By P.J. Simmons
Foreign PolicyFall 1998
In the summer of 1994, U.S. environmental advocacy groups were getting ready to celebrate. The United States was about to join almost 90 other nations in ratifying the Convention on Biodiversity, which enjoyed broad support from U.S. environmentalists, agro-business groups, and the biotechnology sector. After hearings characterized in the press as a "love fest," members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were almost unanimously prepared to back the treaty. Then a group of agricultural and trade nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) previously uninvolved in the debate weighed in, warning that ratification could, in effect, destroy U.S. agriculture. As the Chicago Tribune reported in September 1994, evidence later surfaced that some of this opposition was based on a virulent misinformation campaign claiming, among other things, that treaty advocates were all foes of farming, logging, and fishing. But by then, the biodiversity treaty had been relegated to the back of a long line of treaties competing for congressional attention.
At a time when NGOs are celebrating their remarkable success in achieving a ban on landmines and creating an International Criminal Court (ICC), it may seem churlish to recall a four-year-old episode that many would likely regard as a defeat. But amid the breathless accounts about the growing power of NGOs, the failure of the biodiversity treaty is a useful reminder of the complexity of the role that these groups now play in international affairs. Embracing a bewildering array of beliefs, interests, and agendas, they have the potential to do as much harm as good. Hailed as the exemplars of grassroots democracy in action, many NGOs are, in fact, decidedly undemocratic and unaccountable to the people they claim to represent. Dedicated to promoting more openness and participation in decision making, they can instead lapse into old-fashioned interest group politics that produces gridlock on a global scale.
The question facing national governments, multilateral institutions, and national and multinational corporations is not whether to include NGOs in their deliberations and activities. Although many traditional centers of power are fighting a rear-guard action against these new players, there is no real way to keep them out. Instead, the real challenge is figuring out how to incorporate NGOs into the international system in a way that takes account of their diversity and scope, their various strengths and weaknesses, and their capacity to disrupt as well as to create.
Why NGOs Matter
Defining NGOs is not an exercise for the intellectually squeamish. A 1994 United Nations document, for example, describes an NGO as a non-profit entity whose members are citizens or associations of citizens of one or more countries and whose activities are determined by the collective will of its members in response to the needs of the members of one or more communities with which the NGO cooperates.This formulation embraces just about every kind of group except for private businesses, revolutionary or terrorist groups, and political parties. Other popular substitutes for the term NGO (private voluntary organizations, civil society organizations, and the independent sector) are likewise almost terminally vague. A better approach to understanding NGOs and what they are would focus on their respective goals, membership, funding sources, and other such factors (see box, page 85).
Yet although there may be no universal agreement on what NGOs are exactly, there is widespread agreement that their numbers, influence, and reach are at unprecedented levels (see chart, page 89). In 1948, for example, the UN listed 41 consultative groups that were formally accredited to cooperate and consult with the UN Economic and Social Council (ecosoc); in 1998, there were more than 1,500 with varying degrees of participation and access. Until recently, NGOs clustered in developed and democratic nations; now groups sprout up from Lima to Beijing. They are changing societal norms, challenging national governments, and linking up with counterparts in powerful transnational alliances. And they are muscling their way into areas of high politics, such as arms control, banking, and trade, that were previously dominated by the state.In general terms, NGOs affect national governments, multilateral institutions, and national and multinational corporations in four ways: setting agendas, negotiating outcomes, conferring legitimacy, and implementing solutions.
Setting Agendas
NGOs have long played a key role in forcing leaders and policymakers to pay attention. In the early 1800s, U.S. and European bodies such as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society were driving forces behind government action on the slave trade; by the turn of the century, groups such as the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade were leading an influential antidrug movement that culminated in the 1912 Hague Opium Convention. In 1945, NGOs were largely responsible for inserting human-rights language in the UN Charter and have since put almost every major human-rights issue on the international agenda. Likewise, NGO activism since the 1960s and 1970s successfully raised the profile of global environmental and population issues.
Instead of holding marches or hanging banners off buildings, NGO members now use computers and cell phones to launch global public-relations blitzes that can force issues to the top of policymakers' "to do" lists. Consider the 1997 Nobel Prize–winning campaign by NGOs to conclude a treaty banning landmines over the objections of the United States. The self-described "full working partnership" between the Canadian government and a loose coalition of more than 350 humanitarian and arms-control NGOs from 23 countries was key to the negotiations' success. But what seized the attention of the public and policymakers was the coalition's innovative media campaign using the World Wide Web, faxes, e-mail, newsletters, and even Superman and Batman comic books. Treaty supporters won the signatures of 122 nations in 14 months. When several coalition members announced plans for a follow-on campaign against small arms, the U.S. government sprang into action, meeting with 20 other countries in July 1998 to launch official talks on a possible treaty.
