Routledge Handbook of NGOs and International Relations

Thomas Davies, Thomas Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351977494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Offering insights from pioneering new perspectives in addition to well-established traditions of research, this Handbook considers the activities not only of advocacy groups in the environmental, feminist, human rights, humanitarian, and peace sectors, but also the array of religious, professional, and business associations that make up the wider non-governmental organization (NGO) community.

Including perspectives from multiple world regions, the book takes account of institutions in the Global South, alongside better-known structures of the Global North. International contributors from a range of disciplines cover all the major aspects of research into NGOs in International Relations to present:

• 
  
  

• a comprehensive overview of the historical evolution of NGOs, the range of structural forms and international networks
• coverage of major theoretical perspectives
• illustrations of how NGOs are influential in every prominent issue-area of contemporary International Relations
• evaluation of the significant regional variations among NGOs and how regional contexts influence the nature and impact of NGOs
• analysis of the ways NGOs address authoritarianism, terrorism, and challenges to democracy, and how NGOs handle concerns surrounding their own legitimacy and accountability.

Exploring contrasting theories, regional dimensions, and a wide range of contemporary challenges facing NGOs, this Handbook will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

Part I

History and contributions

1

The emergence of NGOs as actors on the world stage

Norbert Götz

‘Non-governmental organization’ (NGO) is a technical term of international relations that had its breakthrough with the Charter of the United Nations (UN) in 1945. It has come into wider use through the UN system, despite the variety of meanings it carries there, although it has in the past decades – on many informal and sometimes formal occasions – been superseded by the term ‘civil society organization’ (CSO). Other contexts of international relations add to a contradictory picture. For example, in development discourse, NGOs may be distinguished from allegedly more radical and authentic grassroots organizations (GROs), but also, with the opposite tendency, from the private voluntary organizations (PVOs) that provide aid and are run by Western donors. When contrasted with government agencies, NGOs appear to be bottom-up organizations and idea-driven forces for good, but when compared with voluntary associations or social movements, they tend to be understood as technocratic tools of global governance. In contrast to often broadly conceived ‘non-state actors’, ‘non-governmental organizations’ are customarily restricted to the secular, professionally run, and transnationally involved segment of civil society. However, both expressions are lexically based on a similar negation that leaves a considerable range of alternatives. Thus, academic, business, criminal, or religious organizations are occasionally subsumed under the term NGO.

Many authors equate NGOs with international non-governmental organizations (INGOs); that is, they suggest NGOs are organizations based in more than one country. This contradicts the foundational UN terminology and neglects the international agendas pursued by organizations based in only one country. The same principle applied to the governmental sphere would restrict international relations to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), while excluding national governments themselves – an absurd thought, but one that illustrates the marginal position mainstream international relations discourse (IR) reserves for NGOs. At the same time, ironic acronym extensions such as GONGO, standing for ‘governmentally organized NGO’, or QUANGO, for ‘quasi NGO’, frequently call into question the non-governmental character of NGOs.

For all these reasons, any work on NGOs needs to make choices in regard to its study object – principally that means choosing between a nominalistic and a phenomenological approach. A nominalistic perspective would examine the inauguration of the term NGO at the UN charter conference in 1945; take all organizations into account that might be described as non-governmental, possibly weighing different uses according to their frequency; and insist on the purely non-governmental quality of its object. The current chapter departs from such a perspective, shedding light on the emergence of NGOs as a term, but then tracing the phenomenon captured by the UN charter back in time, with a brief historical overview until the present. It thereby limits itself to such organizations formally independent of governmental or religious authority that are engaged in moral causes and collective interests rather than profit-seeking, and considers the relation of such organizations to any government a matter of empirical inquiry rather than of prior definition.

