Non-Governmental Organizations in World Politics

The Construction of Global Governance

Peter Willetts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136848520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Amnesty International and Oxfam to Greenpeace and Save the Children are now key players in global politics. This accessible and informative textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the significant role and increasing participation of NGOs in world politics.

Peter Willetts examines the variety of different NGOs, their structure, membership and activities, and their complex relationship with social movements and civil society. He makes us aware that there are many more NGOs exercising influence in the United Nations system than the few famous ones.

Conventional thinking is challenged in a radical manner on four questions:

• the extent of the engagement of NGOs in global policy- making;
• the status of NGOs within international law;
• the role of NGOs as crucial pioneers in the creation of the Internet;
• and the need to integrate NGOs within mainstream international relations theory.

This is the definitive guide to this crucial area within international politics and should be required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.

1
NGOs, social movements, and civil society

Before we can study the role of non-governmental organizations in global politics, it is necessary to be clear what is meant by an NGO. The term appears to be very abstract and remote from our daily lives. Unfortunately, it is what social scientists call an essentially contested concept. For many people, to define a non-governmental organization is to take a political position, either explicitly or implicitly. NGOs are to be admired: therefore, the term can only cover admirable organizations. Alternatively, NGOs are to be condemned: therefore, the term only covers organizations with negative features. For some people, NGOs are the organizations with which they are familiar and other very different types of NGOs are not acknowledged. The only unanimous point is we cannot use the literal meaning of the term: non-governmental organizations do not include every organized group that is independent from governments. Another confusion is the preference of some writers and activists for the terms social movements and/or civil society. This chapter will address the question of what NGOs are and discuss how they relate to the broader concepts of social movements and civil society.

Creation of the term “non-governmental organization” by the United Nations

Until the adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945 the term non-governmental organization did not exist. Before 1945 several different terms were used. In 1910 a group of 132 organizations, which we would now call international NGOs, came together to form the Union of International Associations. The Secretariat of the League of Nations described itself as keeping “in constant touch with a number of private national and international organizations.”¹ In 1929 a group of organizations that regularly related to the League of Nations Secretariat and attended League meetings formed the Federation of Private and Semi-Official International Organizations Established at Geneva, while the representatives of “international associations” at League committees were called “assessors.”² The League had formal relations with “international bureaux” but these were defined under its Covenant as intergovernmental bodies created by treaties. Contacts did also gradually develop over the years with private organizations, but it was in an unsystematic, pragmatic manner. There were never any permanent official procedures for the League to relate to private organizations.

When the UN Charter was finalized, the San Francisco conference agreed to make provision for both intergovernmental organizations and private organizations to have formal relations with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN. However, the delegates were unwilling to give the same status to the two types of international organizations. Under Article 57, a new term, “specialized agencies,” was defined to cover international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), “established by intergovernmental agreement” that would be “brought into relationship with the United Nations.” Under Article 70, ECOSOC could make arrangements for representatives of the agencies “to participate, without vote, in its deliberations.” This gave the heads of agency secretariats the same status as government delegates from countries that had not been elected as members of ECOSOC. Under Article 71, a second new term, “non-governmental organizations,” was invented, but it was left undefined. The result was that “specialized agencies” and “NGOs” became UN jargon. After 1945, private international organizations quickly started to call themselves NGOs, but the term did not move outside the world of diplomacy until the 1970s. It is now widely used in public debate. On the other hand, it is not so well known that “NGOs” originated as a very broad term from the UN Charter.

Thus, the foundation stone, upon which the whole edifice of NGO influence in global diplomacy was built, is just one article in the UN Charter.

Article 71

The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations concerned.

There was meant to be a clear distinction between the higher status of “participation without vote” for specialized agencies and “consultation” with the NGOs. ECOSOC affirmed at its second session, by Resolution 3 (II), “this distinction, deliberately made in the Charter, is fundamental” and NGOs should not have the same rights of participation as government observers and specialized agencies. Despite the official award of a secondary status, NGOs were able to use Article 71 as the crucial lever to open the door and eventually gain a strong role as participants in international diplomacy. In 1950, ECOSOC codified its definition of what were NGOs and how it would work with NGOs, in a Statute on Arrangements for Consultation with Non-Governmental Organizations. This was revised in 1968 and again in 1996.³ Different ways of thinking about what groups are or are not NGOs, including the UN definition of NGOs, will be discussed in this chapter. Then how NGOs participate in the UN system will be discussed in the next chapter.

