Effective Global Governance Structure impossible without NGOs

Historically, NGOs have been actively involved in global issue since 1919. The evolution of International Labor Organization was a combined effort of nongovernmental organizations, trade unions and business sectors. Participation of NGOs were crucial in shaping and evolving the UDHR, started a dialogue and discussion in international forum to create separate and effective institutional mechanism for children and women under the UN System. In the global governance, the role of NGOs has been recognized as an important player and valuable non state actors. 

There are many advantages of NGOs as important driving force to streamline global governance agenda and to deliver the global public goods. NGOs works as an informal organizational structure, which enables them to be creative in using information, attracting wider attention, building capacity of local community at grassroots level, identifying target intervention and implementation strategy and to combine all these aspect to build strong network, where information, advocacy and effective communication creates enabling environment for better governance. Decentralized and less bureaucratic structure distinguish the civil society from public and private sectors.

NGOs have also experienced evolutionary changes and transformed their working style in last few decades.  John Clarks in his book, “World Apart” illustrates the progression as moving from a focus on ‘poor individuals to poor communities to poor societies’ to global governance. This is also important here to understand that each stage of progression of NGOs has been important part of development process. This has been recognized that NGOs has been involved in responding to humanitarian needs, building social infrastructure for local development, engage in advocacy for policy change and to empower the disadvantage community and civil society. Walter Powell called NGOs as ‘third mode of economic organization, which is different from market and hierarchal economic structure’.

The United Nations recognized that the rise of civil society is one of the historical events and global governance has not been sole domain of government. These days, NGOs and non state actors are prime movers as with issues of gender, climate change, human rights violence, debt related issue, landmines, HIV/AIDS. The core value of global governance and its global institutions is to provide good governance, which requires empowered citizenry and accountable government institutions at national and local level. The Civil Society organization leverages to improve the relationship between the local institutions and citizenry.  

The outreach area of NGOs and strong connection with common people help them to recognize the principled idea, norms to promote those causes to influence and to advocate the policy change. ‘Make a difference and transnational advocacy network’ helps the civil society organization to act together and build strong network at national and transnational level. The transnational advocacy networks provide an effective platform to NGOs to work together, work jointly to gather and share information, influence government to change the policy statement etc.  There are many instances, where NGOs has played significant role in changing behavior for social benefits of society and influence the policy making process to be more social sensitive. 

Civil Society organizations have used the informational politics to combat female circumcision, influence several government and administrators like George Bush to take preventive steps using land mines during war and internal conflict, Baby Food Campaign against Nestle, while symbolic politics of networks convinced the global institution, UN to declare Year of Indigenous People, Watergate issue to create awareness about political corruption, Vietnam War and used ‘naming and shaming’ campaign  against famous director Spielberg not to make documentary for human right repressive regime of Chinese Government. 

The leverage politics and accountability politics are another aspect of network, which brought down the financial institutions such as World Bank to introduce policy change and influenced Eastern European and Russian government to protect human rights. Technology, knowledge network, decentralization are major advantage of third sector and enable the civil society organization to be accountable and transparent in their working style. NGOs also enjoy credibility for its technical expertise, grassroots experiences and sound analysis.There are many weaknesses inherently presence in the NGOs and its network politics. NGOs are dependent on the financial resource on the funding agencies. A large number of funding agencies provide financial resources to NGOs with an objective to achieve its political agenda. 

The ‘rational irrationality’ approach of NGOs is a kind of collective action for collective goal, which help in building the common strategy of global governance to address the issue of human security in global policy agenda. NGOs provides abundance space for ‘policy entrepreneur’, such as Henry Dumont, Mohammed Yunus, whose idea has positively changed the lives of millions  and idea is being scaled up in other part of the world. 

Rethinking Poverty Alleviation: A ‘Poverties’ Approach

I have been trying to find real answer of following questions who has invented poverty? Who define poverty? And how poverty ridden groups or individuals feel about poverty? Poverty is neither an idea nor a substance but its presence in any idea and substance make the state of affair challenging. Recently, I went through quite insightful article entitled “Rethinking Poverty Alleviation: A “Poverties” Approach, written by Edward R Carr (http://www.edwardrcarr.com/index.html).

