 DEBATE Filling the trust deficit: The rise of civil society FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once described non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the world’s new superpower, Eileen Dunne told participants at the discussion on ‘The Rise of Civil Society. And while a Women’s Forum panel had agreed that trust in NGOs had increased in recent years, Barbara Fiorito of Fair Trade pointed out, NGOs were now firmly in the public eye and under closenscrutiny. She forecast that the influence of NGOs would increase still further in the years ahead, and as they joined forces and worked together their ‘trans-nationalisation,’ would enable them to deliver a more coherent message. She recalled that when she was on the international board of Oxfam she had found that seven national Oxfam groups emanating from different countries were represented in Cambodia. The decision was made to merge them for the sake of efficiency. This was the beginning of the establishment of a global entity for the charity. “We became a transnational. The aim was to have a single Oxfam voice and therefore consolidate our power”, she said. Another trend was that businesses had learned they could collaborate with NGOs and even help companies improve their brand image and help convince the public of companies’ commitment to social responsibility. The new buzzword, she suggested, would be ‘corporate social and environmental accountability’. At the heart of this shift, she said, were ‘certification schemes’, like the Fair Trade label that was granted to an increasing range of products. The pro-organic Soil Association in Britain and the Fair Trade movement had joined forces to certify a brand of organic Fair Trade coffee that was now the fastest-growing sector in the retail coffee trade in the UK. Certification schemes were expanding to include garments and, for now, textiles. It was an example of the way NGOs were helping solve problems rather than just complaining about them. To avoid the danger of providing ready-made solutions for developing countries and ignoring local issues and local people, said Fiorito, Oxfam worked only with local partners, or, where it was providing emergency relief, tried to source materials locally. The Fair Trade movement was trying to help producers in a given African country help producers in other African countries. “If an (international) NGO is not working with a local NGO, ask why,” she advised. “It’s rarely defensible.” Melanne Verveer said NGOs, and particularly women within the NGO movement, were pioneers in vital areas. For example, she considered that women’s rights had finally been included in the human rights agenda as a result of activists’ work at the international Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995. Picking up the earlier theme, she said that today’s governments, businesses and civil society were working together better than in the past, and that there would be more partnerships in the future. However, Verveer warned that NGOs providing a service for businesses risked compromising themselves: they would be better off setting standards, as in certification schemes, and monitoring application of the schemes, she advised. Asked about how the public could decide which NGOs to support, Verveer pointed to a need for third party guarantors who could report on NGO efficiency. One way for NGOs to show they were worthy of support was to work with other credible groups. To a questioner who complained about the ever-expanding plethora of NGOs, she said that the more citizens and organizations banded together to deal with real problems, the more society would benefit. Ayo Obe emphasised the need for NGOs to focus on the problems they were set up to deal with, and thought that, ideally, every NGO should be working towards its own obsolescence. On the question of funding, she warned that in countries where NGOs were dependent on money from abroad, governments could accuse them of working for a foreign agenda. Part of NGOs’ job was to empower citizens, so they in turn could hold their local institutions accountable. It was a way of handing power back to the people. Verveer said it was “noble” for citizens to join together to address problems in that it helped people to run their own lives. NGOs were more of a plus than a minus, she reminded participants. “What we have to do every day is make the pluses more common,” she concluded. ______________________________ |