Narrow definitions of non-governmental organizations in global diplomacy

NGOs are often presumed to be concerned with development, humanitarian work, the environment, or human rights. Then, they may be categorized into operational groups that run their own projects or advocacy groups that seek to influence policy. Not surprisingly, such an approach appears in the definitions used by intergovernmental organizations concerned with development. A variety of restrictive definitions of non-governmental organizations is reported in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1 Competing restrictive definitions of non-governmental organizations

• “An organization which seeks funding, hires staff, and undertakes programs, but does not realize a profit”—UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forestry Department.¹

• “NGOs include a wide variety of groups and institutions that are entirely or largely independent of government, and characterized primarily by humanitarian or cooperative, rather than commercial, objectives”—World Bank, 1989.²

• “People’s organizations can be defined as democratic organizations that represent the interests of their members and are accountable to them … Nongovernmental organizations can be defined as voluntary organizations that work with and very often on behalf of others”—United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 1993.³

• “An NGO is a private, voluntary, not-for-profit organization, supported at least in part by voluntary contributions from the public. For Development Co-operation Report purposes, an

NGO may act as a donor (if it supplies external assistance) or as an executing or beneficiary institution. The latter are usually local NGOs”—UNDP, 1996.⁴

• “Private non-profit-making agencies, including co-operative societies and trade unions, which are active in development and national in the sense that their funds are fully or mainly obtained from sources in the donor economy”—Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2000.⁵

• “NGO has become shorthand for public-benefit NGOs—a type of civil society organization that is formally constituted to provide a benefit to the general public or the world at large through the provision of advocacy or services”—Cardoso Panel, 2004.⁶

Notes

1 UN Food and Agriculture Organization Forestry Department, Glossary and Acronyms, FAO Corporate Document Repository, undated, www.fao.org/docrep/X5327e/x5327e03.htm.

2 World Bank, Operational Directive 14.70, 28 August 1989.

3 UNDP, Human Development Report 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 84–85, italics in the original.

4 Used by several UNDP country offices in their Development Co-operation Reports in the late 1990s, but now no longer available.

5 OECD, DAC Statistical Reporting Directives (DCD/DAC(2000)10), 23 May 2000, www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/45/1894833.pdf, “Key definitions,” para. 28.

6 From the glossary, in the Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations—Civil Society Relations, We the Peoples: Civil Society, the United Nations and Global Governance (General Assembly document A/58/817), 11 June 2004.

Several points emerge from these definitions. As the term implies, there is general agreement that NGOs are independent from governments. It is also agreed that NGOs are not profit-making or engaged in commercial activities. Transnational corporations are definitely not NGOs. Less obviously, it is taken for granted, in the above definitions, that NGOs are established organizations and cannot be ephemeral groups, informal associations, or unstructured networks. Thus, the consensus only extends to negative points—what are not NGOs. Little else seems to be agreed. For the Food and Agriculture Organization, they should have operational programs, but for the others this is not essential. At United Nations Development Programme headquarters in 1993 they were seen as being altruistic, whereas for the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development they could be groups cooperating to look after the interests of their own members. Sometimes NGOs are seen as raising funds from the public, but others do not mention this. Some definitions focus on the group’s activities, while others focus on their objectives. Various activities such as undertaking programs, funding projects, or advocacy for general public interests, are suggested but none of the definitions mention political activities to empower disadvantaged people or research to improve understanding of what development policies succeed or fail.

Even if we accept the focus on development in these definitions, they are deficient in not leading us to expect women’s groups, religious organizations, or scientists to be important NGOs. The world of NGOs goes beyond standard operational and advocacy activities to include many other, less well-known, activities, such as harmonization of technical standards, maintenance of communications systems, provision of information, professional collaboration, transnational cooperation and learning, sustaining shared values or a common identity, protecting collective interests, empowerment of the disadvantaged, cultural exchanges, and promoting communal, class, gender, or ethnic solidarity. Each of the definitions quoted above is too narrowly focused on the NGOs of concern to those who wrote the definitions. None are acceptable for a general study of NGOs.