Defining poverty has been a matter of debate since the day the concept was identified in the human civilization. Although, the changes in understanding and dealing the poverty alleviation mechanism has somewhat made the concept lucid but has also opened many windows of opportunity to address the ‘causes of and solution to the challenges that threaten human well being.’ The article thoroughly objects the preconceived notions and its influence in defining, measuring and structuring poverty and poverty alleviation program. Although, the article decries about the poverty as singular universal problem and also rejects the idea of poverty alleviation program which are structured on this basis. The article considers that the main reason behind the failure of the “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” by the IMF and World Bank in 1999, was the approach and its implementation techniques. Treating the poverty as singular and universal problem was not a good approach and the economic orthodoxy of IMF and World Bank was unable to provide space to loan seeking nations to challenge them.

Despite the critical stand on poverty and poverty alleviation, the article somewhat has avoided accepting the fact of dealing poverty is not simply an easy issue or playing with jargon. This article asserts that the limitation in visioning poverty in the context of the practice of poverty alleviation unable to address the causes and challenges at the local. In reality, the poverty alleviation works under the top down paradigm rather integrating with the real causes of the poverty. This happens because the poverty is seen as singular, universal problem. The involvement of local knowledge and social participation is one of the important aspects to address this problem effectively, but learning shows that this initiative also faces challenge going beyond the advocacy parameter in poverty alleviation program.

Elaborated Essence:

Generally, the main thrust is to critically evaluate the preconceived notion and definition of poverty and how this notion and definition destroy the process of addressing poverty at local level with local strategy. The article underlines three ways under which the possibility to ensure the efficacy of poverty reduction intervention. Firstly, the contextual norms of understanding to deal with poverty should be integrated with the contemporary poverty reduction approach. Secondly, the causes of poverty are universally defined, which broadly structured the poverty alleviation approach, overlooking the local context is significant reason of failure in understanding the phenomenon of poverty. Finally, the potential of trade off and synergies disappears as the poverty is conceived as “singular problem with universal causes.” The author justifies the approach to reduce poverty should go beyond the singular conceptualization of poverty, and suggests that the “poverties” approach would allow us to rethink the development goals and its strategy, without disturbing the existing or ongoing efforts on the singular conceptualization. 

According to the article, the effort in defining and measuring poverty under the eight heading such as the sphere of concerns, definition at broader perspective, identification of its objective and subjective nature, justification in drawing poverty lines, units of measurement, dealing multidimensionality, time and causal explanation of poverty are also neither able to recognize the social participation (read local voice) nor able to conceive the poverty as ‘the product of locally unique problems’. The author shows his objection towards conceptualizing the poverty solution in broader perspective of the “growth” (Sach; 2005) or ‘access to capita’ (De Soto 200). However, he asserts that this nature of manifestation of poverty itself increases the chances of failure for the poverty reduction intervention at local level. 

He criticizes the sectoral approach of current poverty reduction intervention, in which, the issues of fertility, education, income and environmental quality mere a kind of manifestation of poverty. The article identifies the potential of the integrative approach as a best practice because one sector reform creates tension with the other sector as ‘education reform vs. market reform vs. environmental protection’. The lack of interlinkages with the different sectoral reforms creates more problem than solution in reducing poverty. The author lucidly asserts that ‘without addressing the local multidimensionality of what we call poverty, our intervention may cause more hardship than they alleviate’. 

    

The article cites the number of studies which identified the challenges related the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). The sheer objective of this initiative was to identify the diverse perspective in building project of poverty alleviation and development behest of the IMF and World Bank. However, the article agrees that the PRSPs were intended to underline the solution of poverty by either involving or identifying its local context through the ‘common sense’ application, besides this objective, the initiative was about to identify the alternative to the economic policies of the World Bank and IMF. Even the financial institutions studies show that the objective of PRSPs was not at all in practice at the national level discussion and in production of the paper. The article simply identifies that countries were not able to take risk of avoiding financial recourse to challenge the existing norms of the institutions. 

This is also to be noted here that the solution to address the poverty was largely evolved and developed away from the locality, where the project was meant to be implemented. Even the local partners (the national governments) did not want to disqualify for the debt relief and access to loan from these institutions. The motivation among the nations to submit the PRSPs was to demonstrate nation’s ability or need towards financial resources. However, the author blames that the economic orthodoxy of these institutions basically motivated nations to avoid challenging it in their nation’s PRPS. The article convincingly criticizes the PRSPs approach for encouraging Ghana to produce certain crops, which was conceived as incremental effects in increasing Ghana’s domestic food security and export earnings. 