Focusing thus on a particular type of organization, but applying an open perspective in regard to time frame and government affinity, limitations of the term NGO are taken into account in order to consider how NGOs emerged as a feature of international relations. First, ‘NGO’ is a technical expression stemming from international law, which has gained currency in IR while other disciplines and fields use alternative terms for the same phenomenon. Examples include civil society, social movement organization, advocacy network, voluntary agency, think tank, pressure group, non-profit organization, or third sector organization. Second, neither in foreign affairs nor in IR, with their traditional state-centric perspectives, has ‘non-governmental’ been a neutral attribute. Rather, it has wittingly or unwittingly functioned as a marker of minor significance. This observation applies in particular to so-called realist approaches, but is also an issue with liberal perspectives. Third, despite being well established and boosted in the past four decades by neoliberal economics with its belief in ‘new public management’ and lean government, the term NGO is frequently negatively perceived and remains controversial. The polemic suggestion, both from within academia and from civil society representatives, to rename governments ‘NPOs’ (non-people’s organizations) illustrates this point.

The following overview begins with a discussion of how the term NGO entered international relations. It continues with a chronological sketch of the emergence of NGOs in the nineteenth century. It then discusses the quantitative development of NGOs until today, periodization issues, and major trends, suggesting a politico-economic perspective in tension with geopolitical IR approaches.

The creation of NGOs at the UN charter conference

The term ‘non-governmental organization’ was invented during the First World War. Most significantly, the newly founded League of Red Cross Societies used it to explain its statutes:

While it is expected that the League of Red Cross Societies will establish intimate relations with the League of Nations it should be understood clearly that the former, being a purely voluntary, non-political, non-sectarian, non-governmental organization, has no statutory connection with any League of Nations or with the government.

(Mr. Davison 1919: 1)

Unlike this bold declaration, the perspective of another early user of the term, US businessman, politician, and diplomat Dwight W. Morrow (1919: 81), foreshadowed how the concept was introduced to the UN and official perceptions since then more widely. While broadly appreciating transnational activities, he made it clear that he would prefer to deal with IGOs. Forerunners like this did not make the term NGO an immediate success. The interwar years gave preference to a number of alternative expressions such as ‘private international organization’, ‘international association’, or ‘voluntary agency’ (White 1951: 3; Seary 1996).

Only by the beginning of the 1940s did the word ‘non-governmental’ gain some momentum in discussions related to US foreign policy and international organizations. However, while there was a marked increase in the number of transnationally oriented associations after the Second World War, there was no qualitative shift that would have necessitated a new terminology (Chiang 1981: 33). Crucial for the change of language was rather the particular way of framing such organizations at the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco (for greater detail, see Götz 2008: 237–42).

In February 1945, the World Trade Union Conference (WTUC) adopted a declaration that sought accreditation to the forthcoming UN charter conference in San Francisco with the aim of effective trade union representation in all major UN bodies (WTUC 1945: 239). This was later specified as ‘representation in the General Assembly, in a consultative capacity, and . . . full representation with the right to vote, on the Social and Economic Council’ (WFTU 1945: 272). The Soviet government backed the demand, seeking to establish what was to become the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) as a specialized agency with observer status, rivalling the International Labour Organization (ILO) (Russell 1958: 799). The US State Department countered this initiative by introducing a distinction ‘between inter-governmental organizations and non-governmental international organizations’, whereby the latter ‘should not be invited or encouraged to send representatives, but no obstacles would be placed in the way of their voluntarily sending representatives to San Francisco’ (FRUS 1945 I: 153).

At an early stage there, the terms ‘pressure group’, ‘private organization’, and ‘unofficial organization’ were still in use instead of ‘non-governmental organization’ (UNCIO 1945 V: 153–4). The conference documentation reveals that the expression ‘non-governmental organizations’ appeared for the first time after one of the UN Charter drafting commissions had decided to invite a representative of the WTUC (ibid.: 206–12). When the steering committee took up the matter, the term ‘non-governmental organization’ marked a difference between the WTUC and IGOs such as the ILO, which had been granted status in San Francisco, serving the purpose of keeping the former out. Thus, in his introductory statement, the US foreign minister warned that ‘nongovernmental organizations would change the basic character of the Conference and moreover would set a new precedent for conferences of this kind’ (ibid.: 208). In the discussion that followed, the term ‘non-governmental organizations’ was used solely by opponents of admitting such bodies to the conference and by a speaker providing background information, while those in favour used other words. The most outspoken rhetorical counter-move to the delegitimization implied by the term ‘NGO’ was made by the representative from New Zealand: ‘The W.T.U.C. was more than an intergovernmental body, it was an international body’ (ibid.: 210).

