of freedom solidarity was put aside.
Some social processes, like individualism, put freedom first, while others (for instance,
religion and nationalism) solidarity. 19

The definition of civil society as composed of non- violent actors, 20 which would
exclude civil society groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, Hamas or the IRA, is also
problematic in spite of the personal dislike of most for violence. As an extreme
example, under this definition armed anti- nazis groups in the Second World War would
be excluded from civil society. Even from a normative perspective, it would be difficult
to exclude violence a priori as an instrument of self-defense and struggle against
oppression.

d) Pillars of democracy - Strengthening civil societies as the path to consolidate

democracy has become part of the credo of international agencies. 21 Although strong
civil societies are common in strong democracies, there is no direct link between civil
societies and the democratization of the state. 22 Civil societies do not produce naturally
or automatically civic values. Civil societies ha ve a dialectic relationship with the state,
rather than being their opposite or opponent. The more societies mistrust the state
institutions the more civil society will tend to be alienated and its actions will even
erode the legitimacy of democratic institutions. On the contrary, the stronger the
identification with the state’s main institutions the more civic civil society organizations
will become, to a point where the separation between civil society and the state’s basic
institutions will be almost effaced.

Only under a democratic state civic oriented civil societies flourish, but civil societies
can also beget undemocratic groups. This is particularly true in the context of weak or
corrupt states. They may produce a reaction from society which can support the likes of

18
Many authors advance this view. See in particular Michael Edwards (2004),
19
See Norberto Bobbio (1982) on the antinomies of values.
20
The market as a constitutive part of civil society is defended by John Kehane (2003).
21
See, for instance, www.worldbank.org/civilsociety/
22
See Ariel C. Armony (2004).

10
the ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Hamas in Palestine, or other similar civil society
organizations in the Islamic world. The bibliography has increasingly emphasized the
phenomena of uncivil societies (including criminal gangs, terrorist and violent political
groups), that is groups that do not accept the civic values of non- violent confrontation
in the public space. However, to a lesser extent according to each case, there are also
religious organizations in democratic states with age ndas that limit civil liberties. While
in the first case these groups are the expression of a wider issue, the consolidation of
alienated civil societies in social contexts in which there is a general mistrust in the
basic institutions of the state, in the second case they express a diversity of phenomena:
the increasing role of Christian fundamentalists in the United States and of
fundamentalist Islamic minorities in Europe who reject the secular tradition. 23 In such
contexts, many civil society organizations tend to amplify the mistrust in democracy. In
other words, associativism doesn’t automatically produce nor is it necessarily related to
civic or democratic values.

e) Third Sector Associations - The definition of civil society as the Third Sector, 24 that
is, as organizations which are not profit- oriented, seems in principle more useful,
especially because it lacks strong normative connotations, but it excludes informal
groups and individuals who engage in civic or public activities. Perhaps the most
important revolution in the information society was the result of the initiative of one
individual, Linus Torvalds who, with the support of an informal network, launched
Linux, the main platform of the free software movement. The importance of
internationa l pop stars in influencing international agendas sometimes seems to be more
relevant than that of NGOs. Informal gatherings (without formal association status) that
are so important in the developing countries, like the market place or bars, in which
much of the public debate and initiative take shape are also excluded from the formal
definition of the Third Sector.

The major limitation of the Third Sector concept is that it presupposes isomorphism
between itself and the first (State) and second (market) sectors. While those two have a
high level of formalization and stability (although in developing countries most of the
private enterprises have a high degree of informality) civil society is multiform. This is
even more so with the new means of communications, which allow for the constant
formation/transformation/disappearance of ad hoc informal groups. One of the main
characteristics of civil society is its creativity in expanding the limits and forms of
participation in the public space making it much more plastic and nebulous than the
market or the state.

Towards a sociological delimitation of Civil Society

23
On the issue of civil society and different religious traditions see Nancy Rosenblum and Robert Post
(2002).
24
The most important research centre using the Third Sector conceptual framework is the John
Hopkins University, Institute for Civil Society Studies, in particular see the work of his director Lester
L. Salamon in http://www.jhu.edu/~ccss/staff.html

11
The bibliography presents a mixed use of the concept of civil society, which is seen as
representing either an arena or a set of actors. As an arena, the bibliography does not
produce any argument to substitute the much consolidated concept of public space for
that of civil society. The public space is not an actor, it is the possibility for the
constitution of actors, and it includes everyone who, based on the rights of freedom of
expression and association engages, without external imposition, in value- oriented
debates and activities that affect the perception (and/or reality) that the members of
society have of themselves (from a local community to the global). The shape of the
public space and its actors depends on the actors themselves, their capacity for creating
new forms of expression, association and institutions. Public space is an historically
evolving institution, increasingly including new actors (at the beginning it was mainly
restricted to members of the elite; it took long periods of social struggles to include the
working classes and women). Also it’s shape has constantly changed, from small
intellectual clubs to political parties and trade unions to the current tendency toward
decreased face-to-face participation and the increased use of electronic means of
communication.

The public space includes all actors that engage in the public debate, including state
officers and members of government. State institutions are both the main guarantor of
the existence of the public space and one of its most important actors. As a public
sphere actor government doesn’t (or should not) mobilize its discretionary power,
being just one more participant in the construction of social consensus.

The public space is about free communication and organization. But communication
and organization in a capitalist democratic society depend on the capacity to mobilize
resources (human and material) capable of influencing the perception that society has of
itself. The idea of a public space where people communicate and organize free from
material resources and individual interests is an idealistic view advanced by such
diverse thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. 25 We should not
underestimate the reality of power in the public sphere in order to avoid an excessive
concentration of power by any actor (be it corporations, state organizations, religious
groups or, for that matter, NGOs).

Civil society in democratic regimes is therefore not an arena but a set of actors in the
public sphere who claim to be part of civil society. There is no a priori definition,
outside the political and cultural struggle of who should be defined as part of or
excluded from civil society. As such, defining civil society is itself part of the political
confrontation, appropriating and imposing one’s own meaning on the concept. The
only actor that can be plausibly excluded from a working definition of civil society is
the state, because it commands the resources and legal power delegated by citizens,
allowing it to retreat from the public debate and impose its decisions on the whole of
society. Any individual citizen and informal or formal group (from church
organization and sports clubs to trade unions) that engage in the public sphere is a
potential civil society actor.

25
See for instance the work by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992) heavily informed by Habermas
theory: “But the actors of political and economic society are directly involved with state power and
economic production, which they seek to control and manage. They cannot afford to subordinate strategic
and instrumental criteria to the patterns of normative integration and open-ended communication
characteristic of civil society”: ix. In later publications Arato (1995) has nuanced his argument.

12
The issue of whether one should exclude private enterprises or political parties from
civil society is an operational problem, not a matter of principle. Any private enterprise
that presents itself in the public realm with a given message (for instance, “we create
jobs” or “free enterprise produces economic growth”) is part of the civil society. By the
same token there is no theoretical justification for disqualifying political parties as a
central civil society actor in search of the public good. At best in some cases they can
be excluded in order to delimit the actors who are not directly involved in or seek to
become part of the government. But this should not exclude (the issue of) political
parties and congressman interaction with other actors of civil society, which is, as we
will see, central for the understanding of contemporary democracy and its challenges.
Finally the media have an ambiguous but central place in understanding the dynamics of
civil society. They are normally private enterprises but are the most important voice
through which civil society can express itself, becoming its main mirror, but a distorted
one by the private interests they represent.

The importance of maintaining an open definition of civil society is that otherwise one
is subjected to a normative discussion of who should or should not be included. Only
by keeping open the concept of civil society to anyone who claims to be part of it can a
non-partisan analysis of its changing meaning and the different ways that it is
appropriated by different social actors be made.

The analysis of societies should not be based on a priori definitions but on the
understanding of the social contexts and ways social actors search to advance their own
different definitions of who comprises civil society and what it’s role is. Civil societies
are not a given predetermined phenomena; they are what social actors make of
them.26 By doing so, they participate in the shaping of citizens’ perceptions of the
political system, highlighting some options and downplaying others. However, the
analysis should not be reduced to only understanding the symbolic confrontations but
should also include the human, organizational, political and economic resources that the
struggle for meaning mobilizes.

NGOs are the main novelty of contemporary Civil Societies

Beyond the wide operational definition of civil society as including each individual or
group of individuals acting to influence the public sphere we need to identify the
specific new aspects of civil society in contemporary global and national politics.
Contemporary discussion on civil society is related to its role in advancing citizen
representation, the construction of collective values in the making of the political
system and the ways by which citizens can influence the destiny of society through
participation in the public sphere as opposed to the traditional forms of political
representation.

