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DEVELOPMENT: Civil Society Grapples With Relationship Problems

Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, Scotland, Jun 24 2006 (IPS) - Sit within the group, and you see the differences. Look at it from the outside, and those differences might just begin to look like collective introspection.

Sit within the group, and you see the differences. Look at it from the outside, and those differences might just begin to look like collective introspection.

That, just about, was what a host of civil society organisations got up to at the world assembly of civil society organisations in Glasgow this week. The conference was called by the civil society group Civicus and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.

The introspection covered the range from troubled civil society relations with government, and how it must address its own failings.

“We came to a greater recognition that civil society needs to look at how it engages with the formal democratic institutions,” Civicus secretary-general Kumi Naidoo told IPS towards the end of the conference.

“It confronted its need to engage with elections-based action. There was growing recognition that civil society has a responsibility to strengthen itself but also needs to breathe new life into formal democracy.”

The assembly also looked at strengthening relations between civil society and trade unions and other groups, Naidoo said. “Like government, we too tend to operate in our little silos.”

Civil society groups recognised they must be more open, to critics as well.

“The key thing that has come up is the question of accountability and legitimacy,” Julius Court from the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) told IPS. “Civil society was the darling in the 1990s. But it has been challenged. It is now struggling to find solutions.”

Civil society members took a hard look at their own legitimacy at the Glasgow meeting, Court said. “Legitimacy comes either from expertise or from representation,” he said. Civil society has at different places and times struggled with both.

Unlike government after its conferences, this one led to no grand five or ten point declaration.

Few tangible results emerge from such meetings, Court said. “The most important part of such meetings is the chance to share experiences and to learn. People from different civil society organisations talked to one another about what is working, what is not.”

The assembly was particularly a learning experience for Scottish civil society groups who turned up in strength, Court said. “And they listened not just to other groups from the North but to many from the South as well.”

The North-South divide did surface all through the conference; it could hardly have been otherwise.

“That gap is very real,” Aruna Rao, director of the group Gender at Work and Chair of the Civicus board told IPS. “You see it in terms of access to resources, the ability to set the agenda, proximity to decision-makers.”

Norway provides the highest percentage of its gross national income for development assistance, she said. “But a lot of that funding goes through Norwegian companies and NGOs.”

But new movements of southern-based organisations are emerging, she said. “They are forming their own networks, and becoming increasingly vocal in terms of defining policy alternatives.”

The world assembly this week did try to bridge the North-South gap, Rao said. “We do that in terms of who speaks at our plenaries, or in setting out the agenda at workshops.”

Contrary to general notions about the civil society as a bunch of vague do-gooders, vital questions about power and politics emerged at the conference.

The nature of civil society work is essentially political, Court said. “If you are doing on the ground what the government is not, that is a very political act.”

At the heart of all civil society effort is the effort towards change, and “every change is about power,” Rao said. “Civil society work is not about politics only in the sense that it is not about party politics.”

The conference brought also a new sense of the range of civil society, that covers also groups often branded ‘right-wing’ and ‘reactionary’, such as those that oppose reproductive health measures on religious grounds.

The conference brought some fresh democratic breeze into its style. A point made from the floor could be flashed on the screen in minutes, and all delegates could vote on it there and then.

A Lebanese woman with a disability spoke of the lack of rights for the disabled. That was instantly debated, with delegates divided about equally – but with suggestions that the disabled face far more discrimination in the developing than the developed world.

And the conference brought none of the hierarchical notes that creep into non-governmental organisations soon enough. More than most other conferences, this one gave practical shape to participation and free speech through the way it was set up, rather than through verbal tributes to the idea.

But this was no absolute model for all conferences to follow, either. The most glaring omission was the Glaswegians. This was about people, but almost no one from the city seemed to drop in to see what was going on. Which did raise a question: are civil society groups often talking to one another rather than to the people in whose name they speak.

And as ever, difficult notions about money came up: where money gets sourced, who channels it and to whom. But at least this all had begun to get talked about.