DEVELOPMENT: Caught Between Fringe and Mainstream

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 27 2006 (IPS) - The content of speeches at the world assembly of civil society groups in Glasgow last week was indication of course of where they stood in relation to the world. But indicative also was where they sat when they spoke.

At one meeting the panellists pulled chairs off the stage to sit at floor level with delegates, with the elevation of stage behind them. It was no doubt a symbolic suggestion of the principle of equality and an expression of democracy separate from the more established forms that raise the elected above the people who elected them.

This seating symbolism came up more than once. It arose at the very first meeting on political justice at the conference, called in Glasgow last week by the civil society group Civicus and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO). Not a lot of people turned up at the meeting to begin with.

And so the panel of speakers seated themselves on the front edge of the stage floor. The Indian participant among them, from the United States, looked comfortable there in her jeans, with her red shoes swinging at eye level before some delegates on the front row. A couple of other panellists in jacket and tie had clearly not expected this.

The seating arrangement ended with a protest. “Call me old-fashioned, but I do not like this,” Amani Kandill, director of the Arab Network for NGOs said as she was called to join the panel. The hall was beginning to fill up, so it might be better to move back to proper seats, said another. And so the panel retreated to more conventional seating on chairs on stage.

The change of seating raised some fundamental questions. The first at floor level had a fringe feel to it, the second was more proper, mainstream-like arrangement. The first reduced the difference in level between those speaking and those spoken to, the second smacked of usual official distance. But also, the second was more serious and purposeful, even if in officially accepted style.

Where is civil society really situated? Is it informally close to people and therefore able to communicate in their tone, and at the same level? Or does it – the civil society of the North anyhow – seem as conventionally removed from people who need it most as the structures of government?

Or, was it none of the above? That civil society needs just to get on with its job, and skip fringe symbolism. It is a dilemma that stayed through the conference, and will last well beyond it. Because on stage or off, one question hovered above the conference, and would not go away: does civil society belong to the fringe, or is it mainstream?

Inevitably, much will depend on the particular civil society you are talking about. If you count in the trade unions and other groups that combined to thwart proposed legislation that restricted the rights of young workers in France, then civil society clearly moved from the fringes to take decisive mainstream action.

The religious anti-abortion groups in the United States are fringe in size, but mainstream in their capacity to block provision of condoms to prevent HIV and AIDS. A civil society group that lobbies successfully moves to mainstream to that extent.

“It really depends how you define civil society,” Civicus chair Aruna Rao told IPS. “If you think of civil society as development NGOs, then certainly you are talking of a narrow band of organisations. But trade unions are much bigger. And as a broader group we all have a life as citizens, we are members of various groups that are not government.”

The kind of civil society groups attending the Glasgow assembly, she said, “are certainly more on the fringes of power than they are at the centre.” And yet many exert varying and often considerably influence.

That impact is telling rather than the profile of the group. The wider political agenda is now influenced hugely by the agenda civil society has set; particularly in development, on environmental issues, and on the protection of human rights. And a lot of the world is about those three issues.

“I think civil society has now become mainstream,” Julius Court from the London-based Overseas Development Institute told IPS. “Fifteen years ago you could have called civil society fringe. But look now at what civil society is doing, particularly in developing countries, and also directly. In Kenya civil society organisations are crucial; they provide 40 percent of health and educational services. And they have a huge impact on peoples’ lives.”

Civil society is really people associating together and discussing issues with a view to doing something, Court said. “In many places there has been a great growth in civil society,” he said. “But civil society could do more, and do it better in terms of engaging with policy processes.”

That raises the further issue how far civil society is political or apolitical. At this Glasgow assembly there was no ‘verdict’ on the subject. But if that was any indication, Civicus took the view that civil society needs to be more politically engaged. There cannot be two separate lives of a citizen, one in which she or he goes to vote once in four years, and another in which the same person associates with others to bring change of some kind.

Civicus secretary-general Kumi Naidoo said at the end of the conference that Civicus will work to engage more with established political processes. No one yet knows what that means, and how exactly that will distinguish civil society from what someone could call as no more than a lobby group.

And it is not certain how civil society can hope to involve more than a relatively few concerned people. The vast majority of people are usually inert for social or political action, to the extent that vast numbers do not even bother to vote. In numbers then, some trade unions apart, civil society will remain a fringe group. But it may not therefore remain on the fringes of action.

Setting or at least decisively influencing a substantial part of the world’s political agenda is success few would deny to civil society. And it has done that as a numerically fringe group.

Perhaps it needs to find a way to bring more people up to stage level.