As we mentioned earlier, the rise of the civil society idea in the last decades is related to
the crisis of the socialist secular utopia and its main vectors, trade unions and political
parties on the one hand and the advance of neo-liberalism on the other. The
26
See Ariel C. Armony’s (2004) excellent book on the inexistence of a necessary “ …positive and
universal link between civil society and democracy…”, 2004.

13
disenchantment with the state as the main agent for changing society, coupled with the
central role of the media in the making of public opinion and political campaigns,
increasing individualism, social fragmentation and the rise of the discourse of human
rights and group identities, was the ground on which from the 1970’s onward NGOS
began to expand exponentially. But the growth of this new political form by which
solidarity expresses itself nowadays wouldn’t have been possible without an important
amount of resources from European international cooperation, the United Nation system
and national states, and, in advanced countries, voluntary contributions, funneled to
finance these new organizations.

What are the NGOs? Civil society associations (cultural and sports clubs, professional
and scientific organizations, Masonic groups, philanthropic institutions, churches, trade
unions, diasporic groups, community associations, to mention only some) existed
throughout the XXth century. While the above mentioned organizations directly
represent or are expected to be representative of the public whose interests they
advance, contemporary NGOs claim legitimacy based on the moral strength of their
argument. Therefore, what is new in contemporary civil societies are the NGOs,
organizations that advance social causes without aiming to receive a mandate from
the people that they claim to represent.

Traditional philanthropic organizations, which also do not represent their public, never
claimed to be the voice of their clientele, and the church’s hierarchical power is based
on the belief that they have a mandate from heaven, being the representative of God on
earth. Revolutionary parties, like the Communist party, saw themselves as the vanguard
to which the working class would finally identify and adhere. The precursors of
contemporary NGOs, like the Red Cross or Action Aid and Oxfam (the last two later
changed their orientations) although motivated by strong moral humanitarian values, did
not intend, at their origin, to take a politically partisan position nor to represent the
views of the people they attended, but only to improve their lives.

NGOs are therefore a real revolution in the realm of political representation. As with
many social phenomena they have their precursors: in this case in the organizations and
people who struggled against slavery or, later, for women’ suffrage and for consumer
rights. But during the XXth century the representation of public causes and the debate in
the public space was mostly channeled through the trade unions and political parties.

This new phenomena of representation without delegation, or perhaps more fittingly,

self-delegation without representation, is related to the above mentioned social
processes which channeled the creative energies of social activists into new forms of
organizations detached from or without clear and permanent links to the public they
claim to defend. This is obviously more so in relation to the NGOs in developed
countries that support developing countries social groups and causes.

Not being based on the direct support of the community they claim to represent, NGOs
are dependent on external resources for their existence. Differently from most of the
traditional civil society organizations, which were based mainly on voluntary work, the
NGOs are run by professional staff, hence, they become an important employment
niche. Finally, their lack of a stable and homogeneous social base from which they can
exert political pressure, induces NGOs to advance their agendas through ad hoc social
mobilizations with media-reaching objectives.

14
This characterization of NGOs is much narrower than the existing universe of NGOs as
legally defined. Many legally defined NGOs fit the traditional civil society
associations’ model of organizations, representing a given membership (from trade
unions, to professional organizations and community based NGOs). The novelty of the
development of the new phenomenon of NGOs in the last decades is the creation of a
political actor without a direct mandate from their target constituency. The new
NGOs are not only a new type of actor but they have changed the landscape of
traditional representative NGOs, especially the smaller community based ones. While
previously, in developing countries, community- based NGOs interacted mainly with
government from whom they asked the delivery of goods, now community based-
NGOs increasingly follow the model of the new NGOs of searching for outside
nongovernmental funding. This is done directly or indirectly through linking themselves
to major national and international NGOs. In the process they become increasingly
professionalized and carry the social projects themselves.

NGOs are a developing story not a fixed reality. As any social phenomena
contemporary NGOs don’t have fixed characteristics. Their organizational forms,
ideologies and political role are in constant mutation and in the last decades they have
undergo ne, as we will see below, important changes. The world of NGOs is an
increasingly complex galaxy which is growing exponentially in numbers and in issues
(to mention but a few: ecology, gender, human rights, human security, children, animal
rights, development, consumption, humanitarian aide, information society, regional
integration, education, HIV, arms control, health, rural and urban development, drugs,
social research, education, trade, corruption, international finances, the elderly, each
of them with their own sub-division); origin (created by individuals or independent
groups, communities, business, religious, , ethnic and gender groups, diasporas and
political parties among others), levels of activity (local, national and international), type
of staff (voluntary or professional, although most NGOs include both); type of
financing (voluntary subscriptions, government and international agencies, private
foundations, although most NGOs have a variety of funding sources), size (small,
medium and large), ideologies (the greater the number of NGOs and issues they
address the more diverse the views they represent on national and international
problems), location (country, region), type of activity (advocacy, social projects).

The variety in origin, financing, issues, ideologies and geographical location, allows one
to produce a large diversity of typologies of NGOS. None of them however, from a
sociological perspective, is a priori more relevant than any other. Typologies depend on
the researcher’s focus, questions and approaches. Studies on the world of NGOs is a
growing field developing a variety of analytical approaches; some emphasize internal
organizational issues while others focus on their ideological tendencies, and on their
impact on society. 27 Still the field is plagued by normative overtones, influenced by the
rhetoric of the NGOs themselves.

Last but not least there is the issue of sources of financing. While some of the major
NGOs in developed countries receive an important part of their financing from
voluntary contributions, public/private foundations and international institutions,
external financial support is central for most NGOs, in particular in developing

27
On the different research centers` approaches see Dayse Marie Oliveira, 2005.

15
countries. In the hands of these institutions as well as those of large foundations
(mostly American) and official European cooperation, NGOs have become a civil
society proxy and the delivery tool for their policies of international cooperation. This
financing always has, implicitly or explicitly, strings attached. The world of NGOs can
only be understood as part of a larger chain in which donors have a central role.
Directly or indirectly donors are a major player in the making of NGOs agendas.
Although NGOs have some capacity to influence their policies their fight for survival
pushes them to adapt to donors’ agendas. As we will see this is more dramatic in
developing countries where voluntary donations are generally not relevant and external
resources are decisive. In the case of international cooperation there is an additional
issue, that of the enormous amount of money that individual countries and the European
Union spend on their own “experts” as well as the requirements they create to purchase
products produced from their own countries. 28

There isn’t a homogenous and predefined political role for NGOs

NGOs are embedded in their local political reality. The role of NGOs in democratic
regimes is immersed in and dependent on the level of democratization of the society and
it’s political system. The lesser the democratic characteristics of a society the greater are
the chances of NGOs becoming detached from the political system, thus becoming
alienated from the national institutions, which can lead them to play a role in
weakening the construction of a democratic state.

Civil societies can’t be dissociated from the social and political structures within which
they flourish. The role and political influence of NGOs in a particular society, as we
already have pointed out with respect to “civil society,” depend on the societal context
(in extreme cases they may have vanished or been repressed as in fundamentalist
Muslim countries or dictatorial regimes, like Syria, Iran, China, and Cuba). In other
regions (as shown in general terms in the following examples) civil society has quite a
diversity of roles according to different social realities. 29

In many African countries NGOs rather than being one expression of civil society they
are it’s main component and they act as an interface between international donors and
local society. For many critics they have a similar function to that of missionaries from
the western world and therefore are alienated from the actual issues and problems of the
construction of a democratic state. According to one author: “Thus, the challenge for
civil society in Africa is to strengthen the democratic state by collaborating with its
government structures at various levels, by assisting in restoring the social contract
between the state and its citizens and by pressing for necessary reforms which turn the
vision of effective civil society-state co-governance at the community level into reality
(Mbogori et al. 1999: 120).” “To conclude, civil society stakeholders have to recognize
that “strengthening civil society requires as an indispensable condition the strengthening

28
See Romilly Greenhill, Patrick Watt et al., (2005).
29 There are innumerous descriptive reports and some solid academic analysis on national civil societies
and NGOs. See for instance, the countries reports in the IDS site: http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/civsoc/ and the
annotated bibliography in Deborah Eade (2000). Some interesting cases studies can be also found in
Robert W. Hefner (1998), Sara E., Mendelson, John K. Glenn, (2002) and Sudipta Kaviraj) and Sunil
Khilnani, 2003. On India see Rajesh Tandon and Ranjita Mohanty, 2000.

16
of the state: the state and civil society stand or fall together!” (Marcussen 1996: 421 in
Kumi Naidoo and Volkhart Finn Heinrich, 2000: 12).

