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CHAPTER 1

Bad Government, Good Governance: Civil Society versus Social Movements

Few terms have achieved such wide currency as 'globalization' to describe the epoch-defining changes that have characterized the past two decades and to prescribe a policy agenda of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation. As description and prescription, globalization is associated with neoliberal policies of structural adjustment that are designed to create a worldwide capitalist economy organized so as to release the forces of 'freedom, democracy, and private enterprise' — to quote from the National Security Report submitted to the US Congress by George W. Bush in September 2002. However, the promoters and guardians of this New World Order have not had an easy time of it. For one thing, the social inequalities generated in the process have not only spawned growing levels and diverse forms of discontent and social conflict, but the resulting forces of resistance against global capitalist development have been leveled against the system, undermining and weakening the neoliberal regimes committed to policies of adjustment and globalization. Under these conditions the international organizations behind this project have had to confront a serious political issue of 'governability' — i.e., the ungovernability of the forces freed from the constraints of state regulation (World Bank, 1994; Bardhan, 1997; Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido-Lobatón, 1999).

'Governance' in this situation is defined as replacing the mechanisms of political control hitherto associated with the nation state. Within the neoliberal model the state is viewed in two ways. On the one hand, it is viewed as Adam Smith saw it — as a predatory device and, in the language of the 'new political economy,' susceptible to rentierism and corruption. On the other, the 'state' (the government, to be more precise) is viewed as an inefficient means of allocating society's productive resources for the social distribution of national income. In this connection, within the parameters of the old and now defunct economic model in place since the 1950s, the government, in its policies of strategic nationalization, protectionism vis-à-vis domestic industry and local enterprise, and market regulations, distorted the normal working of the market, leading to withdrawal of capital from the production process and generating thereby widespread problems of informalization, poverty, and unemployment as well as fiscal imbalance. Within these optics, the state has been subjected to pressures for institutional and policy reform — in the direction of macroeconomic equilibrium (balanced budgets and accounts) and structural adjustment and administrative decentralization; to surrender thereby its capacity for resource allocation and reduce its economic role vis-à-vis responsibilities for development and social programming. A more strictly political dimension to these reforms was democratization, not so much in a return to the rule of law and electoral politics as a change in the relation of the state to civil society. This, we argue, is the crux of the governability/governance issue.

The problem — a problem, that is, for the promoters of globalization — is that neoliberalism is economically dysfunctional, in social terms profoundly exclusionary, and politically unsustainable, generating destabilizing forces of resistance in the form of antisystemic social movements. It is precisely as a means of dealing with this problem that the international organizations for development and finance have turned so decisively toward democratization and civil society, contracting nonprofit voluntary associations (NGOs) and converting them into their agents as 'strategic partners.' The agenda in this strategy is to enlist the help of these NGOs in dousing the fire of revolutionary ferment in the countryside — to provide the rural poor and the popular sector of society with an alternative to the social movements and their radical antisystemic politics.

This chapter explores diverse dynamics of this political process. It means that the social movements, which were formed as means of resisting the neoliberal agenda of globalization and free-market development, are beset by forces designed to demobilize them — to divert the struggle for state power in one or more directions toward electoral politics, reformist social organizations, or local development.

CIVIL SOCIETY, DEVELOPMENT, AND DEMOCRACY

Globalization is one of several ideas advanced in the lexicon of the new 'global economy.' The marketing (by advocates of a New World Order) of 'globalization' as a policy prescription of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization was accompanied by the resurrection of a term used by the rationalist humanists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (the 'Age of Reason') to distinguish a sphere independent from the state, namely 'civil society.' In the context of a neoconservative attack on the welfare/developmentalist state the idea of 'civil society' achieved prominence in political and developmental discourse, particularly in connection with successive waves of democratization, beginning in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and spreading across the developing world. In this context 'civil society' was seen as an agent for limiting authoritarian government, strengthening popular empowerment, reducing the socially atomizing and unsettling effects of market forces, enforcing political accountability, and improving the quality and inclusiveness of governance. Reconsideration of the limits of state action also led to an increased awareness of the potential role of civic organizations in the provision of public goods and social services, either separately or in a 'synergistic' relationship with state institutions. In this context, the idea of 'civil society,' like that of 'globalization,' was converted into a discursive weapon and ideological tool in service of advancing the neoliberal agenda.

