Globalizing Citizens

New Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion

John Gaventa, Rajesh Tandon, John Gaventa, Rajesh Tandon

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848139053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Educazione civica e cittadinanza

Globalization has given rise to new meanings of citizenship. Just as they are tied together by global production, trade and finance, citizens in every nation are linked by the institutions of global governance, bringing new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. For some, globalization provides a sense of solidarity that inspires them to join transnational movements to claim rights from global authorities; for others, globalization has meant greater exposure to the power of global corporations, bureaucracies and scientific experts, thus adding new layers of exclusion to already fragile meanings of citizenship. Globalizing Citizens presents expert analysis from cities and villages in India, South Africa, Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, the Gambia and Brazil to explore how forms of global authority shape and build new meanings and practices of citizenship, across local, national and global arenas.

PART ONE

Introduction

1 · Citizen engagements in a globalizing world

JOHN GAVENTA AND RAJESH TANDON¹

Introduction

From Cancún to Copenhagen, from trade debates to climate debates and from financial crises to food crises, the impacts of global forces on everyday life are becoming increasingly apparent. With globalization have come changing forms of power and new realms of authority, and with these, new spaces for public action. From local to global, fields of power and landscapes of authority are being reconfigured, affecting the lives and futures of citizens across the planet, while simultaneously reshaping where and how citizens engage to make their voices heard. If we believe in the ideals of democracy, in which citizens have the right to participate in decisions and deliberations affecting their lives, what are the implications when these extend beyond traditionally understood national and local boundaries? If we are interested in the possibilities of citizen action to claim and ensure rights, and to bring about social change, how do citizens navigate this new, more complicated terrain? What are the consequences for an emerging sense and experience of global citizenship, and for holding governments and powerful supranational institutions and authorities to account?

While a great deal of attention has been paid in the literature to these changing patterns of global governance, we know remarkably little about how they play out, or their consequences and implications for ordinary citizens. In this volume, this theme is explored through empirical research in Brazil, India, the Gambia, Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa, as well as in cross-national projects in Latin America and Africa. The case studies focus on a number of sectors: the environment, trade, education, livelihoods, health and HIV/AIDS, work and occupational disease, agriculture and land.² They document different types of engagement, ranging from transnational campaigns and social movements to participation in new institutionally designed fora. Taking a citizen’s perspective, they look upwards and outwards at shifting global forms of authority and ask whether, in response to these governance changes, citizens themselves are expressing new rights claims on global duty holders, and whether they are expressing new forms of global solidarity with citizens in other localities.

There are a number of possible responses to these questions. On the one hand, some scholars have argued, globalization has led to changes in governance and emerging transnational social movements which are creating new spaces and opportunities for citizen engagement. In the process, as citizenship has become delinked from territorial boundaries, it has also become more multilayered and multi-scaled, while governance increasingly involves both state and non-state actors, many of which are transnational. The new global configuration, some optimistically argue, provides the conditions for the ascendancy of a new sense of global citizenship, which deepens and expands democratic participation and the realization of human rights.

The case studies in this volume, however, collectively present a somewhat more sombre picture. While shifting landscapes of global authority create new spaces and opportunities for citizen engagement, they also carry with them new possibilities for and forms of power, which interact with deeply embedded local practices. For some citizens, there are new opportunities for participation in transnational processes of action, resulting in the emergence of a new sense of global citizenship and solidarity. Yet for many other ordinary citizens, changes in global authority may have the opposite effect, strengthening the layers and discourses of power that limit the possibilities for their local action, and constraining – or, at least, not enabling – a sense of citizen agency. Even in these cases, however, one can see localized patterns of resistance to global forces, motivated by immediate issues of survival and fragility, rather than a virtuous sense of global solidarity and citizenship.

In the first section of this introductory chapter, we bring together empirical insights from the case studies on how changing global governance patterns affect the possibilities for and arenas of citizen engagement. Sometimes they create new spheres for engagement beyond the nation-state; at other times they bring global factors to bear on national and local forms of action. Contrary to some assertions made in the literature, we find that globalized governance does not necessarily imply a diminishing role for the nation-state. Rather, globalization adds new layers, arenas and jurisdictions of governance, often bringing contestation and competition across them rather than the replacing of one arena with another.