In many parts of Africa, NGOs, when they are allowed to function, absorb a
significant portion of middle class professionals subtracting actual or potential cadres
from government. Due to their almost complete dependency on foreign resources local
NGOs’ agendas need to adapt to foreign donor priorities and so-called international
NGOs’ agendas, acting many times as sub-contracted services. Supported virtually in
their entirety through external funding, they offer “international” salaries, meaning a
much higher salary than those earned by public officials. This enables their members to
preserve a degree of autonomy and a critical distance from the widespread corruption in
public administration. NGO budgets are expanding—a significant portion of
international cooperation funding currently is allocated directly to “civil society”—
thereby transforming these organizations into genuine power centers with enough clout
to question the legitimacy of established governments in international forums

The universe of NGOs in Latin America has become tremendously diversified since the
late 1960’s when it was funded mainly through external sources and it’s main goal was
to participate in the resistance against authoritarian regimes. In Latin America, NGOs
generally have less political weight than in Africa, although their voices reverberate in
the media. In the poorer Andean countries NGOs play an important role in supporting
local indigenous movements.

In recent decades, the relative importance of European funding to Latin American

NGOs has declined (increasingly concentrated in Africa and Eastern Europe) while
public funding sources are on the rise, as well as support from the business sector,
which, influenced by the socially responsible company discourse, has significantly
increased its involvement in social projects in countries like Brazil (Anna Peliano,
2005). Governments and international agencies turn to NGOs to carry out specific
actions, which they make use of to offset dwindling resources and bureaucratic
pigheadedness and corruption. Financial support from their national states is considered
as a mixed blessing, due to their tendency to delay payments or simply write them off
with a change in government. The search for financing from the state and the private
sector has increased the identity crisis of NGOs. They are criticized by outside
intellectuals as a tool of the state or as the marketing of private firms thus creating a
feeling of orphanhood within NGOs.

The Latin American situation is an example of a world of NGOs which only partially
reflects the dynamic of the national civil society. To some extent it reflects the
disposition of foreign donors to support independent NGOs, in the beginning with
relatively limited monitoring. Foreign support has now diminished (and, in any case, it
couldn’t match the increasing growth of the sector) and most of the new sources of
financing are less generous, increasingly monitored and linked to very specific areas,
not always those preferred by the NGOs themselves. 30 Still, local NGOs have proven
themselves, in some countries, as in Brazil, to possess a great capacity for the
mobilization of public resources and private firms in social projects, and a remarkable
creativity, advancing applied research and engaging state institutions in some areas, like
the struggle against urban violence 31 and, in particular, in establishing one the best
30
On case studies of NGOs in different Latin American countries see the site www.alop.or.cr
31
See for, instance, the case-study of Viva Rio in Bernardo Sorj (1993).

17
worldwide programs against AIDS. In Argentina equally they had a central role in
keeping the memory of the of the people killed during the military dictatorship.

The Arab world is a clear example of the limits of creating an independent civil society
with civic values in a context where sociability and NGOs themselves are impregnated
with a culture where conflicts are not peacefully resolved and where dominant
religious values do not support the idea of institutions autonomous from religious
leaders influence. The authoritarian states in the Arab world whose business interests
are intermingled with the political system are not supportive of independent NGOs.32

NGOs in Europe, while playing a major role in advancing solidarity causes and utopian
values as well as being an important source of employment do not have much
importance as carriers of social policies. In some countries, such as France, for instance,
NGOs subcontract with the state and/or lay the groundwork for the entry of public
services in “difficult” neighborhoods. Many of the mainstream NGOs in Europe focus
primarily on international cooperation, while others have an important role in
addressing issues such as environment, women’s and minority rights and undocumented
workers. In Germany a social movement typical of civil societies, the ecology
movement was successful in transforming itself into a relatively important political
party, although in other European countries it was less successful (although the Greens
did participate for some years in the Belgium government). Transforming a social
movement based on one issue into a political party has proved a difficult task, not only
in obtaining wider support but also because of the strains it creates between the social
movement’s “purist” attitudes and the need for compromises related to the realities of
power.

In the United States, the country that is considered the model for civic associativism,
there have been important changes as Theda Skocpol shows in her excellent book
(2003). Skocpol argues that the main issue in the contemporary U.S. is not a decrease
in civic association but rather changes in the ways in which it is organized and functions
and it’s social and moral density. In the classical period North American civic
associativism was constituted by cross-class voluntary local organizations 33 which
were linked to Washington through federative structures. Its activities were not
oriented towards a reduction of state expansion, on the contrary, many civil society
demands were to expand state welfare policies. Contemporary civic associations are
either self- help endeavors (Weightwatchers being the civil society association with the
biggest constituency) or comprised of persons from the same social group (mostly
privileged) with low levels of interaction, managed by specialists in lobbying and fund
raising campaigns.

The new civil society voice is therefore no more the expression of local bottom- up
associations but of specialized advocacy staff. The new advocacy groups are highly
professionalized and an important employment niche, with activities flowing from the
top to the bottom and strongly commercially- minded. Participation has become almost
32
See Ben Néfisa, Sarah, Abd al-Fattah, Nabil, Hanafi, Sari, Milani, Carlos, 2004.
33
Theda Skocpol’s main blind spot is that she includes trade unions as part of the traditional US multi-
class civic association model while they are constituted by only one social group. Therefore she doesn’t
isolate in her analysis the specific impact of the decline of trade unions in the United States on wealth
distribution.

18
reduced to letter-sending, through which organizations advocate their causes and
supporters send their donations. These changes reflect the transformation of the U.S.
social structure, the new role of educated women (previously a main pillar of voluntary
work) in the workforce, the decline of the trade union movement, the increasing
importance of foundations and of the new communications and media in politics and in
particular of new forms of upper middle classes, sociability which isolate them from the
rest of society. 34

The so-called Global Civil Society reproduces the North/South divide

Modernity from its onset was a transnational cultural phenomenon. The main ideologies
of modernity; liberalism, nationalism, socialism and fascism, were the product of the
constant intermingling of thinkers and practitioners from all continents. Through the
circulation of books and traveling elites (in particular of colonial intellectuals studying
in European universities) the modern world system of nation-states’ societies was
shaped by the wave of ideologies which originated in Europe and which was assimilated
and adapted to local conditions. Traveling to the great European metropolis was a must
for the dominant classes of the periphery who on their return organized in their own
countries political clubs, Free Masons lodges, Positivist temples and nationalist parties.

At the end of the XIX and beginning of the XXth century, the great migrations from
Europe transferred both people and ideas, spreading trade- union and socialist parties,
while the mass media (press and radio) converged in the creation of trans- national
public opinion. In the last decades, cable television and the Internet have increased the
quantity and quality of information circulating worldwide making it available almost
instantaneously.

The creation of contemporary world public opinion movements, as expressed in the

civil war in Spain, the fight against Nazism, colonialism, and peace movements and in
favor or against communism was a consolidated process by the second half of the XXth.
century. In the last decades trans- national public opinion has changed not only due to
new communication systems but principally as an expression of major ideological,
political and social transformations. The decline of political parties as the main vehicle
for forming and mobilizing public opinion, the end of the capitalist/communist divide,
the decline of inclusive ideologies, the increase in the individualization process and
social fragmentation as well as new collective identities, have increased the importance
of mass media in shaping public opinion. Public opinion has become more moody and
reactive to issues rather than oriented by long term and clearly defined political goals,
and easily changes according to the latest events and changing perceptions. But
transnational public opinion was and continues to be largely dominated by economic,
political and cultural powers based primarily in advanced countries. It is far from
obvious whether the changes in the dynamics of international relations since the fall of
communism have increased the relative influence of developing countries` public
opinion (and governments) in the international sphere.

34
On the US see also the interesting book by Christopher Beem (1999).

19
While there is undoubtedly something that can be called transnational public opinion it
is confusing to speak of a global public opinion. To become meaningful and more than
just a metaphor such a concept would need to encompass the existence of an effective
space for all national public opinions to express themselves, hence a new type of world
citizenship uprooted from national interests. Considering that the citizens of many
countries do have no means to make their voices heard even locally, the notion of a
global public opinion refers mainly to the confrontation in the world arena of a still
limited number of citizens and elites.

The diffusion of ideas from national or regional contexts to the world level continues to
be the most important cultural vector of social change. Human rights, free market,
feminism and environmentalism, to mention some of the most important ideologies of
the contemporary world have shaped trans- national public opinion through a complex
process of formation of global agendas (that is agendas for social change that claim to
have universal validity). However the infrastructure of intellectual and material
resources needed for the formation of global agendas is highly influenced by the
South/North divide and needs a careful analysis.

