Non-Governmental Public Action and Social Justice

J. Howell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349331512, 9780230290365
• eBook ISBN: 9781137309174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unique collection explores the different organizational forms, strategies and tactics that activists adopt. The authors examine how established trades unions struggle to reform, how non-governmental public actors negotiate various dilemmas, and the efforts of non-governmental public actors to secure justice.

1

Introduction

Jude Howell

The self-immolation of a vegetable vendor in Tunisia triggered a wave of revolt that soon cascaded across the Middle East bringing down autocratic regimes and unleashing open debate about building a democratic alternative. The 2011 Arab Spring put non-governmental public action centre-stage in the drive for greater social justice. While the impact of the spontaneous actions of one individual would have been difficult to predict, the protests that ensued drew upon decades of more sustained non-governmental public organising around issues of social justice, be that in terms of reducing poverty, enhancing social inclusion, challenging inequalities or crafting alternative visions of the good life.

In the last two decades new social movements, developmental non-governmental organisations, voluntary sector organisations and human rights groups, and transnational advocacy networks have garnered the attention of academics, politicians and policymakers. The organisational format of the non-governmental organisation or voluntary sector organisation has come to dominate policy thinking when considering potential collaboration and agencies of change. Despite the enthusiasm for the idea of civil society, particularly since the end of the Cold War, which embraces a wide gamut of organisational forms and interests, national and global policymakers have tended to reduce the idea operationally to the sphere of rights-based and/or service-delivery non-governmental organisations. Indeed a distinct field of study has blossomed around non-governmental organisations and voluntary sector organisations that exists apart from social movements, trades union studies, mutual aid or religious organisation. However, the organisational terrain of non-governmental public action concerned with social justice is much broader, encompassing trades unions, co-operatives, faith-based groups, campaigning groups addressing injustices in the market-place, virtual networks, self-help groups and so on. Moreover their relations with governments have become increasingly complex, as politicians for diverse purposes have sought new ways to bring non-governmental public actors into governance processes, be that as partners in service provision, participants in policy dialogue, or as seeds for reinvigorating democratic politics.

The aims of this volume on non-governmental public action are threefold: first, it seeks to highlight the diversity of non-governmental public actors pursuing social justice, examining the different organisational forms, tactics and strategies that are adopted; second, it investigates some of the dilemmas that arise through new forms of governance, where governments cultivate closer relations with non-governmental public actors for the purposes of policy dialogue, service provision or regenerating democratic citizenship; and third, it seeks to strengthen the evidence base demonstrating the contribution of non-governmental public action to enhancing social justice.

In doing so, the volume draws on a selection of research findings emerging out of a five-year research programme funded by the Economic Social Research Council on non-governmental public action. This programme is focused on how non-governmental public action contributes to processes of social transformation, poverty reduction and the pursuit of social justice. The research programme involved over 37 projects with researchers spread across 46 countries. The chapters here provide but a glimpse of the wealth of empirical research and theoretical exploration that was carried out under the programme.¹ Findings from this programme have been widely publicised in academic journals, professional journals, co-authored and edited books as well as in photographic exhibitions, media reports and policy briefings. For the purposes of this volume a slice of this vast research is selected that relates to the guiding themes of organisational diversity and the dilemmas and constraints for non-governmental public actors in new governance spaces.

Before exploring the themes in this volume further, we should first clarify the term non-governmental public action. Non-governmental public action refers to the activities, interventions, strategies and organising processes undertaken by individuals and non-governmental organisations, that are distinct from the state and the market, for the public purposes of addressing social injustices, poverty and inequality. Such action aims to influence governmental and intergovernmental policy processes and corporate practices. Non-governmental public actors include not just NGOs, which have arguably received disproportionate attention in the literature since the mid-1990s, but a range of forms of organising such as media-based networks and coalitions, transnational advocacy networks, ethical trade coalitions, social movements, faith-based groups, development NGOs, human rights groups, women’s groups, child protection organisations, trades unions, co-operatives, campaign coalitions, and also individual actors. Non-governmental public action occurs in the wider realm of civil society, which is a much broader concept encompassing not only action and organising but also processes of deliberation and dialogue that may not translate immediately into action or purposive organising.

The book takes the concept of ‘non-governmental public action’ as its starting-point rather than say ‘NGOs’ or ‘non-profits’ or ‘the voluntary sector’, or ‘the Third Sector’ for several reasons. First, this allows us to explore the diversity of organisational forms, values, ideologies, activities, and relationships with the state and market that can be found in non-governmental public action. In this way it avoids a crudely functional view of non-governmental public action that a limited focus on say only NGOs or the voluntary sector or the `Third Sector’ often invites. Second, the language of action and actors allows us to move beyond a sterile organisational approach to attune more closely to the interactions between actors engaged in public action, the strategies they deploy, the issues they engage on, the discourses they use, and the politics of power in this engagement. Third, it enables us to transcend the linguistic and academic divide that has arisen in different literatures whereby studies of NGOs tend to be the preserve of international relations, global politics, area studies and development studies, and voluntary sector organisations fall under the microscope of social policy and nationally-focused social sciences.