Negotiating Outcomes
NGOs can be essential in designing multilateral treaties that work. Chemical manufacturing associations from around the world helped set up an effective verification regime for the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention that could be supported by industries and militaries. Throughout the various sessions of negotiations on climate change, groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development have helped craft compromise proposals that attempt to reconcile environmental and commercial interests; meanwhile, NGOs have been instrumental in helping government negotiators understand the science behind the issues that they seek to address.
NGOs can also build trust and break deadlocks when negotiations have reached an impasse. In 1990, a sole Italian NGO, the Comunití di Sant'Egidio, started the informal meetings between the warring parties in Mozambique that eventually led to a peace settlement. During talks in 1995 to extend the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, NGOs from several countries working with the South African government delegation helped forge a compromise that led to the treaty's permanent extension.
Conferring Legitimacy
NGO judgments can be decisive in promoting or withholding public and political support. The World Bank learned this lesson in the early 1990s, albeit the hard way. After decades of watching the bank do business with only a handful of NGOs and brush off demands for change, more than 150 public-interest NGOs took part in a sustained campaign to spur greater openness and accountability and to encourage debt reduction and development strategies that were more equitable and less destructive to the environment. Today, partly as a result of this high-profile pressure, about half of the bank's lending projects have provisions for NGO involvement—up from an average of only 6 percent between 1973 and 1988. The bank has even included NGOs such as Oxfam International in once sacrosanct multilateral debt relief discussions—against the wishes of many World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials. Even the IMF is beginning to change its tune. In June 1998, the IMF Board of Directors met with several NGO leaders to discuss their proposals to increase the fund's transparency.
Making Solutions Work
NGOs on the ground often make the impossible possible by doing what governments cannot or will not. Some humanitarian and development NGOs have a natural advantage because of their perceived neutrality and experience. The International Committee of the Red Cross, for example, is able to deliver health care to political prisoners in exchange for silence about any human-rights violations that its members witness. Other groups such as Oxfam International provide rapid relief during and after complex humanitarian disasters—with and without UN partners. Moreover, as governments downsize and new challenges crowd the international agenda, NGOs increasingly fill the breach. Willy nilly, the UN and nation-states are depending more on NGOs to get things done. Total assistance by and through international NGOs to the developing world amounted to about $8 billion in 1992—accounting for 13 percent of all development assistance and more than the entire amount transferred by the UN system.
International NGOs also play critical roles in translating international agreements and norms into domestic realities. Where governments have turned a blind eye, groups such as Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists call attention to violations of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Environmental NGOs police agreements such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, uncovering more accurate data on compliance than that provided by member nations. Perhaps one of the most vital but overlooked NGO roles is to promote the societal changes needed to make international agreements work. Signatories of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 1997 Bribery Convention, for example, are counting on the more than 80 chapters of Transparency International to help change the way their societies view bribery and corruption.
Increasingly, however, NGOs operate outside existing formal frameworks, moving independently to meet their goals and establishing new standards that governments, institutions, and corporations are themselves compelled to follow through force of public opinion. The UN moratorium on driftnet fishing in 1992 and the U.S. International Dolphin Conservation Act of 1994, for example, largely codified changes in fishing practices that NGOs had already succeeded in promoting and then winning from commercial fisheries. More recently, even as governments and multilateral institutions slowly begin to consider measures to promote the sustainable use of forests, the environmental NGO Greenpeace led a European consumer boycott that persuaded a leading Canadian logging company to announce that it would change the way that it harvests trees.
The Rise of the "Global Idiots?"
Despite the demonstrated capacity of NGOs to do good, their growing power on the ground has exposed them to heightened criticism, some of it justified. As salutary as international attention has been to the recent turmoil in Chiapas, Mexico, for example, it is hard to believe that the arrival there of 4,500 foreigners from 276 different organizations necessarily represents an unalloyed good. One recent study on NGOs and peacebuilding in Bosnia criticized the use of advertising (from signboards to t-shirts) by NGOs to promote their reconstruction programs to potential donors. Such advertising, the study noted, had the effect of denigrating local rebuilding efforts and raising questions about where NGOs were actually putting their money. In the Sudan and Somalia, NGOs have subsidized warring factions by making direct and indirect payments to gain access to areas needing assistance. In other conflict settings such as Ethiopia and Rwanda, NGO–constructed roads and camps for civilian assistance have instead been used by combatants.
Other longer-term concerns loom for these service-delivery NGOs. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned in 1996 that if national governments continue to favor NGOs over multilateral agencies in donor assistance, they may undermine important systems of coordination and cooperation in large-scale emergencies. Intense competition among NGOs in the relief sector has also pushed the sector toward a form of oligopoly that threatens to crowd out smaller players, especially local NGOs in developing countries. Eight major groups now control about 50 percent of the relief market (see box on page 92).