Classical national civil societies (what we have called representative civil society) in
the XIXth. and even more in the XXth. century created a large network of
transnational organizations. Probably the one most resembles more the ideal global civil
society of a free space of autonomous communication is the scientific community
(although not completely free from the local reality of each national scientific
community due their differing capacity to mobilize financial resources). Political
parties and trade unions also created transnational networks, not to mention the different
religious groups, which always had the tendency to go beyond national frontiers. In all
these cases the differential power between poorer and richer countries, or between
center and periphery (in the case of communist parties, Moscow and Peking had a
dominant role) didn’t allow one to speak of global civil society organizations.
However in some cases the logic of some organizations (like scientific or religious
institutions) had a set of principles, beliefs and interests that protected them to some
extent (at least in democratic countries) from the national spheres of power.

It would be legitimate to speak of some of these organizations (for instance the Catholic
Church or the scientific community) as global, in the sense that they have a common
transnational set of rules and institutions which although influenced by local conditions
are relatively self-contained sub-systems capable of communicating and defending
world- views beyond the national societies. These relatively closed institutions not only
exist thanks to shared beliefs but also due to the infrastructure and resources that they
are capable of mobilizing both nationally and internationally.

However, the idea of a global civil society35 is at best an elusive metaphor which
doesn’t make much sense empirically and can easily induce one to a mystified view of
contemporary politics. As we mentioned before, national civil societies are constituted

35
For an overview on the concept of Global Civil Society and different perspectives, see Gideon Baker
and David Chandler (2005) and Mary Kaldor et al, 2004. For a critical analysis of the concept of Global
Civil Society see Gordon Laxer, Halperin Sandra (2003) and David Chandler (2005). Several authors
present their own idiosyncratic view of what is civil society. See, inter alia, John Keane, 2003, Michael
Walzer (2002, and José Vidal Beneyto (2003). For a quantitative analysis see Lester M-. Salamon et al.
(2003).

20
by very heterogeneous actors. There is no internal unity between these actors nor do
most of them have an international impact. In fact most theories of global civil society
do not refer to a supranational level in which national civil societies express their views
but rather to new supranational players advancing global agendas, the international
NGOs (known as INGOs)..

Mary Kaldor et al, for instance present a definition of global civil society as “… the
sphere of ideas, values, networks and individuals located primarily outside the
institutional complexes of family, market, and state, and beyond the confines of
national societies, polities, and economies.” (Ibid: 4). The authors trying to further
clarify their definition indicate that the participants of global civil society and their
values are “… at least in part, located in some transnational arena and not bound or
limited by nation-states or local societies” (Ibid.) The main problem here is the
meaning of the concept of transnational arena, a concept that is not defined by the
authors. In fact in the contemporary information society Internet makes transnational
any local act and cable TV can transform any local event into a worldwide spectacle.

The fragility of the definition is not improved by the authors adding that “Global civil
society is also about the meaning and practice of human equality in an increasingly
unjust world… is about finding and giving ‘voice’ to those affected by the old, new
emerging inequities….. it is about private action for public benefit…”.(Ibid.) As we
have mentioned before, basing a social concept on moral intentions begs the
sociological question: who defines who are the makers of the discourse that the authors
identify as being typical of civil society. As David Chandler convincingly argues 36 the
values of global civil society could only be defined by global society itself, which
presupposes the existence of free communication of the members of global society, who
define what their values are. And such global arena and actors don’t exist.

The concept of global civil society is generally based on methodological cosmopolitism

(as against methodological nationalism) which envisages social processes beyond the
frame of the national states. 37 According to the cosmopolitan view the old perspective
circumscribed social processes within the boundaries of national realities and viewed
the state as a natural phenomena and the main actor in the international sphere. This
argument is to a great extent based on creating a straw man: sociological analysis has
always shown that the historical origin of the national state and it’s main theoretical
frames were not bounded by national realities. In fact the main mistake was to consider
this as a universal process located in given countries or regions. A similar but opposite
mistake is made by methodological cosmopolitism by stating the existence of a global
entity disembedded from local conditions .

Still, without overrating the importance of non-state actors in the international arena, the
criticism made of the realist school of international relations (which focus mainly on
national sovereign state interests) is relevant and the increasing role of international
actors beyond the national states is an important point. Transnational communities of
activists (not only NGOs, but also religious groups, diasporas, scientists) have an
important role in the making of international politics although this point should not be

36
See Martin Shaw (2004) and Ulrich Beck (2004).
37
See the articles by Shaw and Beck, for a critique of the constructivist approach see David Chandler
(2004, Chapter 7).

21
restricted to contemporary world politics, since the beginning of modern times they
have always been important transnational players. 38

Yet it is not that the actors described by the label “global civil society” have no key role
in world politics. They do, but the concept supposes the existence of a cosmopolitan
actor and a free global arena which don’t find any support in empirical reality. It’s
stress on a global perspective overlooks that the national state is still the main locus of
wealth distribution and life opportunities for most inhabitants of the planet. Maybe the
world should be different but while it does not change in regard to the importance of the
national state’s role in wealth distribution the real fight is about improving the relative
position of the poorer countries and the poor within each country. Adopting a
cosmopolitan view implies that someone (an individual or organization) can be the
bearer of a cosmopolitan perspective. Does this mean that beyond the subjective
intentions of individuals/group, there are actors who are capable in practice of being
uprooted from their national contexts? The concept of global civil society supposes that
for the actors of this new arena the national realities of unequal power and cultural bias
have disappeared thanks to the shared values of those that integrate this new realm. But
the facts speak otherwise. The presumed members of the global civil society nourish
their cosmopolitan values from their national cultural realities and they finance their
activities with the support of public and private donors of their countries who set the
parameters for their action.

The so-called International NGOs, that is organizations who defend causes beyond their
national frontiers without a mandate from the people they claim to defend, have a
complex genealogy within humanitarian movements and organizations beginning in the
XIX century. The anti-slavery movement in the late XVIII century and the Red Cross
in the XIX century were followed in the XX century by organizations mainly oriented
toward mitigating the effects of war or humanitarian crisis (Save the Children in 1932
and Oxfam in 1942 followed in the aftermath of second world war by Care, Christian
Aid, Caritas and World Vision). But it was only in the last decades of the XXth century
that the NGOs multiplied and became a partisan player in the struggle to establish
globalization agendas.

Most of the humanitarian NGOs, like Oxfam, transformed themselves in this process,
becoming involved in international political confrontation on the ways to reduce
poverty and support development, while new, mostly secular NGOs (unlike their
predecessors) were created in the field of environment, humanitarian aid, human rights
and every possible area - to mention some of the most known: Amnesty International
(created in l961), Green Peace, Human Rights Watch, Medecins sans Frontieres, (all of
them appearing in 1971).

Contemporary NGOs have become the main vector for the elaboration of global
agendas of solidarity. They disseminate new values and denounce inhumane conditions,
governments and international agencies activities. The transformation of NGOs into
political actors is generally presented in the bibliography through three periods: a first
phase of philanthropic orientation until the 1960’s which was followed by one centered
on development concerns in the 1970’s and 1980’s and finally, the current one, of

38
Still, it can be argued, as Chandler does, that some of the players do not support alternative agendas to
those of their national states, rather their international agendas are supported by national governments as
part of their internal self-legitimating role.

22
radicalization and denouncement of globalization (tackling mainly the issues of human
rights, gender, environment, the role of international finance agencies, trade barriers to
agricultural products, patents and multinationals’ code of conduct). Of course there are
important nuances between the attitude of the different NGOs and this periodization
disconsiders the importance of NGOs (and foundations) related to right wing (generally
religious but also secular) tendencies. However the common factor is the politization of
NGOs and their increasing importance in political and cultural confrontations.

Most international NGOs` national (or multi- national) headquarters are based in
developed countries, where they get most of their financial resources and associates.
Undoubtedly any NGO is dependent on donors. But the agendas of NGOs based in the
North are the expression of their own societies from which they receive their material
resources while most “independent” Southern NGOs depend on support from outside
their countries. In so being, the world of NGOs is not a network of equals but is based
on a hierarchical power structure. NGOs based in the North, even very small ones, have
the capacity to act internationally while major Southern NGOs get support mostly to act
nationally. 39 While most NGOs are located in the South the so-called International
NGOs (INGOs) are mainly from the north. Hence the paradox that the so- called
global civil society is oriented by values of equity but there is no equity in global civil
society.

The idealization of a global civil society leads to a representation of the world as unified
by actors with a common view capable of transcending national interests and cultural
realities. But the reality is quite different: national or regional interests and culture are a
constitutive part of the NGOs. This does not imply the impossibility of alliances and
productive cooperation between NGOs from the North and South. But we should not
underestimate important disagreements between NGOs from the South and North on
concrete issues, be it the governance of the Internet, agricultural subsidies, organizing
humanitarian aid, fair trade, or the priority to be given to environmental issues.

