Transnational Civil Society and the World Bank

Investigating Civil Society's Potential to Democratize Global Governance

C. Pallas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137277602
• eBook ISBN: 9781137277619
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Transnational civil society is often seen as an important contributor to the democratization of global governance. In their engagement with the World Bank, however, transnational civil society organizations prioritize pre-existing mission over responsiveness to claimed stakeholders and undercut the authority of developing country governments.

1

Waiting on Democracy

At their best, global governance institutions reflect a certain form of optimism. Many of the most prominent institutions, including the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, were created at the close of World War II to preserve peace and enhance global economic prosperity. International institutions and regimes founded in subsequent decades help regulate everything from the trade in endangered species to transnational aviation, and facilitate global responses to epidemics, climate change, and criminal activity. Taken together, global governance institutions can seem to reflect a world trying to work together toward some common good.

Yet academics and practitioners alike recognize that global governance institutions suffer from a democratic deficit. Global governance institutions often reflect the balance of power among the states most involved in their founding. In the UN, the permanent members of the Security Council exercise veto power over military interventions. In the World Bank and IMF, voting rights on the governing boards are assigned based primarily on the capital each state contributes to the institution, privileging wealthy states over poorer ones. The trade rules enforced by the WTO favor free trade in the manufactured goods produced by industrialized states while allowing restrictions on trade in the agricultural goods produced by developing countries.

In the midst of such inequality, many activists and observers have looked to transnational civil society as a means of remediation. Activist leaders appealing for changes in global policies claim to speak on behalf of marginalized stakeholders, and academics describe transnational civil society as the basis of a new, more democratic international order. Yet, as this book explains, such claims must be evaluated critically – not because transnational civil society is still nascent and has yet to reach full maturity, as some have argued, but rather because civil society is already becoming an established player in international policy processes and a clear gap has begun to emerge between normative expectations and empirical reality.

Purpose of the book

This book examines the potential for TCS to democratize global governance by assessing TCS impacts on policymaking at the World Bank. This book asks: do data about the World Bank support the idea that TCS can democratize global governance? To answer this question, the book focuses primarily on whether transnational civil society is democratizing Bank policymaking already. There are several reasons for this retrospective approach. First, the best and most definitive evidence of transnational civil society’s capacities is demonstration of concrete achievement. This is particularly important in the realm of global governance, where the hypothesized capacities of international actors and regimes have frequently failed to live up to expectations. Just because the architecture of a global governance institution is structured in a particular way does not mean it will produce the outputs that one might logically expect from such a structure.¹

Second, it has been twenty years since civil society’s capacity to impact global governance was first discussed by scholars like Lipschutz and Shaw, who started to frame the issue in 1992. In the intervening decades, civil society has demonstrated that it is indeed capable of changing the international system. If its capacity to democratize global governance is real, then one would expect to find concrete evidence of democratizing impacts. Indeed, a substantial portion of the literature on civil society and the democratization of global governance argues that civil society is democratizing on the basis of the impacts that civil society has already achieved. Therefore, testing whether civil society is democratizing global governance on the basis of civil society’s concrete impacts is not only logical; it also allows this book to investigate directly many of the claims made in the literature.

This book, however, is more than just an investigation of previous claims. As noted, transnational civil society has real power and has used its influence to telling effect over the past several decades. If TCS is not making global governance more representative, transparent, accountable, or otherwise democratic, then one must ask: what is the net effect of TCS on the functioning of global governance?

This chapter provides the background and framework for this research. The first half of the chapter elaborates on the points made above by describing the democratic deficit in global governance, defining transnational civil society, and outlining the claims made about transnational civil society’s impacts. The second half of the chapter explains the design of the research and enumerates the specific questions it seeks to address. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s argument.

The democratic deficit in global governance

In the past half-century, the forces of globalization have increased the importance of global governance at an ever-accelerating pace, connecting people through new technologies and increasing economic interdependence. At the same time, the world has encountered new problems, such as ozone depletion, climate change, and transnational pandemics, that require a coordinated global response. These evolutions have increased the power and importance of global governance institutions.

As the power and importance of international institutions has increased, so too have concerns about how who controls their power and how it is used. In the 1980s, the growing environmental movement drew public scrutiny to the work of the World Bank. Concerns about the impact of structural adjustment focused attention on both the World Bank and the IMF in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The IMF’s handling of the Southeast Asian financial crisis led to accusations that its policies favored rich-world business interests over developing country citizens. Protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 created greater awareness of the problems posed by globalization and the arguments of its detractors. Alternative ‘people’s forums’ have sprung up around meetings of global power brokers, like the World Economic Forum in Davos, and popular protests are now a regular feature of the meetings of the G8. The net impact of such critical activism has been to challenge the legitimacy of existing power arrangements. The activists participating in these challenges do not, in general, seem to argue that global cooperation is unnecessary; indeed, the protests themselves often represent a form of international cooperation. Rather, they argue that global cooperation must take place in a way that affords equal value and voice to all of the world’s citizens.