The academic discourse on civil society, however, has moved beyond this agenda and can now be put into three ideological categories — conservative, liberal, and radical. On this ideological spectrum liberals generally see civil society as a countervailing force against an unresponsive and corrupt state and exploitative corporations that ignore environmental issues and human rights abuses (Kamat, 2003). Conservatives, on the other hand, see in civil society the beneficial effects of globalization for the development of democracy and economic progress — for advancing the idea of freedom in its historic march against its enemies (Chan, 2001). As for those scholars that share a belief in the need for radical change, civil society is seen as a repository of the forces of resistance and opposition, forces that can be mobilized into a counter-hegemonic bloc or a global anti-mobilization movement (Morton, 2004).

In effect, academic discourse in its diverse ideological currents appears to converge on civil society, viewing it as an agent for change in one form or another. The growth and strengthening of 'civil society' (nongovernmental, social and civic organizations) in the 1980s and 1990s are offered as proof of its capacity for autonomous development and the virtues of 'democracy,' a state that is subject to powerful democratizing tendencies and forces that favor democratic renewal. In this process of democratic renewal (or 're-democratization', as it is referred to in the literature) NGOs are assigned a leading role as frontline agents of a participatory and democratic form of development and politics, to convince the rural poor thereby of the virtues of community-based local development and the need to reject the confrontational politics of the social movements.

In the 1980s there was a veritable explosion of NGOs, many of which were formed in the wake of a retreating state. It is estimated that the vast majority of the 37,000 or so NGOs operating today in diverse developing countries were formed in the 1980s or the 1990s. As noted above, the NGOs in this historic context were contracted by international organizations — and the governments engaged in the international development project — to spread the gospel of the free market and democracy and to speak of the virtues of social democratic 'civic' organization and action within the local spaces available within the national power structure. Despite the serious reservations of many governments in the developing world (because of their 'politics'), the NGOs in this project were viewed as vastly preferable to the social movements that were generally oriented toward collective action against the power structure, seeking to change this structure rather than search for accommodation with it. In this political context the NGOs are enlisted by overseas development assistance agencies (ODAs) and governments as partners in the process of 'sustainable human development' and 'good [democratic] governance' — as watchdogs of state deviancy, to ensure its transparency (inhibit or prevent corruption and rentierism), and as participants in the formulation of public policy. The institutional framework for this 'participatory' form of development and politics (and governance rather than government) would be established by the decentralization of decision-making capacity and associated responsibilities from the national to the local level and the institution of 'good governance,' that is, a democratic regime in which the responsibility for human security and political order is not restricted to the government and other institutions of the state but is widely shared by different civil society organizations (World Bank, 1994; BID, 1996, 2000; UNDP, 1996; OECD, 1997).

The global phenomenon and explosive growth of NGOs reflects a new policy and political consensus that they are de facto, and by design, effective agents for democratic change, an important means for instituting an alternative form of development that is initiated from below, and is socially inclusive, equitable, participatory, and sustainable. This consensus view is reinforced by evidence that the NGO channel of overseas development assistance by and large is dedicated to political rather than economic development — to ensure transparency (to inhibit or prevent government corruption and rentierism), promote democracy in the process of change, inculcate relevant values and respect for democratic norms of behavior, and encourage the adoption of 'civil' politics (dialogue, consultations, negotiation) rather than the confrontationalist politics of the social movements.

The leading role of 'civil society organizations' (CSOs) in this regard (political development) foretells a reworking of 'democracy' in ways that coalesce with global capitalism and the neoliberal agenda. Indeed, a well-placed development practitioner in the UK (Wallace, 2003) has wondered aloud (and put in print) whether NGOs in this regard have been used by the international organizations as their stalking horse — and, not to put too fine a point on it, as an agent of global neoliberalism. Global policy forums and institutions, such as the OECD's Development Center, USAID, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the UN's operational agencies such as the UNDP, have all turned to the NGOs as 'forces of democratization' in the 'economic reform process' (Kamat, 2003: 65). In this, Ottaway (2003: vi) argues, they function as agents of 'democratic promotion,' a 'new activity in which the aid agencies and NGOs [originally] embarked [upon] with some trepidation and misgivings,' but that in the early 1990s 'came of age.'