NGOs from the North are capable of establishing and disseminating global agendas that
are off limits for most of their third world counterparts. 40 Furthermore NGOs from the
North have the resources to establish their local representation in developing countries,
contracting some of the best local cadres and sometimes even “buying” local NGOs.

This doesn’t mean that we agree with authors, working within Bourdieu`s theoretical
framework, like Guilhot (2005) and Dezalay (1996, 2003), who argue that NGOs have
become the vector through which U.S. foundations and universities co-opt intellectuals
and disseminate neo-liberal agendas in the Third World. There is an increasing number
of studies which argue that NGOs have become instrumental for neo- liberal policies,
compensating for the state retreat from welfare activities, and, in a similar vein, some
critics consider the discourse of human rights functional to the liberal view of a minimal
state coupled with a deregulated market. Many critics also argue that NGOs are
increasingly distancing themselves from grassroots and social movements, becoming an

39
In this sense the world map presented in The State of Global Civil Society 2003 (Mary Kaldor et. al.
2004), which shows global civil society being mainly based in advanced countries is obviously biased by
the north-south relationship: the main criteria for density of global civil society is the existence of
International NGOs!.(Helmut Anheier and Hagai Katz, 2004)
40
Perhaps one of the few local innovations that has become part of the international agenda is the so-
called people’s banks, which lend to micro-entrepreneurs and producers.

23
appendage of international financial organizations and government agencies, weakening
the political capacity of popular groups. 41

This perspective represents an over-simplification of reality, although, as we will see,

some of the arguments have some grounds, in particular in relation to the NGOs
technocratization and distancing from social movements. However, the increasing
isolation of NGOs is part of a general social shift, in which the increasing fragility of
popular sectors is part of a major structural change in many developing countries –the
weakening of trade unions and left-wing political parties and the loss of their utopian
horizon. The world of NGOs is not homogeneous but a complex galaxy capable
sometimes of producing useful innovations, in particular on the issue of gender which
expanded womens’ participation in different fields of public life. In general the human
rights discourse is a fundamental contribution to society, even if it too often suffers
from a strong bias towards denunciation often incapable of establishing a positive
agenda.

Furthermore, the identification of structural adjustment policies as the source of all evils
affecting Latin American societies is misplaced. Social inequalities on the continent are
based on a stable long term tendency and undoubtedly many adjustment policies had
negative social impacts but they were supported –at least passively- by most of the
population which perceived them as the only available alternative for stopping
hyperinflation and diminishing increasingly unacceptable corporatist privileges
accumulated by entrepreneurs and sectors of the middle- classes working for
government and state companies. 42

The one- sided criticism of the relations between developed countries’ donors and
developing countries NGOs is based on a simplistic view of the cultural and political
struggles in advanced countries, dismissing their different political and ideological
currents. Many first world foundations oppose the governments of their own countries
and their agendas do not support the dominant policy orientations. In many cases they
had an important role in supporting resistance to dictatorships which where blessed by
the US government as well as supporting independent research centers, 43 fruitful local
advocacy and social projects. The transference of agendas doesn’t mean that local
NGOs have no room for maneuver or that the imported agendas are not filtered by local
conditions. 44 But undoubtedly the issues, priorities and policies of developed countries
and the boards of international organizations tend to disregard or underplay the different
priorities, challenges and needs of the countries in which they act. 45

To claim that NGOs in Latin America have become a substitute for the state in
delivering social policies is unsustainable: their capacity to deliver social public goods
is extremely limited. The stronger the economy of the country the more this is true: in
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela or Mexico, to cite the most powerful
economies on the continent, it is unreasonable to expect that NGOs would be capable of

41 See, for instance, on Latin America, James Petras (2000) and on Africa, Firoze Manji and Carl O'Coill
(2002).
42
For an analysis of the Brazilian case, see Bernardo Sorj (2000)
43
On the role played by the Ford Foundation in Brazil, see Bernardo Sorj, 2002)
44
See for instance Bila Sorj, Aparecida Moraes analysis of the “translation” of feminist oriented policies
in Brazil (2005).
45
See Anthony Bebbington and Diana Mitlin (1996).

24
substituting state policies. At the best they are being contracted by governments to
implement local services, an important issue on which there is still need for in-depth
studies. In Latin America the main problem is not NGOs substituting the state, but
rather increasing their capacity to become an autonomous partner with the state
through advancing innovative projects that can be transformed into social policies and
having a more productive relationship with the political system and social movements.

Finally, Erik Reinert’s (2005) concept of “welfare colonialism” which characterizes

international aid as only acting on the symptoms of poverty while supporting an
economic model that maintains the status quo is a powerful reminder that beyond the
discussion of more effective social policies and civil society solidarity actions
developing countries need to advance their own development agendas, absorbing
technologies and channeling local entrepreneurial and material resources according to
their relative position in the international system.

NGOs currently confront multiple challenges

The challenges faced by NGOs are one expression of the general issue of democratic
institution- building in contemporary societies in which the de-differentiation of sub-
systems (Niklas Luhman, 2001) and individualization and the de- institutionalization of
values (Danilo Martuccelli, 2000) are central tendencies. By the de-differentiation of
sub-systems we mean the increased blurring of societal sub-system frontiers, through
the interpenetration and colonization of the various spheres of power (for instance,
economic power influencing scientific research, judiciary influence on political
decisions, media impact on politics, and in general the pervasiveness of private sector
influence on the different areas of social life). By the de- institutionalization of values
we mean the increasing detachment of individual values and identity- formation from
state institutions (in particular the school) as well as the decline of traditional
institutions of representation (trade- unions, professional bodies, political parties). 46

These tendencies are reflected in the formation and dynamics of NGOs. The effacing of
frontiers between subsystems expresses itself in the colonization of NGOs by the state,
international agencies and the market, while the identification with transnational values
and agendas are both facilitated and reinforced by NGOs´ universal agendas and the
formation of a trans-national elite of professional activists. These tendencies and their
internal dynamics confront NGOs with a complex set of challenges. In the following
section we will introduce some prescriptive elements in our analysis:47

1) A tendency towards concentration, consolidation of brand names and

professionalization.
In the last decade, similarities can be observed between some developments in the world
of NGOs and in the private sector. There seems to be an enormous concentration of
human and financial resources in a few NGOs.48 This is due primarily to the fact that

46
On this issue see Bernardo Sorj, 2004.
47
In this section we advance some point made in Bernardo Sorj 2003.
48
In Brazil, according to the IBGE study (op. cit.) , less than 0.2% of NGOs employ a third of the
NGOs staff members..

25
foundations and international agencies tend mostly to support NGOs with a solid track
record together with the more stringent demands of donors which involve an enormous
amount of bureaucratic work in project formulation, monitoring and accountancy, and
often the y need also to advance part of the grant. This concentration is accompanied by
the formation of brand names that become synonymous with the causes they defend and
with “quality”, creating entry barriers to new NGOs. Some brand name NGOs in
developed countries even have the capacity for self financing through fund raising
campaigns with public donors, or at least largely diminishing the dependency on
governmental support.

Their large size as well as the requirement of donors for sophisticated proposals and
reports increases the need for specialized staff, although due to their financial
instability most NGOs have difficulty paying competitive salaries. The
professionalization of NGOs produces some tension in the recruiting of staff, between
the demands of a moral ethos that attracts people willing to accept lower-than- market
salaries –but who are not always fully qualified-, and a professional ethos that calls for
highly qualified personnel with their accompanying expectations for higher salaries and
vision of NGOs as a business structure. This is a problem faced by NGOs throughout
the world, and the professionalization of medium and large NGOs is well under way,
spurred on by new requirements from financing agencies.

The differential power between NGOs raises the question of the possible
monopolization of the field by a few giants, who like any large organizations have a
tendency towards centralization, bureaucratization and diminished creativity. However,
they may also deliver efficient services, monitoring results and attract more qualified
cadres. The increasing barriers to entry in the field are particularly strong in relation to
small community NGOs and have become a general factor of strain between large and
small NGOs.

2 – Making explicit the differences and conflicts between NGOs.

Paradoxically NGOs own “public space” is very limited. Most supporters of ecological
causes cannot explain the differences between, say, Greenpeace and WWF. NGOs
don’t debate between themselves, and even their exchange of experiences is relatively
limited. In other words, the world of NGOs is extremely politicized in reference to the
outside world but extremely depolitized as regards its own hinterland. One reason for
this is the orientation of NGOs towards advancing demands on the state, the market or
international institutions, and never explicitly confronting their own views. This creates
the myth, especially in developing countries, of civil society as a unitary actor that
shares the same values against a corrupt state and an inhuman market. If NGOs want to
create more effective coalitions they will need to confront their differences and discover
affinities between themselves.

