The End or the And?

New paper on civil society and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Tags: Africa , Civil Society Building
Additional tags: Sub-saharan africa , Policy making , Ngo's , Civil society , Civil society building , Governance , Lobby , Advocacy , Development , Social change

Can civil society organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa succesfully advocate, lobby and mobilize to fight poverty and corruption, and to bring development and democracy? Have citizens’ organizations in the new roles of policy making and participation in service delivery been able to realize the high hopes and aspirations surrounding their explosive growth. And how has international assistance promoted or hindered their struggle to catalyze social change and pro-poor development? To answer these questions, Ria Brouwers, researcher and lecturer at ISS has assembled four studies that were conducted by ISS MA-students in our Civil Society Building Knowledge Programme.

In her synthesis paper 'When Civics go Governance: On the Role and Relevance of Civic Organisations in the Policy Arena in Sub-Saharan Africa', Brouwers analyses the lobby and advocacy work of civil society organisations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. She puts their efficacy to the test and questions whether civic organisations really are a countervailing force vis-a-vis the state, promoting democracy and triggering development for the poor.

The findings of this synthesis confirm earlier critisms of the aid chain: NGOs that enter the public arena of governance, get caught up in 'being participated, being manipulated, and being challenged' be it by local/national politics or external donors. The paper suggests to move away from the assumption that NGO engagement contributes to the improvement of (democratic) governance, an increase of pro-poor development and a decrease of poverty in a linear fashion. In the last section '' back to the future" the author gives us directions for future research: (1) review the theory of change that is currently in use in the development sector, (2) generate new knowledge on why and how people protest to pressurize existing powerholders, and (3) to revisit the form and function of external engagement with civic actors in the global South.

Based on Ria's paper we could opine that civil society building and lobby and advocacy work should be perceived as a goal in itself, to grow (in Rawls words) 'civility', and not as a means to achieve large goals such as more democracy, or less poverty, because those outcomes are under influence of many other factors, like the market, vested elites, or international politics to name a few. The falsity of the assumptions and claims about the governance role of civil society organizations has been addressed by several authors and studies (see paper). In this post we could add one more: Hans Holmen, Associate Professor at the University of Linkoping (Sweden) wrote 'Snakes in Paradise: NGOs and the aid industry in Africa' . The book questions many key assumptions about the effect of NGOs and civil society in development. It paints a rather bleak picture, but also provides suggestions on how to improve NGO performance and how NGOs can better link with local African initiatives and agendas.

But what then? Is it all doom and gloom? To conclude, we could say that we should not think of civil society building as an End to achieve accountable governance, nor is it approriate to hail the End of civil society (building) as a development strategy. Instead, we should look at the 'And': what could be done beyond working on civil society building as we know it. As we wrote in a previous post, recent research gives us enough clues to hold on to when we think of new practices. IDS has done research on 'Winning Policy Change', which show examples from South Africa, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Turkey, India and the Philippines, exploring cases of citizen activism that resulted in national policy change. David Booth suggests in his latest policy brief to 'build on what works': to go from 'best practice' to best 'fit' through working with the grain of the host society. He elaborates on this point in the free-to-download introduction in March 2011 IDS Bulletin. Duncan Green responded on Booth's publication with a sharp review, and severely criticizes Booth for stating that "citizen pressure is at best a weak factor and at worst a distraction". ODI's Politics&Governance programme suggests that donor agencies themselves need to change, if they are ought to take the politics agenda forward. And, last but not least, Sue Unsworth makes a plea for disconnecting existing engraved pathways in our brains: development practitioners should "close off their existing assumptions and mental models about governance and development" and start to develop an "upside down view on governance". But to close, here's a question for you: the limits and pitfalls of aided NGO-driven development have been known to donors and practitioners for at least 20 years now. In response, a rich body of thinking and guidance for policy and programmes has been developed that offer alternatives. Why is it then, that so little has changed in the practice of Southern NGOs and their International partners? 

Download the paper Brouwers, Ria (2011) 'When Civics Go Governance: on the role and relevance of civic organisations in Sub-Saharan Africa'