But on balance, the record for such NGOs is surely no worse than that of governments. NGOs are increasingly aware of these weaknesses and are moving to address them by adopting codes of conduct and pledging to "do no harm." Moreover, given their origins as grassroots groups, NGOs tend to be wary of organizations that become too big; this innate suspicion can serve as a mechanism for self-regulation.
Yet, the greatest challenges created by the growing influence of NGOs are not in the field but in the arena of public opinion and the corridors of power. Today, in a phenomenon that one environmental activist bemoaned as the "rise of the global idiots," any group with a fax machine and a modem has the potential to distort public debate—witness the demise of not just the biodiversity treaty but the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (mai), which for all its apparent shortcomings still deserved more reasoned consideration than it received. [See Stephen Kobrin's "The mai and the Clash of Globalizations" on page 97.] Even legitimate, well-established groups sometimes seize on issues that seem designed more to promote their own image and fundraising efforts than to advance the public interest: In 1995, for example, Greenpeace continued to attack the Royal Dutch/Shell Group for its plans to sink an oil rig (the Brent Spar) in the North Sea, even after independent scientific analyses showed that the environmental effects of doing so would be inconsequential. Steeped in a culture that encourages adversarial attitudes to the powers that be, many NGOs seem best suited to confrontation, a characteristic that some U.S. policymakers seized on in noting that the NGO coalition against landmines might have won U.S. support (and hence a stronger treaty) if it had been more patient and willing to compromise.
The Limits of Democracy
Governments, multilateral institutions, and corporations face inherent dilemmas in trying to work with NGOs. At their most fundamental level, these dilemmas hinge on two key questions: Who should participate, and how? On the one hand, opening up the floodgates to allow equal access to every group would frustrate decision making. More than 1,500 NGOs were accredited at the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, for example. Trying to include them all was impossible, so in the final days of the conference, government delegates increasingly retreated behind closed doors. On the other hand, narrowing the field fairly is extraordinarily difficult because no one algorithm or set of criteria can objectively rank the worth of an NGO to a participatory process. Should the World Trade Organization (WTO) consult and share information with groups that have large memberships but are sworn enemies of the WTO's existence? When seeking to devise a treaty on persistent organic pollutants, should negotiators insist that groups be representative of, and accountable to, large constituencies and thereby exclude reputable, experienced groups that represent future generations or nonhumans (the International Fund for Animal Welfare, for example)? Some traditional centers for power have done a better job than others at tackling these kinds of questions about participation. Among nation-states, Canada stands out for its role in forging an alliance with NGOs on the landmine ban. As Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has said, "Clearly, one can no longer relegate NGOs to simple advisory or advocacy roles. . . . They are now part of the way decisions have to be made." And nations such as Norway helped fund the NGO coalition for the ICC. (On the other side of the funding fence, nations such as Sierra Leone and Bosnia received help at the ICC negotiations from legal advisers provided by the NGO No Peace Without Justice.) The U.S. record in working with NGOs is mixed: generally good in areas such as the environment and relatively poor in areas such as arms control and regional issues. China represents another extreme, having chosen to banish NGO delegates at the Fourth International Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995 to a site one hour's drive away from the main negotiations.
Most multinational corporations are still struggling to figure out how to handle NGO participation. One 1996 poll of 51 major European corporations found that although 90 percent of them believed that the impact of "pressure groups" would stay the same or increase over the next five years, only 20 percent had formal procedures in place for dealing with such groups, and only 12 percent for evaluating them. Still, there are grounds for optimism: A 1998 survey of 133 NGOs found that while many rated their current relationships with corporations as "antagonistic" or "nonexistent," most predicted the development of cooperative relationships in the future. The changing attitude toward NGOs of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group may be a case in point. Stung by fierce NGO campaigns on the Brent Spar episode and its operations in Nigeria, where its ties to the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha made it a target for human-rights groups, Shell has adopted a new Statement of General Business Principles that includes commitments on human rights and the environment; in regions such as Latin America, it now consults with NGOs to ensure that its oil operations take environmental and social factors into account.
The impact of NGOs on multilateral institutions (and national governments) may well be cyclical. As Yale professor Steve Charnovitz has observed, NGO involvement seems to depend on two factors: the needs of government and the capabilities of NGOs. During the nineteenth century, for example, governments had little experience with nonpolitical treaties and therefore needed NGOs; although the young League of Nations later saw NGOs as allies in forming new international organizations, NGO participation diminished in the 1930s as the league's influence declined and governments garnered more practical experience in NGO–oriented issues. The same pattern holds true for the post–World War II years: an early burst of enthusiasm, followed by a gradual decline during the 1950s that reversed itself as issues such as the environment, development, population, and food aid became part of the international agenda. Today, in the wake of a powerful post–Cold War boost in NGO activity, the receptivity of multilateral institutions to NGO participation varies greatly, from relatively open ECOSOC bodies such as the Commission on Sustainable Development to the more closed UN Security Council and General Assembly, and from an increasingly receptive World Bank to the still recalcitrant IMF and WTO.