The self-presentation of civil society as a somewhat homogeneous voice in fact

represses internal debate, making NGOs´ life too easy through a discourse that fights
against the usual “enemies”, but which does not help to deepen the debate about their
own problems and alternative solutions to concrete issues. New creative thinking
requires that the different organizations of civil society confront their perspectives,
criticize each other and learn from each other’s mistakes. The world of NGOs needs to
accept the fact that contradictions both of perception and interests exist between NGOs

26
from the South and the North and within each national society. Making these
differences explicit is fundamental for reconnecting NGOs to the political system.

3 – Understanding the different dynamics and challenges faced by advocacy-oriented

and social projects-oriented NGOs.
Advocacy oriented NGOs have a different logic, perception and experience than those of
social projects (also called ‘development’) oriented NGOs. Although most NGOs tend
to act in both fields, one field is usually dominant. The problems posed by the
advocacy-orientation are different from those involved in the social project–orientation.
Advocacy NGOs which advance universal agendas are much more detached from
specific national issues and often distant from the practical difficulties of
implementing their agendas. It is much more difficult to monitor and evaluate the
impact of advocacy activities. In most cases their main activity is to reach the media
directly or indirectly through impact-actions or press-releases that produce media
interest.

The main difficulty for the social projects of NGOs is the limited time span of support
for their projects. The social projects of NGOs normally have a life cycle equivalent to
the period of outside financing. Although there is an increasing pressure from donors
that the projects become self- sustaining after a short period in most cases this is not a
realistic demand. The real issue is not so much about self-sustainability of the projects
but rather whether they can become a model for public policy and /or the market, the
only ones which in the long-run have the material and human resources to adopt the
new solutions in a sustained and systematic way.

Most NGO social projects are ad hoc local actions, undoubtedly releva nt for the target
communities, but without a large-scale societal impact for the simple reason that
generally they are not replicable given the available local resources. Instead of
pioneering or complementing government action, all too often they end up becoming
showcases. However the criticism that is often raised that NGOs have become a
substitute for state policies under the neo- liberal agenda is, as we mentioned above,
unsustainable . NGOs cannot deliver security, justice, urban services, large-scale
education or health services. The NGOs at most are being used by the state to
complement or support their policies, and we need more research to evaluate the
importance of their contribution to state policies.

Given the rigidity and bureaucratic nature of the state, NGOs have an important role to
play as social laboratories, sources of innovation, developers of new techniques for
social intervention, and eventually, as implementers and supporters of government
action. But the ability of NGOs to innovate is only relevant to the extent that the
experiments they develop are transformed into public policy and/or attract the attention
of private enterprise to the potential of low- income communities as producers,
consumers and labor markets. For this to happen, NGO action must go beyond
amateurish projects, whose particularities, functional logic, unrealistic financing, and
management make them non-replicable. Too often the actions of many NGOs resemble
a cemetery of well- intentioned projects.

NGOs need constant external support to create and experiment with social projects,
which are all too often cancelled when funding dries up. While there is some truth to the
argument that NGOs are more efficient than the public sector under equal conditions

27
they may often however be extremely wasteful of human and financial resources due to
the short life cycle of their projects.

NGO social projects should have a well-defined format, managerial structure and
evaluation system that can lead to their reproduction on a large scale, thus allowing
them to be taken over eventually by the market or transformed into public policy.
NGOs should be trained in how to overcome amateurism and create social projects
whose success doesn’t depend solely on the good will and sacrifice of NGO staff and/or
external financing. This can be done by creating prototypes that can be transformed into
public policies. Without such training, local efforts will likely result in little more than
temporary improvements, or at best, the social improvement of small groups targeted by
the projects.

As donors don’t want to support projects for more than a determinate period of time
(normally short) most NGO social projects don’t survive. Donor bureaucracies prefer
not to acknowledge this fact and many of them produce reports (usually in extremely
fancy and expensive editions) in which they present success stories of projects they
have supported, most of which have already been buried by the time the report
circulates. Financial instability not only puts the continuation of projects at risk but
makes it difficult to recruit qualified personnel, especially when executive experience is
required. Sometimes sheer size serves as an antidote. Large size permits the
accumulation of a critical mass of resources that allow for the maintenance of a
permanent team of qualified professionals in spite of fluctuations in cash flow and to
cover the cost of pilot programs before formal financing has been secured.

4 – Accountability, transparency, stake-holders’ partnership and evaluation.

There is a mounting pressure from donors and also from sectors critical of NGOs' work
to increase their transparency and accountability. The main method proposed is that of
monitoring and evaluating the impact of their activities. Though a reasonable demand,
the methodology to be pursued is far from obvious. 49 Some of the major problems
related to the demand of increasing monitoring and evaluation of results include:

a) Evaluating the impact of social projects implies not only identifying their
consequences for a given target population but also their long-term sustainability and
their potential for transformation into a solution which can be converted into public
policies or absorbed by the market. This type of evaluation implies taking a long-term
view beyond the time cycle of the project itself taking into account that project
maturation and public or market impact take effect over a longer period of time. Neither
donors nor NGOs work within a time framework beyond the period under which the
project is in effect. In fact, donor bureaucracy is not much interested in knowing the
long-term consequences of their grants. Sometimes donors make use of outside experts,
but in many cases these experts have limited independence, and often come from
developed countries with insufficient knowledge and sensibility to local conditions.
Most NGOs have no resources to follow up on the consequences of their projects. As
soon as one project is underway they move on to find support for a different one. And,
in any case, it is not very realistic to ask for self-evaluation when own´s survival is at
stake.

49 See Michael Edwards, Alan Fowler (2003) for a systematic discussion on NGOs
management issues. See also David Lewis, 1999 and Helmut K. Anheier, 2000.
.

28
b) Advocacy projects are even more difficult to evaluate due to the complex number of
factors involved in increasing public awareness. The time frame of their impact is
normally greater than that of social projects and more diffuse. As stated by a study on
African Civil Society: “The studies demonstrate that the contribution made by civil
society organizations to democracy is not only manifest in the extent of their ability to
influence policy and legislation. If measured on the basis of this criterion alone their
impact would be judged to be very minimal. But the evidence demonstrates that the
contribution of civil society organizations to democracy extends to their ability to foster
participation and deliberation, to build leadership capacity and to nurture values of
tolerance and consensus building, all of which are a function of internal democratic
practices. It´s capacity to offer citizens a say in decisions and to enhance pluralism may
be as important as the ability to influence decision- making and demand accountability
from state actors.” (Mark Robinson and Steven Friedman, 2005: 40).

c) Demanding monitoring and evaluation of the results of the projects only increases the
entry barriers for community or small NGOs without the human resources to apply
complex methodologies. The obsession with monitoring and evaluation can lead to
support only for projects that are more adaptable to accountability criteria and obvious
impact, hence excluding more innovative and creative projects.

d) The development by each national association of NGOs of a Code of Ethics, which

will define the internal principles that orient NGOs internally and in their relations with
other stakeholders (the state, international organizations, private firms) would help to
increase NGOs public accountability.

e) Probably neither NGOs nor donors are the best qualified to evaluate the projects in
which they are involved. What is increasingly needed are local institutions, with
intellectual capacity and independence, capable of producing methodologies of
evaluation adapted to local conditions. In addition there is the need for conceptual
frameworks to understand the role of NGOs so as to enhance their self- reflexivity, and
compile and compare their experiences as well as assess the long term impacts of their
projects.

5- Including the World of Work in the NGOs Agendas.

The world of labor is not within the scope of most NGOs. The subject is touched on
tangentially through issues like gender, fair trade and children’s rights (mostly through
the lens of advanced countries´ realities) but labor rights (including salaries and
working hours) within private enterprises and informal labor social rights are generally
outside the scope of most NGOs. Sometimes the label ‘socially responsible’ is given to
enterprises engaging in outside social projects while they at the same time practice
regressive labor policies. Without including the world of labor and employment in their
agendas -a central factor of income distribution- NGOs will be unable to advance
overall strategies for fighting poverty, social inequality and new strategies for economic
development.

