|
|
Volume 13 Number 1
|
Editorial
The boundaries between governments, the private sector, and civil society organisations (CSOs) are far less rigid today than in previous decades, as each sector seeks to interact with and be to some degree responsive to the others. Governments have increasingly chosen, or been obliged, to go down the privatisation route and either to sell off certain areas of work to for-profit companies, or get involved in some form of ‘public–private partnership’. Many of the services relating to social welfare will characteristically be taken by the voluntary or non-governmental sector, not least because there is little profit to be had from activities such as providing respite care for lone parents, setting up temporary shelters for the homeless, or offering decent healthcare to those who cannot afford to pay for it. The ‘safety-nets’ supposedly designed to soften the blow of economic structural adjustment programmes will never have the spread, or a sufficiently fine mesh, to ensure that nobody falls to the ground.
Alongside this more instrumentalist or ‘division of labour’ approach there have also been growing efforts to establish critical but constructive inter-sectoral dialogues, particularly in the field of development assistance. Inter-governmental organisations and bilateral agencies actively seek out the opinions of established NGOs, while also seeking to influence their views and even their programme focus. By the same token, NGOs will often combine their role as public and rather noisy watchdogs of industry and international financial institutions with the ‘insider tactics’ of quiet diplomacy. Even as economic globalisation encourages us to be consumers first, and citizens second, so there is a resurgence of political activity focused on ways to re-orient this process to meet the needs of the world’s majority, without destroying the resources upon which we all rely. The World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, attended by over 50,000 people from around the globe, attests to the belief not simply that the present dynamic is wrong, but that ‘another world is possible’. Hence one of the things that characterised the Forum was precisely the genuine effort to build an agenda for political change that genuinely incorporates and indeed thrives upon diversity.
For many social actors, however, this kind of collaboration is uncharted territory. There is the risk of being co-opted on the one hand, and that of co-opting others into one’s own agenda on the other. Writing about Bangladesh, which has a relatively long NGO tradition, Shelley Feldman argues that the shift of emphasis among the more influential NGOs over several years from relief and social welfare to social mobilisation and now to entrepreneurship and individualism has both followed the changes in donor discourse and practice, and also profoundly changed the relationship between the NGOs and civil society at large. In her view, the trend has been one of depoliticisation, despite the fact that NGOs how have closer dialogue with government than ever before. Rinus van Klinken looks at a similar set of issues, but from the other end of the telescope, as it were. Focusing on a Tanzanian NGO, he looks at how the discourse of decentralisation plays out in reality, and at the mechanisms that can be established between NGOs and local government that might foster the political goals of having more locally accountable state institutions, and also deepen and enrich civil society in the process. In a frank and self-critical account, David Simon, Duncan F. M. McGregor, Kwasi Nsiah-Gyabaah, and Donald A. Thompson describe the challenges faced in conducting a cross-cultural and inter-institutional research programme in a peri-urban area of Ghana. Apart from the predictable problems of having to accommodate unreliable transport and telecommunications in the research timetable, and despite efforts to ensure that relations among team members were as equitable and collaborative as possible, difficulties still remained, including resentment about salary differentials between the Northern and Southern researchers as well as cultural differences in communication styles. A further example of how the crossing of boundaries can generate problems in its own right arose when one of the communities being surveyed began to demand practical (financial) development assistance; they were tired of collaborating without any tangible benefit coming their way. While accepting that these people had a fair point, it did not follow that the researchers could then go out and broker resources for them; and indeed to do so for one community and not for another might generate far worse conflict. The authors reflect on the fact that being honest about one’s intentions is not enough in itself to ensure that others will take these at face value, especially when there are clear economic and social divides between the two sets of people.
Turning to the Andean region of Peru, where a brutal war was conducted throughout the 1980s, Peter Lauritsen and Stinne Hoejer Mathiasen report on a fascinating effort to encourage children to imagine and then draw what their idea of development would be. The three communities involved had experienced the war in rather different ways, one having stayed more or less intact by collaborating with the armed forces against the Shining Path guerrillas, one having returned to a village that had been destroyed, and the third being made up of people who voluntarily came together to rebuild their lives but who had not been able to return to their places of origin. These backgrounds are reflected in the children’s depiction of how they would like to imagine their futures, giving a deep qualitative insight into how they see their own communities. By contrast, Reidar Dale writes critically about the logical framework and its derivatives, pointing out that these lend themselves to, and are most commonly used to support, a quantitative rather than a qualitative understanding of development and a standardised approach to planning.
With this issue, we extend our sincere thanks to the three long-serving Editorial Advisers who stood down at the end of last year – Achille Mbembe, Dorienne Rowan-Campbell, and Fernand Vincent – and offer a warm welcome to Caroline Knowles, Kumi Naidoo, Andy Storey, and David Westendorff.
Deborah Eade
Oxfam GB
 Contents
|
Next Issue 
|