We move on to discuss ways that the multi-tiered and multipolar character of global authority simultaneously creates new multilayered and multidimensional identities of citizenship, which in some cases create new possibilities for inclusive citizen voice, while in others serve to reinforce axes for greater exclusion, contributing to the weakening of already fragile forms of citizen expression. In sum, there are winners and losers in this process.

In the next section we argue that explaining the difference in these outcomes involves exploring forms of mobilization, the role of mediators and the politics of knowledge which shape the possibilities and practices of citizenship in response to the changes in the global landscape. By examining these intervening factors, we can gain insights into the paradox of why, for some, globalization offers possibilities for a new sense of solidarity and new opportunities for engagement, while for others it offers little real opportunity for expanded solidarity, and weakens the possibilities for citizen agency.

We end this chapter by arguing that taking a ‘vertical’ approach – one that looks at the interrelationships of levels of authority along a scale running from local to global – has important strategic implications for citizen action and social movements. In this interdependent world, more inclusive citizenship, and with it more effective forms of citizen engagement, will not be realized by a focus on one arena or layer of political authority alone. Rather, more promise is found in new forms of engagement which recognize the layers of authority and employ strategies that build citizen solidarity vertically and synergistically across them.

The changing nature of governance: new spaces for citizen engagements?

It is now commonplace in emerging literature on globalization and governance to argue that authority is moving beyond singular nation-state systems and power is increasingly dispersed along a scale from local to global, and across state and non-state actors. In this new emerging global order, governance is seen as a) multilayered (cutting across global, regional, national and local institutions), b) polyarchic or pluralistic (in the sense that no site of governance has unilateral, supreme and absolute authority), c) geometrically varied (in that regulatory systems vary across issues and geographies), and d) structurally complex (made up of diverse state and non-state agencies and networks) (Held and McGrew 2002: 9). Such shifts in global governance have important consequences for grassroots actors. They reshape the possibilities for extending their action to the international arena, as well as for citizen action more locally (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Edwards and Gaventa 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Appadurai 2000).³

In every case in this volume, we see examples of how this shifting political authority affects where and how citizens engage on a range of issues including education, HIV, occupational health, environment, land, agriculture, livelihood, trade and ‘forced’ displacement. While much of the literature on the consequences of global governance focuses on the emergence of transnational citizen action, our first group of chapters present a number of examples of how new global actors and factors are brought to bear on national and local decision-making processes. In Chapter 2, Cassidy and Leach outline how changing patterns of power and governance are unfolding in relation to HIV/AIDS in the small West African country of the Gambia. Here, a new globalism in public health has led to an array of international initiatives and funding mechanisms contributing to a shift from authority based on the nation-state towards global public–private–philanthropic partnerships. We see how powerful global funding mechanisms – such as the Global Fund, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the World Bank’s Multi-Country AIDS Programme – affect the decision-making and dynamics of citizen engagement at the national and local level, with little or no downwards accountability to the people affected. Continuing in the field of global health, in Chapter 3 Robins investigates how global funding in South Africa is mediated downwards through international NGOs and local health activists, and with it the extension of global ideas, discourses and technologies that affect patterns of local action and resistance.

In Chapter 4, we shift from Africa to India, and from health to the arena of livelihoods. In this chapter, Julie Thekkudan focuses on Project Shakti, an initiative promoted by the Indian government in collaboration with Unilever, a multinational corporation, to fund women’s self-help groups at the grassroots level. This initiative represented a new public–private partnership arrangement, but with little accountability downwards, despite great consequences for local identities and the actions of local participants. Moving to agricultural livelihoods, in Chapter 5 Ian Scoones examines the dynamics of engagement in new global fora, in this case the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an ambitious attempt to encourage local and global debate on the future of agricultural science and technology through ‘cross-stakeholder dialogue’. Responding to critiques of top-down, Northern-dominated expert assessments of the past, the IAASTD aimed to be more inclusive and participatory in both design and process, in a way that became inevitably ‘fraught and flawed’.

In the next section of the book, we move from cases that examine the impact of global actors on everyday citizenship to those which explore the dynamics of transnational action as citizens attempt to mobilize upwards from their local spaces to put pressure on global decision-makers. In so doing, these case studies also reveal, they must deal with an increasing complexity of levels and types of authorities.