Admission of the WTUC to the San Francisco conference was rejected at the meeting by a vote of thirty-three to ten. However, 1,200 voluntary organizations had sent representatives to San Francisco (Alger 1999: 393), and some acknowledgement of their commitment was in line with the US government’s attempt to create a national consensus on the UN that would prevent a disaster like the failed approval for League of Nations membership in 1920. A measure to this effect was the granting of observer status to 160 private US organizations and the attachment of forty-two of their representatives to the government delegation in an unofficial consulting capacity. Drawing on such an inclusive model, a working group of consultants submitted a proposal on the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to the US delegation. This proposal used the term ‘non-governmental organizations’, which had by then become part of the conference’s language code (Robins 1971: 86–90, 102–3, 122, 216–18). In view of such a background in the United States, of lobbying labour organizations in the allied countries more broadly, and of external pressure from the Soviet and other governments, Article 71 of the Charter eventually offered a compromise:

The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations concerned.

The eventual openness of US decision-makers was due to the value of NGOs in influencing public opinion, the attempt to benefit from their tangible and intangible resources, and the wish to gain a measure of control over their activities (Snider 2003: 377–9). Although NGO leaders later noted Article 71’s ‘humble wording’ (Shestack 1978: 97) and ‘rather condescending terminology’ (Fenaux 1978: 194), its norm-setting stipulation meant that ‘in the UN system, all transnational actors have to accept the label “NGO”, in order to participate’ (Willetts 2002). While the article’s codification of the involvement of private international organizations was an advance in legal terms, it limited the inclusion of NGOs to ‘low politics’ issues as compared to more far-reaching informal arrangements at the League of Nations. In many organs there, private organizations had enjoyed ‘full participation exclusive of the right to vote’, similar to the status Article 70 of the Charter grants to specialized agencies (Chiang 1981: 35–9; Pickard 1956: 24–27, 50, 72).

Today the NGO concept is not uniformly applied within the UN system. For example, in the Agenda 21 document adopted at the 1992 UN Conference in Environment and Development (UNCED, ‘Earth Summit’), the term ‘NGO’ carried no fewer than five different definitions. This conceptual disarray was partly a consequence of leading activists’ dislike of the expression ‘NGO’ (Willetts 1996: 55, 61). However, despite its inconsistencies and surrounding controversies, the acronym has gradually spread from the UN to societal discourse at large. At present it is used in many different ways, often at variance with the nomenclature of international law. Thus, the concept of ‘NGO’ may be confined to organizations concerned with sustainability and development and to bodies focusing on peace, human rights, and cultural exchange, while trade union bodies are frequently excluded because of their agenda related to established economic interests. However, while the legal and administrative UN term ‘NGO’ has taken root in political discourse more broadly, it has been on the retreat in its traditional strongholds. Most specialized agencies and programmes in the UN system have in the past decades changed their terminology in favour of ‘civil society (organizations)’ as the cover concept. Even the UN itself, despite far-reaching adherence to the term ‘NGO’, prominently addresses civil society on its website, rather than NGOs.

The emergence of global civil society in the nineteenth century

The identification of civil society organizations that pioneered cross-border agency depends, apart from the type of borders taken into account, on the features regarded as defining for such organizations. Various religious orders, charities, missionary bodies, and a few secular organizations have operated across these spaces for centuries and have been regarded as ‘ancient forms of INGO’ (Davies 2013: 20–2). For unclear reasons, a comprehensive chronological list of international organizations issued by the Union of International Associations (UIA) restricted itself to claiming that the Rosicrucian Order (1693) and the General Conference of the New Church (1783, this refers to the Swedenborgian Church) preceded the first IGO, the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine (1816) (Speeckaert 1957: 1). This selection privileges comparatively recent mystic sects (that may be phantasmal international agents) over established churches. Meanwhile, the spiritual outreach of religious groups differs from the inner-worldly aims of international organizations more broadly. This distinction is not denying that nonconformist denominations were vanguards of civil society, nor does it exclude bodies tackling practical matters such as the World Council of Churches from being a part of global civil society, but it dismisses devotional organizations as such.

Civil society in the modern sense emerged in connection with an open public sphere that was distinct from the state. Consequently, the origins of global civil society ...