Limiting non-governmental organizations to the virtuous

Outside the world of diplomacy, in wider public debate, NGOs are often portrayed as having high moral standing. If they are altruistic groups, concerned with the general public interest, they must be worthy of support. It comes as a shock to many that the US gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), is registered at the United Nations as an NGO. It also came as a shock to the other NGOs at the UN when the NRA joined them. Some reacted by saying: surely, the NRA is not a “true” NGO. A similar pattern of thought has been evident among environmentalists. In the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a group of 86 NGOs set up an International Facilitating Committee (IFC) composed of representatives of the “independent sectors” to run a Global Forum and to lobby the diplomats. Other more radical NGOs formed an alternative Steering Committee. One of their major disagreements with the IFC was over inclusion of “business and industry” as an independent sector and rejection of collaboration with the Business Council for Sustainable Development. There remain very many NGO activists who see business as solely being concerned with profit-making. Hence, “true” NGOs cannot collaborate with the private sector. A third challenge has arisen with the Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies, which has had at least four front organizations working at the UN headquarters in New York.⁴ These groups have also been rejected by the NGO community. To some people, the gun lobby, business groups, or the Unification Church may be acceptable groups. To others, they are self-evidently not legitimate NGOs. Whatever one’s point of view, each of these groups represents very large numbers of people and has gained recognition among the NGOs at the UN. The lesson from these events is that there is not any universal moral standard for recognition of a “true” NGO.

The above point about controversy over specific groups can be generalized. It is not possible to regard all NGOs as sharing the same values and being able to adopt common policy positions. On some occasions, in some special situations, there may be high agreement among all the NGO representatives who are present at a particular meeting. However, such self-selecting sets of NGOs will not reflect the full diversity of the world of NGOs. Similarly, invocation of “the people” or public opinion with implied assumptions that everybody is united against some “bad” policy of governments ignores the fact that no government, not even a dictatorship, can operate without support from some social groups. More extreme naive idealism, which is out of touch with reality, comes in the Cardoso Report, a UN report on its relations with NGOs, produced in June 2004. This asserts there is “a new phenomenon— global public opinion—that is shaping the political agenda and generating a cosmopolitan set of norms and citizen demands that transcend national boundaries.” The report even argued that “enhancing civil society relations can also keep the United Nations in tune with global public opinion—the ‘second super-power’—and enhance its legitimacy.”⁵ Of course, public opinion is important and it is now a factor in global diplomacy. However, there is rarely a single homogeneous public opinion within individual countries and there is never any such thing at the global level. There are multiple strands to public opinion. Consequently, there are diverse strands of thought within the NGO community.

The possibility of NGO diversity is not just a hypothetical question. It exists on many global issues. The role of transnational corporations in globalization produces divisions between those who see TNCs as the engines of growth, those who see TNCs as creating poverty through their ruthless pursuit of profits, and those who think TNCs might be beneficial but only when they are regulated. The question of global population growth unites many women’s groups, development organizations, environmentalists, medical professionals, and human rights activists in support of the provision of reproductive health services, in the face of bitter opposition to birth control from the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, some radical feminists, and ultra-conservative social groups. There is a somewhat different political division over the related question of providing abortion services. Other issues—such as the reconciliation of economic growth and environmental conservation; the balance between individual human rights, the rights of social groups and the general public interest; or the role of women in society—also produce divisions within civil society.

It may be possible to categorize NGOs in terms of a standard of moral acceptability, their standing with public opinion, their membership, the activities they pursue, or the issues they cover, but it is not possible to define what is or is not an NGO by any of these criteria. Each academic analyst and each political activist can have their own idea of what is a “good” NGO, worthy of their support, but by that person’s own standards there will also be “bad” NGOs. Nobody can support all NGOs, because so many of the NGOs actively oppose other NGOs. For the same reason, nobody can oppose all NGOs, because there must be some that are in accord with their own values. There is no such thing as a “true” NGO, just as there is no such thing as a ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Global Institutions
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 NGOs, social movements, and civil society
• 2 The access of NGOs to global policy-making
• 3 The status of NGOs in international law
• 4 NGOs, networking, and the creation of the Internet
• 5 Understanding the place of NGOs in global politics
• 6 The creation of global governance
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index of NGOs and hybrid international organizations
• Subject index