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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Different tasks but same responsibility
Civil society’s North-South divide
No need to re-invent global rules
Privatisation is good but regulation is needed
8-9/2004 |
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[ Non-governmental organisations ]
Civil society’s North-South divide
Can transnational civil society overcome the North-South divide or is it just reproducing it at another level? International movements like the debt relief campaign Jubilee 2000 show that activists in the South can certainly hold their own against the North. But Mundo Yang of the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) reports that the two sides have displayed the same patterns of behaviour for years. Activists in the South accused their counterparts in the North of being paternalistic and not sufficiently radical in their demands. The organisations in the North respond that radical positions do not win over private and public donors. “The conflicts reflect many structural differences between North and South,” Yang says. The heavy pressure from donors to produce results and the brevity of Northern NGO projects are set against vague time horizons and a lack of international experience in the South.
At a conference staged by WZB and the German Political Science Association in early July, some speakers described the gap between donors in the North and organisations in the South, with Northern NGOs in between, as the biggest obstacle in overcoming the North-South divide in international civil society. “The weakest link in the chain are the organisations in the South, which have no direct access to donors. In the worst instances, they are downgraded to mere implementing organisations by the organisations in the North”, says Brigitte Fahrenhorst of the international non-governmental network Society for International Development. Fahrenhorst proposes to establish foundations in the South that work with local assessment criteria and evaluation boards.
Despite some differences, NGOs in the South are subject to the same kind of “transformation dynamics” as their counterparts in the North, says Berthold Kuhn. According to the guest lecturer at Leiden University, this becomes evident in increasingly “commercialised and over-extended” organisations – a development which is much more pronounced in the South because of the lack of rules and regulations and the absence of public checks and balances. The development organisation BRAC in Bangladesh offers a good example. In the space of less than 30 years, it has mutated from a small non-profit organisation to a powerful “aid group” with an annual budget of 150 million US dollars. Thanks to its revenue from various enterprises and a diversified range of products from brand printers to fast food, BRAC is largely independent of northern donors today.
In the not too distant future, successful NGOs like BRAC could be the only organisations in the South receiving development funds from the North, suggests Dirk Messner of the German Development Institute (GDI). He has observed a continued trend away from classical technical cooperation in recent time. “Where assistance is provided increasingly as direct budget support, that has impacts on civil society.” And that could result in the promotion of elites, which will at best profit powerful Southern NGOs like BRAC.
Jutta Bangel
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