By Mark Waller
Inter Press ServiceOctober 10, 2002
The relationship of Northern aid agencies and NGOs with the South is far from the 'partnership' they like to project, says a study released this week.
The study 'Voices from Southern Civil Societies' points to inequalities despite the shift from the imperious paternalism in development aid practices during the 1990s.
The study commissioned by the development department of the Finnish foreign ministry and co-ordinated by researchers at Helsinki University aims to bring a new tone to bilateral development work. It was conducted in seven sample countries with which Finland has development links - Kenya, Namibia, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico and Nicaragua.
The study seeks to give a Southern perspective on development aid relations with the North. 'Strengthening civil society' has been the vogue phrase of development policies since the early 1990s and is usually equated with supporting Southern non-governmental organisations. But the study stresses that civil society in developing countries is massively diverse.
The Nepalese report compiled by staff at the Nepal South Asia Centre defines civil society in Nepal as a conglomeration of NGOs, community organisations and emerging social movements. The report of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Nairobi University says civil society in Kenya also includes social and cultural groups, and religious, professional and co-operative organisations.
The North forgets often that local organising in the South is neither new nor a creation of development aid, the study says. The report on Kenya points out that the spirit of 'harambee' - pooling of resources for mutual help - has in fact been weakened partly by foreign-funded NGOs.
Assistance from the North is clearly seen as a double-edged sword. On the plus side it has brought a welcome focus on democracy and good governance. The Thai report drawn up by the Project for Ecological Recovery notes the willingness of Northern NGOs to learn local culture and work at the grassroots level. But the majority of reports stress that relations between Northern and Southern organisations are fundamentally unequal.
"Whoever provides money, commands and controls," says the report on Mexico prepared at the Chiapas-based Centre for Research and Advanced Study in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). Southern civil society organisations (CSOs) resort to "dressing up information to create space for activities that are considered important" by Northerners, the report says. In Kenya "organisations cannot think about their policies without a donor in mind."
Outi Hakkarainen, a researcher at Helsinki University's Institute of Development Studies and one of the co-ordinators of the study says "it's striking that the reports tend to refer to Northern organisations as 'donors'." Northerners, on the other hand, "like to see themselves and their Southern counterparts as 'partners'."
The influence of foreign money on CSOs in the South is "huge and not always healthy," Hakkarainen says. "It tends to be blind to the effects on regional and state structures, for instance undermining pressure for social services. The countries we've heard from ultimately need to find their own national conditions for civil society that are not shaped from outside."
Reports in the study are critical of the negative effects of donor funding on civil societies. In Nepal they have created the image of a "dollar-farming sector".
Northern organisations expect openness and access to information from the South but are rarely open themselves, the reports say. The study points out that the stress on project funding by donors undercuts the ability of Southern civil societies to get resources for day-to-day activities.
"Much of the time of CSOs in Mexico is taken up with finding financial resources for their survival as organisations," says Lourdes Angulo of CIESAS. "We don't really understand the nature of the donor organisations we deal with from the North. We don't understand their purpose because there is a lack of information coming to us from the North."
At the same time, Angulo says that the pressures that increasingly shape the role of CSOs are a clear product of outside leverage. "Privatisation and global economic determinants are the pressures that most define us," he says.
"In Kenya there are CSOs that want to affect social transformation, and there are private enterprise ones that want to access donor funds," says Karuti Kanyinga of the IDS. "The latter are real entrepreneurs, they carry briefcases filled with excellent proposals. In most cases they have no impact at all, but they are very vocal and influential."
Montree Chantawong of the Thai Project for Ecological Recovery says Northern aid tends to empower mainstream development policy locked into structural adjustment, the global market and privatisation. "Though aid may carry an excellent goal and is seen by the public as acceptable, it tends to work in such a way that it eventually helps the state authorities to preserve their power," Chantawong says.
Officials at the Finnish foreign ministry hope to draw on the proposals in the reports to reshape approaches to development aid for civil society. "Civil society should be a channel for the poor to demand their rights," says Christian Sundgren, head of information and NGO work at the development department. Civil society workers are waiting to see if such sentiment will eventually be reflected in official development policy.
More Information on NGOs
More Information on NGOs in the Field
More Information on Credibility and Legitimacy of NGOs
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
