I’ve been musing a lot over the last few months about what we loosely call “civil society” at a very turbulent and fast-changing time and I’ve begun to wonder whether the era of the large, Northern-based international campaigning NGO might be coming to an end.
This isn’t a hard-and-fast view and I’m offering it as a spur to discussion rather than as an assertion of an unchallengeable truth.
I’ve worked for several large campaigning NGOs since the early 2000s as employee or a contractor, all in the field of what used to be called “international development”, and I wonder if their particular character stems from the neoliberal era which is now over.
These organisations used to get most of their funding from Western governments or non-profit foundations and, with 20/20 hindsight, it seems to me that the purpose of this funding in the minds of those who gave it was to correct the excesses of post-Cold-War globalised capitalism, not to transform it.
By funding NGOs to criticise them, decision-makers could say to themselves: “see how liberal and open-minded we are, we even pay these people to call us out.”
Many policymakers and public servants in the West had genuine qualms of conscience about the ruthlessly exploitative nature of globalised capitalism and found it useful to have NGOs standing in the doorway of the tent and expressing the same concerns, thus exerting mental pressure on their colleagues in government who were more reactionary or more susceptible to corporate lobbyists. This alliance was quite visible in the UK in the days of the Department for International Development (DFID), now long gone.
This was the era of what the late British thinker Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” – an era in which the status quo was so all-encompassing that it became very hard for many people (including me) to imagine a systemic alternative, so that marginal improvements within the logic of markets and the profit motive to seemed to us to be all that was possible, whatever our personal preferences might have been.
I have to admit that I was a naive and privileged beneficiary of that era, which gave me a stimulating career and a decent income by my country’s standards, plus a satisfying feeling of moral justification in my work. It’s taken a long time for me to realise just how privileged I was.
But that era is very clearly over. Just as Western hegemony over the world economy is no longer assured, so the sense of “noblesse oblige” which supported the extraordinary growth of big international NGOs is now fading. And with it, much of the funding has dried up and many organisations have had to lay people off.
The dominant tone of diplomacy has become far more transactional. Parts of the political and commercial elites of the West, in a deep panic about the threat to their hegemony posed by China, are experimenting (most of all in the US) to see how far they can ditch the claims to democracy and openness which used to be essential to modern Western capitalism’s self-legitimation, and which drove much of the funding to NGOs.
No doubt this era too will eventually pass, but we won’t be returning to the 2000s.
Falling between two stools
The problem for large campaigning NGOs in this volatile period, I’d suggest, is that they fall between two stools. They are not really close enough to the mass of politically passive citizenry to claim the legitimacy of a social movement but nor do they have enough technical expertise, as organisations, to counter the claims of corporate lobbyists with the dead weight of money and elite prejudice on their side.
There are important exceptions. I think the global tax justice movement is one. This movement has members who can present arguments about tax reform with a high enough degree of technical sophistication that the high priests of the tax technocracy at the OECD and similar places have to take them seriously. At the same time, the movement can also tap into public concerns about big companies and the rich not paying enough tax which are so widely held that they cannot simply be ignored or distracted by decision-makers.
But I’m not sure how many large campaigning NGOs can do this. They employ people who are experts in their fields, but the complex and nuanced messages of these people have always had to go through an internal negotiation – with the comms, fundraising, advocacy and private sector liaison people, as well as with the political sensibilities of the people at the top of the organisation – which tends to reduce the outcome too far towards the lowest common denominator, in my opinion. It often used to (and still does) end up in a messy compromise of grand rhetoric and “golden keys” – single-factor reforms which are meant to unlock multi-dimensional problems but are actually too thin and narrow in shape to do so.
I’m struck, in my work for Critical Takes on Corporate Power, that the intellectual energy in the field of corporate power is not coming from campaigning NGOs at the moment but from academics – people like Cecilia Rikap on Big Tech, for example, or the network of academics who work at the nexus of farming, food systems and public health. Or from someone like Cory Doctorow (also on Big Tech) who is a writer and a commentator rather than a traditional NGO campaigner.
I feel that large NGOs find it much harder at the moment to come up with fresh ideas or to really think structurally about change and suspect that this has to do with organisations being configured for the era of capitalist realism which is now passing, leaving them seriously short of money and hunkered down in a defensive crouch.
Of course there are many people within large NGOs who can think of fresh and ambitious ideas – the constraints are institutional. For example, Oxfam came up with the basis of a strong agenda for challenging corporate power more than two years ago, then buried it deep inside a 70-page report and I’ve not seen anything of it since.
I’ve come up with my own version of that agenda, incorporating ideas from Oxfam and many others (https://criticaltakes.org/the-corporation/ten-proposals-for-curbing-corporate-power/) but there’s only one of me and I literally work from my bedroom.
Oxfam seems to have majored instead on the idea of a wealth tax, which is understandable because it is easier to communicate and rally support for than a broad-ranging programme of institutional and legal reform. I see a lot of people from civil society jumping on the bandwagon of a wealth tax and I feel conflicted because it’s a good way of raising more public money in a progressive manner, at a time when more money is badly needed to pay for public goods around the world, but it’s also not a structural response to the structural causes of economic inequality. (Jeff Bezos, after he’s paid his wealth tax, will still be pretty much as rich and powerful as he is now).
So as campaigning NGOs try to adapt to this volatile time, it may be that those which thrive are those which are genuinely rooted in a constituency (such as a mass membership) which gives them legitimacy and makes them impossible for politicians to ignore, or more agile and specialised NGOs with such a high level of technical expertise that technocrats in government are impressed enough to listen to them.
The implication of this might be that campaigning will be primarily at national level, because it’s easier to build mass legitimacy and relevant expertise within the political space of a single state. There will still be a need for some NGOs with international reach because structural problems of economic justice, including the vast phenomenon of corporate power, cannot be addressed in one country alone. So there will need to be connectors and synthesisers who can work with national-based movements and campaigns and attend international forums to speak for their collective views.
But it feels as if the era of international NGO types (like me, as I was in the old days), striding confidently into conference halls full of people in suits and making pronouncements about the state of the world – and expecting to be listened to – is well and truly over.