The study of non-governmental public action and social justice has focused much attention on the role of NGOs, particularly human rights organisations, advocacy organisations, and rights-based development groups. The role of workers’ organisations has tended to be studied separately under industrial relations or trades union studies. Moreover, studies of trades unions in liberal democracies outweigh those of unions in authoritarian states or developing country contexts. Yet workers’ organisations have played an historic role in advancing social justice in the workplace and promoting welfare reform more generally in society, as illustrated well in the development of trade unionism in industrialising Britain in the nineteenth century. Workers’ protests can also be pivotal in bringing about regime change in authoritarian states. Strikes and demonstrations by workers in Poland, and in particular the Solidarnosc movement, were central in pushing reform and in eventually bringing about regime collapse. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 state-sponsored trades unions struggled to survive as workers began to form their own trade unions and organised independently to seek social justice in the workplace.

This volume recognises the centrality of worker organising to promoting social justice not just in the workplace but more generally in society. It considers how workers’ organisations and actions contribute to processes of social and political change, how they draw on past historical experiences of organising to inform current protest and how established trade unions seek to adapt in rapidly changing contexts. It examines how workers innovate in the face of co-opted trade unions to deal with inequalities in the workplace and society, creating their own discourses, ways of organising and new styles of leadership. The chapters by Tim Pringle, Anne Alexander and Ana Dinerstein, address these issues in their detailed studies of worker organising in Russia, China, Vietnam, Egypt and Argentina.

In the chapter on Russia, China and Vietnam, Tim Pringle explores how the shift to capitalist relations of production in all three countries has impinged on the pre-existing trade union federations. These federations were key structural components of the state socialist regime and as such functioned to mediate between the respective communist parties and workers. As Pringle underlines, these were ‘directive’ rather than representative institutions. In the context of capitalist economic reforms, the trade union federations face challenges to adapt and maintain their authority and relevance to workers. Though the path of reform has varied in the three countries – Russia experiencing a `big bang’ approach, whilst China and Vietnam pursued a more gradual path – the introduction of market forces has yielded similar grievances and injustices. These have included issues such as excessive overtime, delayed payment of wages, poor health and safety, low wages, phenomena that are all too reminiscent of the sweatshop conditions that prevailed in the manufacturing heartlands of nineteenth-century Britain.

In all three countries the introduction of capitalist relations of production has required new laws, regulations and frameworks for governing industrial relations. Much of the impetus for these changes has come through labour unrest rather than from pressure within the trade union federations. Independent workers’ strikes and protests have also pushed the trades union federations to reform their structures, ways of working and approach to workers. In particular autonomous organising by workers has highlighted the gap between the federations’ claim to speak on behalf of workers and the actual needs, interests and concerns of workers. Pringle addresses these issues by examining two strategies that trades unions in each country have adopted to address workers’ grievances, namely, the introduction of collective contracts as a way to negotiate pay and working conditions, and the reform of labour dispute resolution.

While Pringle investigated the impact of political and economic transformation on the pre-existing Communist Party-linked trade union federations, Ana Dinerstein approaches worker organising and trade unionism in a context of neo-liberal reforms and neo-globalisation in an already existing capitalist economy. It has become commonplace to note the casualisation and flexibilisation of labour, unemployment and the crisis of trade unions as significant effects of the global spread of neo-liberalism. At the same time observers of neo-globalisation have drawn attention to the new forms of labour resistance and new strategies of trade unions such as new internationalism. In the context of Latin America researchers have tended to focus their attention on the crisis of trade unions. To what extent then have neo-liberal reforms in Argentina affected the nature of labour resistance? In what ways does casualisation and unemployment create new categories of workers with distinct identities, interests and novel ways of organising? How do these new categories of workers engage with other types of labour resistance? And in what ways do these new forms of activism alter perspectives on ‘trade union crisis’ and the decline of labour power?

These are some of the issues that Ana Dinerstein takes up in her chapter on Argentina in the midst of neo-liberal reforms in the second half of the 1990s. She sets out to show how changes in the process of capital accumulation lead also to changes in the way that labour is subordinated. The latter is not a wholly destructive or negative affair; rather, changes in the nature of subordination generate new forms of identity, new ways of mobilising and new politics. In essence, Dinerstein proposes, new `labour subjectivities’ emerge. The argument that Dinerstein advances in her chapter contrasts with pessimistic perspectives that see only the demise of trade unions and the disempowerment of labour, situations of permanent defeat and historic finality rather than temporal shifts in power and recreation of agencies of resistance. By focusing on the case of unemployed workers she shows how their newly constituted organisations and identities served not only to shape an anti-neo-liberal discourse but also to reinterpret the worlds of work and unemployment and to challenge mainstream notions of social justice.