In Chapter 6, Borras and Franco focus on the case of Vía Campesina, one of the largest transnational agrarian movements, examining how rural agrarian movements have responded to the growing forces of globalization, especially in relation to land rights. Drawing on Fox (2001), the authors describe how nation-states have been affected by a ‘triple squeeze’: ‘from above’ through the growing regulatory power of international institutions; ‘from below’ through the decentralization of some authority to local actors; and the ‘from the sides’ through the ceding of some functions to private or quasi-public actors. As a result, the peasant movement has begun to focus much more on international institutions as duty bearers that must be accountable for upholding local land rights.

The diffusion of authority across layers and actors is also found in Chapter 7, which examines the Global Campaign for Education (GCE). Gaventa and Mayo outline how the global right to education is now affected by a multiplicity of players at different levels. As a result, they argue, citizen action must span a variety of new spaces in order to reach the universal goal of education for all. In Chapter 8, Icaza et al. illustrate how shifting patterns of trade governance, as seen in the North American Free Trade Agreement and other similar accords, create new rights for private actors, which affect where and how citizens can exercise their voice. From traditionally holding their own state to account for the provision of basic services and the fulfilment of social and economic rights, citizens must now engage private actors and defend their rights in the regional and international arenas where key decisions are increasingly made.

In Chapter 9, Waldman describes how the area of occupational health is governed increasingly by a dizzying array of global regulatory actors that exercise an array of hard and soft regulatory powers, and the consequent effects on citizen mobilization on asbestos disease in South Africa and India. In Chapter 10, Alonso shows how challenges of linking from the local to the global on environmental issues in Brazil create new types of ‘hybrid activists’, with new sets of skills required for effective engagement. In Chapter 11, Mehta and Napier-Moore describe how even displaced people – who are in some cases effectively stateless and do not have access to full citizenship rights in their host countries – in fact find themselves regulated and governed by an array of international frameworks and agencies.

Thus each of the chapters in this book illustrates a concrete example of how the shifting landscapes of global authority affect the possible terrain of spaces in which citizens may engage. In each of the important policy issues illustrated, the responsible actors and authorities are found not only at the national and local levels. Such new governance regimes are driven by a number of factors, many of which are associated with global economic forces. In India, increased engagement with global market actors reshapes public and private contours of power at the national and local level, while in the Philippines and elsewhere a growing international land grab affects the traditional structures that regulate land reform. In other cases new quasi-public entities such as the Global Fund or large environmental foundations – what Edwards (2008) calls the philanthrocapitalists – play an increasing role in the governance of social policies across a range of sectors. In some cases, these actors exercise power through formal authority. More often than not, however, they illustrate the ‘soft powers’ that characterize global authority (Nye 2004; Lukes 2007), through their effect on knowledge and discourses, or through the creation of cross-cutting networks of actors, which link public and private, governmental and non-governmental, in visible or sometimes less visible ways.

In all of these changes, the nation-state increasingly becomes squeezed between the rights and needs of its citizens, and the demands and expectations of global forces and actors, many of whom are non-state or international actors who bring a different set of pressures and accountabilities (Scholte 2005). While some scholars argue that the growth of global governance effectively diminishes the role of the nation-state (Rosenau 2002), these cases suggest in fact that the capacity of the nation-state to mediate between the local and the global is critical to how global pressures enhance or weaken the rights and claims of local citizens. From a citizen’s perspective, the internationalization of authority means negotiating additional layers of governance, characterized by increasing complexity and opaqueness, in which the local, national and global constantly mingle. Mobilization for rights and accountability, if it is to be effective, must look beyond the national and the local to the global arena, as well as to interactions across the entire spectrum of governance. Movements themselves, as we shall explore later, are faced with the challenge of becoming multi-scalar, as well as becoming able to deal with a wide variety of actors and authorities.

The implications of changing authorities for the meanings and practices of citizenship

To raise the question of the impact of global governance on citizen action is to immediately enter into voluminous and enduring debates on the possibilities of ‘global’, ‘world’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ citizenship. While there is much debate on the meanings of these terms,⁴ at its most basic level the concept of global or cosmopolitan ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the editors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acronyms
• Foreword
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: From global to local: the impact of global governance on everyday citizenship
• Part Three: From local to global: the dynamics of transnational citizen action
• About the contributors
• Index