The tendency of INGOs to emphasize the conflict between rich and poor countries leads
them to underplay the importance of national inequalities within developing and
developed countries. While the North/South divide calls mainly for increasing
humanitarian help to developing countries, internal inequalities are much more a

29
political issue which implies a confrontation of social interests that cannot be dissolved
in general demands for human rights. The over emphasis on identity groups´ rights has
relegated the overall issue of working conditions to a second plane (Michael Piore,
1995). The fragmentation of social causes and the multiplication of specialized NGOs
has led to a dispersion of energies and to over- looking the more unifying issues that can
lead to improvement in the living conditions of the poorest sectors of the population.
Advancing identity groups’ causes without changing the overall conditions of the labor
market and social policies has a limited effect on improving the general living
conditions of the poor and lower middle classes.

6 - Reducing the dependency of southern NGOs on northern agendas.

Societies are still national and their strategies for integration into the globalization
process should be national and regional; global agendas for development do not exist
with the exception of some general formulas (like the Tobin tax or debt relief). Each
society needs to make the best use of its local resources and creativity. By insisting on
global proposals, be it from the World Bank or from Attac, there is a tendency to
propose the same formulas for every country. The Global Social Forum’s demands are
presented at such a level of abstraction that they are basically moral and normative
recommendations with no practical relevance. Their main focus is the global
multilateral organizations, which also constitutes the principal target of INGOS. Their
purely normative stand is a way of creating an artificial consensus allowing them to
avoid confronting their differences. While targeting multilateral agencies is an
important task it is not necessarily the priority of civil societies in developing countries.

It should be recognized that we are far from the reality of a global civil society. This is
not only, as many argue because of September 11th , the fight against terrorism and the
backlash produced by U.S. intervention in Iraq and the Bush government’s anti-
multilateralist posture. Of course current U.S. policies have had important negative
effects on the advancing of multilateralist and internationalist agendas. Supporters of
global civil society in the 1990s, however, tended to have a naïve perception of world
politics and blindness to the continued importance of nation-states in the making of
international politics, including within the transnational world of civil societies.

The dependency on outside sources of financing, at least for developing countries’

organizations, has distorted their agenda. The imposition of agendas by major advanced
country donors promotes a diverse array of partnerships, sometimes quite open to the
demands of local NGOs but always using their discretionary power (Townsend et al.
2002).50 Just as problematic is the position of many INGOs which at times act as
colonial powers absorbing some of the best local cadres to adva nce projects which are
not necessarily the priorities of local peoples.

Most of the International NGOs´ research in or on developing countries is principally

oriented toward confirming their own assumptions, while most third world NGOs have
little or no internal research capabilities. 51 The main weakness of NGOs in developing
countries is their intellectual fragility and limited capacity for absorbing the best of
international policy agendas while maintaining autonomous and creative thinking. For
instance, in Latin America in the 50’s and 60’s’ CEPAL played the role of think tank

50 See Edwards, Michael, David Hulme (1997). For a very critical analysis of the “ aid industry” see
Alison Van Rooy , 1999.
51
On this issue see Caroline Harper (2001).

30
for the entire continent. Today this type of think tank does not exist. The reconstruction
of creative local, national and regional thinking is made difficult by the
interna tionalization of academic research and the North/South networks which
marginalize horizontal south/south contacts, even at the regional level. International
donors´ policy in the last decade to support mainly ‘action’ projects has been
particularly harmful to research activities. Policy oriented research centers in
developing countries devoted to this endeavor could greatly contribute to making sense
of accumulated experience and help orient NGOs activities to define a national/regional
agenda. The challenge for southern civil societies is to increase their think tank
capabilities in order to produce autonomous centers of reflection that will orient the
action of local civil society organizations.

7- Creating interactions between NGOs, citizens and political parties.

Professionalization, project- finance orientation and dependency on foreign resources
and agendas has led NGOs in developing country to become relatively detached from
their national political agendas and social movements and citizen participation. While in
the bibliography NGOs and social movements are presented as twin concepts the reality
is considerably different. Many NGOs in developing countries are relatively isolated
operations and have become producers of projects for outside donors and their relations
with their target public have become increasingly instrumental. Reconnecting (which
does not mean being subsumed) with social movements, other civil society
organizations, political parties and citizens is a major challenge for NGOs so as not to
become an isolated elite of (relatively well paid jet-setter) activists. In Latin America
the feeling of abandonment by the poorest sectors of the population is leading to the rise
of populist leaders directly ‘connected’ to the poor, bypassing civil society
organizations.

The risk of NGOs being either colonized by international agencies or by the state and
the market at the local level can not be averted by retreating to isolation or radical
rhetoric but only by engaging them with proposals for new forms of citizen
participation to democratize state institutions and economic power. Media campaigns
although useful, cannot substitute for the importance of participatory social
movements and the establishment of institutionalized mechanisms for increasing the
State’s delivery of public goods, transparency and accountability.

This implies that NGOs should become an autonomous and engaged player with other
political actors. The experience of many NGOs in Latin America has swung from
alienation from political parties to uncritical support, like the one given by most
independent NGOs to the Workers Party in Brazil. 52 Engaging in interaction and
debates with political parties, trade- unions and congressmen will help NGOs go
beyond demand-oriented agendas, confront the issue of limited state resources, and
create realistic proposals and an inclusive societal agenda. NGOs can play a
democratizing role if they see themselves as part of the national political system,
confronting the problems of governance, wealth distribution, labor rights and
democratization of the state. In other words the relevance of NGOs depends finally on
their capacity to be part of shaping national democratic systems, reinventing political

52
This identification was due not to the common political roots of NGOs and PT leaders but rather to a
similar tendency of the Worker`s Party and NGOs to engage in moralistic anti-neoliberal discourse
without tackling the issue of alternative ways to elaborate and implement alternative policies.

31
parties, promoting cit izens’ participation in state institutions and strengthening
political parties instead of being part of the process of delegitimizing them.

8 - Networking and Representation in the International System.

NGO’s base their legitimacy on the principle that they embody moral claims which are
self-evident. As such, they demand to be heard and have a place in international
organisms, in particular in the United Nations system. 53 Although so far NGOs haven’t
achieved effective influence within the United Nations system, the world summits have
been key moments for the NGOs to consolidate their influence in national and
international public opinion (Mario Pianta, 2005).

NGOs not only downplay the issue of how they represent the voice of the people, but
also the problem of internal representation: which are the NGOs that represent the
galaxy of NGOs? This is even more the case with the international NGOs who claim
to represent the voice of global civil society. As we have argued above NGOs from the
South and the North as well those from different countries in all regions have different
positions on many issues. International organizations should recognize the importance
of assuring a role for NGOs from different nations and regions and their different
perspectives. Increasing the voice of NGOs from the South is even more important
considering that normally the richer NGOs can afford the cost of financing a permanent
lobbying presence in international organizations. Recognizing their differences will
allow NGOs to organize different coalitions representative of their diversity.

While major NGOs from developed countries are capable of establishing alliances
between themselves to advance common campaigns this is much more difficult for
NGOs in developing countries. Networking has become a catchword to counter the
problem of the enormous fragmentation in the world of NGOs. The merit of donors to
promote cooperation between NGOs at the international and national level must be
recognized. However, converging NGOs efforts and interests is particularly difficult due
to the silent but nevertheless fierce competition between NGOs which militates against
cooperative projects. Often the results of forced cooperation are fruitful but most of the
networks are short-lived and are only a strategy to adapt to donors´ demand. Keeping
networks alive is normally a very expensive activity. The belief that the Internet is
sufficient to create stable and functioning networks of institutions is unrealistic. In fact
the Internet has multiplied the availability of information and contacts to such a level
that people only access and mostly contact the counterparts that are already partners in
common projects. Of course this is not only a problem of NGOs but given that they
have common goals the level of waste of resources is particularly high.

9 - On not mystifying grassroots and activism.

The increasing tendency of international donors and major NGOs to support ethnic
identity groups and empower local people, may at times be a case of creating identities
that never really existed or shaping pre-existing identities to the image that

53
The proposal for increasing the role of civil society in the United Nations, elaborated in 2004 on the
request of the Secretary-General, by the Panel of Eminent Persons, chaired by President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, see www.un.org/dpi/ngosection/N0437641.pdf. and Miguel Darcy 2005. See also
Riva Krut (1997) and for a more nuanced perspective on the possibilities of civil society intervention in
multilateral organizations see Shepard Forman (2004) and Stephen Toulmin (994).

32
international donors suppose is the correct one. 54 The so-called local culture is always a
mix of various traditions that can be interpreted in many ways and ethnicity is itself a
culturally biased concept, which has different meanings in the everyday life of most
countries.

There is also a tendency to mystify grassroots and local activism as an aim in itself and
the principal source of wisdom, forgetting the links that they have with the wider
national political system and public policies. Many of the problems related to the
advancement of an alternative agenda for democratization of state institutions require
an effort of elaboration that goes beyond (although it should not obliterate) the local
perspective. How to advance national agendas and keep in touch with local actors is a
major challenge both for civil society and government bodies.