However, this approach was unable to recognize the gender relationship in cropping the identified crop and also the power relationship in social context with the economic activities in Ghana. Resultantly, the approach yielded more harm than the poverty reduction at local level. Even land reform intervention in second phase of PRSPs in Ghana was miserably failed to integrate the real social issues in relation with the land holdings and its access among women in Ghana.

This article articulates the meaning of ‘poverty to poverties’ as a transformation in the process of conceptualizing the development and poverty. Broadly, the sectoral approach has been significantly underlined as result of the failure of the singular universal definition of poverty. This articulation embraces the idea of heterogeneity and diversity in the nature of poverty, which are seen as corrective step in measuring and identifying poverty. However, the article accepts that the transformative articulation is not mean to reject the idea of existing norms and measurements, but promotes this as an approach to overcome the existing limitations in dealing with development and poverty alleviation. 

Although, the author cautiously categories that the definitional and operationalization aspect of ‘poverties’ are not quite away from ‘poverty’, but an approach to recognize the localized version of challenges and solutions, which somewhat close to reality about the understanding and dealing poverty. He agrees that the localized version of poverty and its challenges in his argument as to reinforce the Chamber’s approach to examine ‘who defines problems and its solution? And who benefits from this definition?’ However, the author highlights the value of local knowledge and its application as an additional advantage in building viable strategy to deal the ‘poverties’ and this would generate a sense of belongingness with the local people and good for the general well being. 

Throughout the article emphasizes the concept of legitimacy and values. In the ‘poverties’ approach, the concept of legitimacy is seen as the combination of local knowledge and power structure, a critical force for the outcomes of any poverty alleviation intervention. Meanwhile, the challenge of generalization is treated an opportunity to facilitate the new framework, which would be able to reproduces PRSPs once again to guide the national development policy. However, the reproduction of PRSPs would not replicate the sectoral approach but focus to integrate the social, economic and environmental processes within the country, which contributes the well being outcomes. Secondly, the ‘poverties’ approach would orient the PRSPs to focus on the local strategies and their significance in dealing with the prevailing inequalities at local level. In last, the article rejects the process of identifying the broader indicators of development through the survey and baseline analysis, because this process of building indicators is also reinforced the poverty as singular universal problem.

Ideal Type:

The article aptly fit into the category of ‘ideal type’, which fascinates the interpretation of existing norms and values. In this article, the significance of locality and grassroots approach are presented as the last resort to address the poverty effectively. In fact, the article sees the concept of knowledge as a structured body not as process of continuous learning. The social participation is also the prototype of diversity and heterogeneity, but the challenge to build consensus among the group is also daunting task. 

Additionally, the article avoids accepting the inevitability of social change as potent force for expanding the local knowledge base. As the knowledge base is changed, the social structure is developed around the “mechanical solidarity”, which encourages the specialized set of information and practice in the society. In the contemporary society, the sectoral approach is also based on the previous learning from the poverty reduction program. The education reform enables the local to utilize the available resources effectively rather than starting conflict with market reform. Although, the conflict is also normal phenomenon even at the grassroots level, while the article projects the conflict as pathological subject. 

The subject of poverty has been critically developed in this article but, on the one hand, the article criticizes the role of powerful theories and institutions in spreading the preconceived notion of poverty and its approach, while on the other hand, the article itself recognizes the domination of power in Ghana’s social structure a reason of failure of PRSPs. The relationship between knowledge and power is unavoidable; therefore, the sectoral approach in dealing poverty is not simply avoiding the integrated mechanism but also addressing the issue of poverty as multidimensional and multidisciplinary.  

In Last:

The social participation and local knowledge do not exist as combined entity at local level. There are various dimensions within the social structure in locality. The failure of many approaches in reducing poverty is not merely a reason of avoiding the local knowledge and its participation but the nature of poverty itself a challenge since a long period of time. However, the poverty to poverties has also been recognized in many poverty reduction approaches, while the local level power holding and sharing is still a challenge for strengthening social participation at local level. In last, the substance in the article promotes new opportunity for advocacy and rights based approach to deal the poverty as the causal effect of failed policies and approaches. This correlates the power of social participation in strengthening the capacity of local institutions.