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE

In the 1990s the perception of NGOs as 'Trojan horses for global neoliberalism' (Wallace, 2003) also 'came of age.' But the effectiveness of NGOs in this regard is not without controversy. Indeed, it has occasioned something of a debate between liberals, in general favorably disposed toward the NGOs, and conservatives, who view them as 'false saviors of international development' (Kamat, 2003). In the same context, radical political economists — and we situate ourselves here — tend to view NGOs as agents (or instruments), either knowingly or often unwittingly, of outside interests. And, in the same context, both economic development and democracy appear as masks for an otherwise hidden agenda, used to impose the policy and institutional framework of the new world order against resistance.

This apparent convergence between the left and the right in a critical assessment of development NGOs points toward several problems involved in the use of the state as an instrument of political power. From a liberal reformist perspective the state needs to be strengthened, but it also needs to be democratized in the service of a more inclusive and participatory approach to policy design and implementation. From a neoliberal (and politically conservative) perspective, however, the state is the problem. On the one hand, it is an inefficient means of allocating the productive resources of the system. On the other, as Adam Smith argued, it is a predatory device with a tendency to serve special interests and to capture rents from state-sponsored and regulated economic activities. The state officials, it is added by contemporary advocates of this view, such as the economists at the World Bank, are subject to pressures that more often than not result in their corruption. The solution: a minimalist state, subject to the democratizing pressures of civil society, i.e. groups and organizations able to secure the transparency of the policymaking process.

And what of the state as viewed through the lens of an alternative, more radical political economy? From this perspective the state is an instrument of class rule, a repository of concentrated political power needed to turn the process of national development around — in a socialist direction. In this context, the essence of what is now widely regarded as the politics of the old left — or the old politics of the left — is a struggle over state power. Both leftist political parties and the social movements tend to be oriented in this direction, albeit in a new political context which has seen the emergence of a new perspective and way of doing politics — the politics of 'no-power,' which is to avoid confrontations with the structures of political and economic power and instead to build on the social capital of the poor, to engage in projects of local development.

In the academic world the politics of state power is theoretically constructed in these ways. But what about in the real world? In this context, and with specific reference to developments in Latin America, the main pattern of political development over the past two decades seems to have been a twofold devolution/involution of state power. On the one hand, the policy and institutional framework for political decision-making has been subjected to what has been termed the Washington Consensus, with a corresponding shift of political power (vis-à-vis macroeconomic policy) toward Washington-based 'international' institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. On the other hand, a democratic 'reform' process has resulted in the institution of the 'rule of law' and the decentralization of government from the center to the local as well as the strengthening of civil society, viz. its capacity to participate in public policymaking.

The latter development is based on various forms of partnerships between international organizations and governments on the one hand, and civil society on the other. And this development was no coincidence. It is based on a conscious strategy pursued by the major representative organizations of global capital and the new world economic order — the imperial brain trust, as Salbuchi (2000), defines these organizations. Among these organizations can be found the World Bank, the regional banks such as the IDB, ODAs such as USAID, the Development Center of the OECD, and operational agencies of the UN system such as the UNDP, ENEP, FAO, WHO. Each of these organizations pursues a partnership strategy with NGOs and other civil society organizations, setting up a division (or 'office') to work with them, officially registering those prepared to cooperate with them in a common agenda of democratic development, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection — an alternative form of participatory, socially inclusive, and 'human' (economic and social) development.

In this context, much of the current academic discourse on the role of NGOs in the economic and political development process focuses on the issue of improving their organizational effectiveness as well as their accountability — as well as their 'autonomy' vis-à-vis governments and the donor organizations (the ODAs). As for the latter, several umbrella organizations within the NGO sector have sought assiduously to ensure greater independence from both donors and the governments that hire 'private voluntary organizations' (PVOs) to execute their projects and programs. But, generally speaking, these efforts have not met with any success. More often than not, as in the case of the US, the major NGOs have not only met with resistance on the part of the donor community but outright efforts to bring NGOs into line. As for USAID, in 2003 the director at the time bluntly informed an assembly of NGOs brought together by Interaction, an umbrella organization of American NGOs, that they would have to do a better job acknowledging their ties to government, as private contractors of public policy, or risk losing funding. Our own research (see also Okonski, 2001) indicates that a substantial number of NGOs in recent years in fact have become increasingly dependent on this funding.

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Excerpted from "Social Movements and State Power"
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Copyright © 2005 James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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