In some cases, like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a large number of community leaders
are directly involved or indirectly at risk of blackmail by drug traffickers. This alone
would be sufficient reason not to leave the management of projects entirely up to local
residents. But those who emphasize the empowerment of communities would argue
that this is circumstantial, and thus temporary. This vision relies on an idealized and
thus distorted view of the community. These communities are frequently controlled by
oligarchic structures which without external control tend to back projects that at best
reinforce their power, and at worst channel scarce resources in their own interests.

While local participation is fundamental it should not lead to the myth of an

‘alternative’ discourse based on local knowledge, which has been adopted by many
large foundations. It is important to value the expression of local communities and their
leaders, but without mystifying them as the sole source of knowledge

Rather than celebrating pre-existing identities which have been ignored or restrained by
the dominant culture, the central issue is that of transforming the self- image of the
poorer sectors as well as the negative image that other social groups have of them by
creating new forms of cultural and social integration with the wider society. Instead of
opposition and isolation, the goal should be to integrate them into national social and
cultural life. Social prejudice, a journalistic ethos of high- impact news, and even well-
intentioned international cooperation which focuses on social exclusion tends to present
poor communities in a negative light, as sites of violence and suffering. Without
denying these problems, NGOs should try to create bridges between different sectors of
society by presenting a more nuanced and multifaceted view of the life of the poor. At
the same time NGOs should not confuse solidarity and vocalization of the needs of low-
income groups with actual representation of these groups. Solidarity cannot and should
not be confused with representation, since no matter how well intentioned it amounts to
a kind of usurpation.

10 - The contradiction between sovereignty and individual- rights bearers cannot be

solved on the basis of principles only.
Northern NGOs base their activities on the assumption that the principal of sovereignty
is superseded by internationalist humanitarianism and human rights. While there are

54
One of the most questionable types of initiatives is the Ford Foundation program of affirmative action
in Brazil, it shows a lack of understanding of the particularities of racism in Brazil in relation to the US..
See Peter Fray ? (2005).

33
situations that require some type of external intervention, sovereignty is considered in
most developing countries as a mechanism of self-defense against the imperial
tendencies of the stronger nations. 55 Yugoslavia’s crisis 56 , the recent invasion and
occupation of Iraq and national legislation that permits the pursuit of presumed political
criminals from other countries has produced second thoughts in many developing
countries` civil society sectors on the complex issues involved in bypassing national
sovereignty. 57 The same goes for ecological causes advanced by developed countries
that may hamper economic development or constrain imports based on criteria that may
be used as invisible trade barriers. International human rights and ecological activists
need to engage with local civil societies in developing countries if they are not to be
seen as imperial oriented organizations.

Although the principle of sovereignty was always relative, in particular for weaker
nations, it should not be readily dismissed as hampering the implementation of the
human rights agendas. External intervention is always a traumatic experience and
imposing democratic regimes is, in many cases, destined to failure, especially if the
external agenda is imposed on internal social realities. 58 The conditions and extent
under which interventions in humanitarian crises should be undertaken must be weighed
both on the basis of principles and against the backlash it may produce at the national
and regional level.

11 - Human rights are insufficient to provide policy orientation in situations of open

violence or where cultural clashes are present and can be manipulated by partisan
interests.
The defense of human rights through denouncing violations is an important task on
which NGOs have played a central role. However, human rights militants have
enormous difficulties in confronting the practical realities of vio lent situations in which
the police and/or the armed forces must use physical repression. Of course the use of
repression ought to be accompanied by the respect for human rights and associated with
preventive policies to improve the social conditions which are conductive to crime and
violence. One cannot ignore, however, the need for confronting violent groups with
repressive measures. NGOs ignoring the demand of society for an effective public
security system only push the population into the hands of governments that propose
repressive agendas (see, for instance, the case of President Uribe`s popularity in
Colombia). Human rights discourse should be related to active proposals on the role of
the police and armed forces in situations of conflict, and should be capable of assessing
situations of risk and violence and the appropriate use of force when needed. A
tendency to criticize primarily state repressive actions coupled with leniency, and
sometimes even rationalizations for civil violence tend to alienate human rights groups
from the rest of the population. Human rights groups should recognize and denounce
civil violence, both as a matter of principle and as the only practical way to find wider
support for developing a working relationship with the security forces.

55
For the Latin American case see Bernardo Sorj (2005). For a general criticism of the internationalist
human rights vision see Danilo Zolo (1997, 2002).
56
A critical analysis of OTAN intervention can be found in Danilo Zolo (2002). On humanitarian wars
see also David Chandler (2002)
57
As was the request for Pinochet’s judgment in Spain, seen by many democratic militants in Chile as an
intervention in their internal affairs.
58
See David Chandler (2002).

34
The wish to be inclusive and open to every culture leads many theorists of civil society
to believe that it is possible to be completely open to non- western cultures. This is a
naïve presumption that ignores that there are limits to accepting other cultures´ values,
some of which even deny the possibility of a democratic civil society. In practice,
values cannot be stretched to such a point that endangers the possibility of their own
existence without which openness to other values wouldn’t be possible. Deliberative
democracy supposes that the social actors agree beforehand on the value of deliberative
democracy. 59 The solution for this contradiction is not theoretical but practical and will
need to be negotiated in each context (for instance the conflict between women’s rights
and cultures that from a liberal perspective oppress women).

Human rights organizations sometimes mask clearly defined political agendas and their
priorities are a far cry from those of the universality of extolled values, as was evident
during the 2001 conference against racism in Durban, where the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict became the main issue for many NGOs participating at the meeting. The logic
behind these organizations reminds that of the communist-sponsored `fronts’ of years
past in that they employ a discourse that condemns the failure to respect human rights,
but aiming to condemn only the ‘political enemy.’

Conclusions: Advancing national civil society agendas in global contexts and

global agendas based on national realities

In a world in which social relations and values are increasingly plastic and
individualized and the old political ideologies and their vectors –trade unions and
political parties- are in disarray, the idea of civil society and the practice of NGOs has
become an anchor for many in finding a way to express their desire to improve the
world. However civil societies in general and NGOs in particular are under the
influence of the same factors – unequal economic, social, political and cultural power
which is vitiating the functioning of democracy worldwide.

Hasty generalizations about the globalization process and global civil society have
produced a tendency to overlook the continued central role of the national state and
national societies in forming cultural identities, and in creating and distributing wealth. I
am not diminishing the obvious impact of globalization processes, but as the Chinese
saying goes “when the bamboo is leaning too much to one side we need to push it the
other way to make it straight”.

Democratic construction continues to be associated with nation-building and the

consolidation of the feeling of being part of one people with a common fate. This
means the capacity of creating affective links between the people and governments and
political leaders capable of responding to the more urgent material demands and
delivering a symbolic discourse with which most of the population can identify. The
discourse of human rights is too universal and abstract to become the basis on which
this sense of belonging can be created. NGOs most probably are not oriented to fulfill
this function in the political system, but if they do not want to find themselves bypassed
by political leaders that appeal directly to the people they will need to increase their

59
See Neera Chandhooke (1995).

35
cooperation with social movements, the wider civil society organizations, political
parties and parliaments.

It is not only the material realities of everyday life that make nations the main reference
for the majority of the citizens. Collective narratives and the construction of political
will cannot be based on abstract principles (the food of middle- class intellectuals) but
needs to be related to common history and experiences, which so far can only be found,
at least for the majority of people, within a territorial reference. Democracy is not a
narrative that can be imposed with good will messages or ad-hoc activities, though both
help, but is a complex process of social participation - involving the creation of
accountable institutions 60 coupled with sustained economic development and
redistribution of wealth.

Globalization agendas are not a substitute for the formulation of national projects,
although national agendas need to appropriate and answer the challenges of economic
and cultural globalization. In developing countries this process involves effective
wealth redistribution, reorganizing the body politic, re-elaborating mechanisms of
representation for all, but in particular, for the poorest sectors of the population. The
demand for human rights increases the expectations of the population while the failure
of the political system to deliver the goods may create frustration thus playing into the
hands of demagogic leaders. The divorce between the system of demand (civil society)
and the system of delivery (the parties and government) is a source of delegitimation of
representative democracy if the demands are not met by the political system. Thus
increasing the articulation between both sub-systems is strategic for strengthening
democracy.

Civil societies in general and NGOs in particular can be central players in improving
democratic life but they need to reconnect to the local population, developing projects
and agendas linked to their context going beyond the affirmation of universal agendas
and values.

Rio de Janeiro, November, 2005

60
See Guillermo O’Donnell (1999).

36
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