At bottom, however, the search for a form of perfect democracy that encompasses all NGOs makes about as much sense in the international system as it does in, say, the United States. Instead, institutions and NGOs should strive to create formal but flexible systems during negotiations to foster dynamism and self-adjustment. ECOSOC is a case in point. It ranks NGOs according to three tiers of status: Category 1, Category 2, and Roster. The small percentage of those with Category 1 status, or top access, have more opportunities to attend meetings, submit written advice, and occasionally speak at conferences. The selection process deliberately favors NGOs operating in more than one country, without barring national NGOs that cannot afford to travel; it also favors groups that are of a representative character but is ambiguous enough to allow in groups that represent perennial values and scientific truths, not members. In 1998, more than 100 NGOs have top status, with nearly 1,500 enjoying some form of consultative status at ECOSOC,versus 978 in 1995, and 41 in 1948. NGOs want more, governments want less, but the system generally works.
Some advocates want to push more UN decision-making forums in the direction of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which gives formal voting rights to business and labor delegates as well as governments. A handful of variations on the ILO model exist that work well, particularly on technical issues and the setting of standards. (The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, for example, is a hybrid NGO that brings together representatives of industry, government, consumer, and other bodies together on equal footing to resolve global standardization issues.) But trying to win voting rights for NGO representatives in more UN forums is by no means a sure way to improve the representative character of institutions. The unique ILO system works fairly well because national employer and labor umbrella groups already exist, making the identification of representative employer and labor delegates simpler than in other fields. But it is doubtful in most cases that such systems would actually improve the representative character of institutions; even if NGOs elected their own representatives from among themselves, there would be insufficient guarantees that the pool of electors was truly representative of society or the public interest.
Perhaps most important in the long run are systems to formalize existing means of two-way communication between decision-making institutions and "stakeholders." Although NGOs still see much room for improvement at the World Bank, it has produced better decisions and is rated accountable by more NGOs because it no longer simply provides a sounding board mechanism for selected groups to air their views. The bank now disseminates more detailed information about its decisions and activities so outside groups can weigh in. And it uses a variety of techniques to elicit feedback and track NGO expertise—including surveys, advisory groups, public meetings, and private meetings with staff. Consequently, the bank is more apt to consult and partner with the right groups when designing and implementing specific projects. Because the system is more open, groups that cannot participate directly are more likely to judge the decision-making process as accountable—even if they disagree with the results.
Letting NGOs Be NGOs
Many governments and institutions—including the WTO, IMF, and several UN bodies—will continue to resist more public participation, arguing that their issues require great secrecy. But history offers a powerful argument that the holdouts suffer from a failure of imagination. Half a century ago, the architects of the postwar international trading system did not contest NGO involvement. The proposed charter for the International Trade Organization (ITO) included the very same language as the WTO charter, providing for "consultation and cooperation" with NGOs. The ITO framers had a different interpretation than their latter-day successors, however; they envisaged that commercial and public-interest NGOs would maintain regular contact with the ITO Secretariat, receive unrestricted documents, propose agenda items, and participate as observers and occasional speakers at conferences. The spirit of these proposals faded away when the ITO failed in favor of an interim solution, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. Ironically, most multilateral institutions today face requests from NGOs that could be met by adopting the standards for participation that the ITO's framers proposed.The challenge facing NGOs is more subtle but no less important. As these groups acquire the access and influence that they have long sought, they must not lose the qualities that have made them a source of innovation and progress. Some analysts already fear that formerly independent NGOs may become more beholden to national governments as they come to rely more on public-sector funding—which now accounts for around 40 percent of NGO budgets versus only 1.5 percent in 1970. And many of the schema for increasing NGO involvement may simply foster predictable and bureaucratic behavior among civil society representatives, potentially dulling the passion and richness of views that can emanate from narrowly focused groups. They may also cut off NGOs from the informal channels through which they have traditionally been most influential.
Instead, NGOs, governments, and multilateral institutions need to devise systems of public participation that draw on the expertise and resources of NGOs, their grassroots connections, sense of purpose and commitment, and freedom from bureaucratic constraints. Those NGOs that have seen the most rapid growth in their power will have to contend with inevitable limits on their influence and access. Those governments and institutions that have resisted the advance of these new players will have to permit an unprecedented level of public scrutiny and participation. Over time, this messy process of give-and-take promises to transform the way that international affairs are conducted. Yet as it plays out, both sides may realize that the new system that they have sought to create or resist is in many respects no different from the clash of competing interests that has characterized democracies since their inception.
P.J. Simmons is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of its Managing Global Issues project.
More Information on the General Analysis of the Role of NGOs