As already noted, a significant part of the problem involves institutional architecture that privileges a minority of states over most others. However, the problems in global governance go beyond self-interested manipulation of global governance mechanisms by state leaders. Institutions often develop considerable autonomy through their exercise of bureaucratic functions and their role as norm-setters (Barnett and Finnemore 1999) and national governments have often allowed global governance institutions ‘considerable unchecked prerogative’ in their activities (Scholte 2004, p. 212). The result is that international institutions can become autonomous players with limited accountability to any outsider. One of the best examples of this is the IMF, which has been accused of pushing a neo-liberal agenda based on the economic ideology of its core staff (Stiglitz 1999; cf. Scholte 2012, pp. 195–196).

The combination of unequal state power and technocratic autonomy has resulted in what academics have described as a democratic deficit in global governance (Scholte 2011; Woods 2007). Zürn (2004, p. 262) writes:

There is broad agreement that currently the functioning of international institutions such as the WTO or the UN does not meet democratic standards. Acknowledged democratic deficits include the lack of identifiable decision-makers who are directly accountable for wrong decisions made at the international level, as well as the inscrutability of international decision-making processes and thus the advantage the executive decision-makers have over others in terms of information. Furthermore, particularly the prime actors in international politics, such as multinational businesses and superpowers, are at best accountable only to a fraction of the people affected by their activities.

In short, the vast majority of people impacted by global governance have generally been without any effective voice or vote in the decisions affecting them. Yet if the problems in global governance are rooted in the political and bureaucratic structure of global governance institutions, then it seems possible that global governance could be made more democratic, even in a world marked by persistent imbalances in economic and political power between states.

Transnational civil society defined

Transnational civil society (TCS) is often suggested as a key part of this solution. TCS is a category of non-state actors ranging from advocacy groups like Amnesty International and the World Wildlife Fund to faith groups like the Catholic Church and even some social movements, like Occupy Wall Street and its global spin-offs. Yet while the actors within TCS are readily recognized – we know transnational civil society when we see it – arriving at a precise definition can be challenging. Therefore, before discussing its possible role as a solution to the problems of global governance, it is necessary to discuss and define the term itself.

Definitional debates over the meaning of TCS occur for several reasons: because of a minority of writings that conflate contemporary definitions of civil society with a much older, Hobbesian usage that depicts civil society simply as the citizens of the state; because of normative arguments over whether ‘uncivil’ civil society organizations should be excluded from study; and because transnational civil society often looks quite different from civil society in the domestic setting where, as Robert Putnam (2000) has pointed out, civil society includes groups like bowling leagues and bridge clubs that have no explicit policy agendas. In addition, a variety of labels besides TCS have been used to denote non-state actors working in the transnational realm. Some research refers to ‘transnational advocacy networks’ and others to ‘global civil society’. A number of authors pragmatically focus on the most visible actors, writing about ‘non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) or ‘international non-governmental organizations’ (INGOs). These definitional ambiguities and variations in nomenclature can inhibit scholarly dialogue and obstruct empirical research.

This book uses the term transnational civil society and defines it as referring to all associations of individuals meeting two criteria. These associations (a) are not primarily a part of a government or a governance organization, nor of a profit-making enterprise and (b) are engaged in activity that takes place beyond the borders of the state in which they are headquartered, is intended to impact events outside their state, or is linked to non-governmental, non-commercial actors outside their state. Individual groups meeting these criteria are referred to as transnational civil society organizations (TCSOs).

It is important that the reader not think of TCSOs as equivalent to ‘international non-governmental organizations’ or ‘INGOs’. The popular use of the INGO term obscures more than it reveals. The term is generally used to describe a class of NGOs characterized by their resources rather than their transnational activities, and thus applied almost exclusively to well-resourced actors from the US and Europe. Calling these actors international NGOs, rather than American or European, can obscure fundamental characteristics of these organizations (including funding base, staff culture, and language) that may influence their behavior. The use of the term INGO to refer to this limited group also obscures the presence of transnational organizations in other parts of the world. By creating a false dichotomy between ‘international’ and ‘local’ NGOs, the term depicts many developing country NGOs as perpetual objects of assistance and ignores the contributions they make (or seek to make) to global governance.

Admittedly, to define actors by the transnationality of their activities or associations creates opportunities for confusion, insofar as a purely local CSO may become a TCSO by dint of entering an international campaign. It is important to recall, however, that the purpose of this book is to understand the democratic credentials of transnational civil society. The definition of TCSO is designed to delimit the membership of TCS.

TCS is conceptualized as the collective body of TCSOs. This is not to say that TCS represents some sort of homogenous whole or to assume that TCSOs consistently arrive at consensus agendas. We can readily observe that not all TCSOs participate in all instances of international policy advocacy and, as this book will make abundantly clear, TCSOs frequently disagree with one another on policy priorities and advocacy strategies. However, insofar as we are evaluating the impacts of TCS on global governance, we must consider the aggregate impact of all TCSOs, whether they choose to participate in policymaking, abstain from involvement, or are otherwise excluded.

Defining TCS in this way has two virtues. First, the definition stated above best describes the empirical reality of non-state engagement with global governance institutions. Civil society typically refers to that realm of human association that is neither explicitly profit-making nor a formal part of state government. The vast majority of policy advocacy has been conducted by professional NGOs – organizations in which the majority of the staff are full-time employees of the organization (as opposed to volunteers), such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Christian Aid. Yet faith-based organizations have also played a crucial role in areas like development policy and human rights. Protestant and Catholic churches, for instance, helped support the Jubilee debt relief movement, while Muslim organizations frequently sponsor development projects in Africa. Global justice movements, based around grassroots resistance to things like globalization or environmental degradation and often manifested in street protests during major world policy summits and in groups like Occupy Wall Street, have occasionally influenced international policy. The term ‘non-governmental organization’, in its most common usage, does not readily encompass these latter two types of organizations (however much a literal definition of the term ought to encompass them). If we wish to talk about all of the organizations impacting global governance, the term ‘transnational civil society’ is clearer.

Transnational civil society also seems preferable to other common terms like transnational advocacy networks (TANs) or global civil society. Transnational activity is inherent in seeking to influence global governance and one of the virtues of the TAN perspective is that it readily encompasses local actors involved in international campaigns, rather than focusing only on powerful international NGOs. Empirically, however, not all participants in transnational advocacy or activity are part of networks or – if they are – conduct their advocacy through those networks. While the idea of TANs is certainly useful for discussing the particular advantages of concerted action or information-sharing across state boundaries (or, as researchers such as Clifford Bob have revealed, the perils of such coordination), to focus only on TANs would exclude organizations that have chosen to go it alone. Environmental Defense, for instance, is said to have influenced climate change negotiations largely by pursuing an agenda independent of the other CSOs involved. Amnesty International frequently coordinates only with its own local chapters. Indeed, as this book will discuss, atomized action on the part of civil society organizations operating internationally may be more the norm than the exception.

The term ‘global civil society’ is more normative that descriptive. The community of transnational civil society organizations is not truly globe-spanning. Organizations with the resources and wherewithal to operate transnationally tend to be concentrated in the wealthier, more industrialized countries of what is often called the global North. As will be discussed later in this book, their partners elsewhere, while also part of transnational civil society, are often chosen selectively to suit the purposes of their rich-world partners. Moreover, even civil society organizations in developing countries that operate transnationally of their own initiative tend to be led and staffed by economic and social elites from within those countries. If the globe encompasses all people of all states and all socio-economic strata, there is little that is global about transnational civil society.

The TCS and TCSO definitions used in this book aim to bring together the most important parts of these alternative terms and definitions. The exclusion of government and commercial involvement, for instance, is in keeping with the commonly understood definitions of NGOs and civil society. Specifying transnational linkages, rather than transnational activity, allows us to include, as the TAN model does, local organizations that form a crucial part of transnational advocacy efforts yet rarely undertake activities beyond their home state. Thus the term transnational civil society and its associated definition were chosen because they facilitate inductive, empirical research on non-state actors and the democratization of global governance, while also connecting to previous scholarship in clear, recognizable ways.

TCS to the rescue

Why do observers hope that TCS will democratize global governance? To begin with, transnational civil society has had a noticeable impact on global governance over the past 25 years. Transnational civil society organizations are credited with, or claim credit for, prompting developing country debt forgiveness, driving new environmental regulations, ending human rights abuses, and persuading most of the world to ban the use of anti-personnel landmines. In achieving these changes, TCSOs have forced the hands of states and global governance institutions alike, establishing TCS as what Florini (2000) describes as the ‘third force’ – a new power in international policymaking. TCSOs have helped create new institutions and policy regimes, such as the Forest Stewardship Council and Fairtrade labeling, that directly influence intern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Waiting on Democracy
• 2 Context, Role, and Legitimacy
• 3 Beating the Bank: Transnational Civil Society and the 10th IDA
• 4 Principles and Paychecks: Positions and Participation in the IDA-10
• 5 Mechanisms of Influence and the Distribution of Authority
• 6 Transnational Civil Society and Local Representation
• 7 Beyond the 10th IDA
• 8 Transnational Civil Society and the Democratization of Global Governance
• Notes
• References
• Index