While independent workers’ organising in post-socialist and democratic states undergoing neo-liberal reforms has put pressure on corporatist trade union federations to reform and set limits on capitalist exploitation, in the Middle East, too, autonomous worker action has played a key role in bringing about regime change and social justice. The wave of protest and activism that erupted in January 2011 in Egypt led not only to the fall of President Mubarak but also to a spate of revolutionary uprising across the Middle East. Whilst the media has focused intensely on these events, it has tended – perhaps inevitably because of its concern with reporting the immediate and sensational – to overlook the accumulated layers of activist resistance that preceded and informed the cataclysmic uprising of early 2011 in Egypt. Anne Alexander adopts a comparative historical perspective to draw out the parallels in activist cultures in Egypt during the 1940s and since 2006, focusing in particular on the workers’ movement in these two periods. Specifically, she addresses the question of how forms of leadership can influence the nature of collective action and how different forms of collective action in turn can structure the formation of new arenas of dissidence. She coins the notion of ‘activist culture’ to describe and analyse the patterns of interaction between leadership practices, forms of collective action and spheres of dissidence. In doing so she adopts an understanding of leadership that is not harnessed to high-level, formal positions of authority and command, but rather acknowledges the plurality of leadership at different levels of a social movement.

Alexander pursues her historical comparative analysis of activist cultures by first dissecting three phases of workers’ protests that took place between 1945 and 1952, specifically in February and March 1946, then April to May 1948, and finally between the autumn of 1951 and January 1952. She explores each phase in terms of the democratic forms of leadership that emerged, the repertoire of collective action adopted, such as strikes and protests, and the spheres of dissidence such as radical book shops, cadre schools and political clubs where tactical and strategic planning took place and democratic methods were nurtured. Alexander sets out to trace the similarity in the patterns of interaction between a more democratic leadership and forms of collective action adopted by workers during these three periods in the 1940s and 1950s, and those forms of collective action and spheres of dissidence in the period since 2006. Her chapter illustrates vividly how workers’ protests feed into broader processes of social change and how historical memories of non-governmental public action feed into contemporary forms of resistance.

International foundations, development institutions and academics have paid considerable attention to the role of international, national and local NGOs in enhancing democratic governance processes, promoting human rights and providing alternative avenues of service provision. While there has been growing interest in micro-credit schemes and social enterprise, non-governmental public actors that challenge issues of justice and inequality in the market-place have received remarkably little attention in policy debates or the broader literature on civil society and NGOs. Such challenges might take the form of labour movements and trades unions, as discussed in the chapters by Pringle, Alexander and Dinerstein, or questioning the barriers faced by poorer populations in accessing essential goods such as basic medicines, or pursuing collectivist approaches to the production and distribution of goods.

Particularly surprising is the paucity of research and relatively limited policy interest in the potential of co-operatives to contribute to greater social inclusion and poverty reduction. This is extraordinary given that co-operatives employ over 100 million people and have over 800 million members across the world. In their chapter on co-operatives Johnston Birchall and Richard Simmons provide one of the few detailed studies of the role of co-operatives in reducing poverty, drawing on the cases of Tanzania and Sri Lanka. Given that in the last five years international financial and development institutions have begun to cast their attention upon farmers’ associations and co-operatives as a way to boost rural economies, this study of Birchall and Simmons comes at a timely moment. Such international attention to co-operatives creates openings for thinking constructively about the changes that are needed to make co-operatives more effective as agents of development. To this end Birchall and Simmons also reflect upon the reforms that would be needed for co-operatives to realise their potential as development agents with comparative advantages in poverty reduction.

Birchall and Simmons set out to address three main questions: first, what is the potential of co-operatives in reducing poverty?; second, what organisational comparative advantages do co-operatives have compared to other organisational forms, such as NGOs or small businesses; and third, how best can the interests of co-operatives be represented in national-level poverty-reduction strategies, donor and government policies. They draw on the findings of a survey of 474 co-operative managers and 250 member-directors, 58 semi-structured interviews with key informants in international agencies, co-operatives, donor organisations, NGOs and the private sector at the national level in Sri Lanka and Tanzania, and 25 semi-structured interviews with key informants from 18 international organisations and specialist consultants. They also worked through the International Co-operative Alliance to administer a questionnaire to apex co-operative organisations around the theme of the contribution of co-operatives to poverty reduction and the organisational comparative advantages of co-operatives. Their chapter thus analyses the findings of this extensive empirical research to shed light on the much neglected role of co-operatives in reducing poverty and enhancing social justice.

In many developing countries low-income populations depend on the market for access to medicines. This is often in a context of weak regulation of retail sales and asymmetric information about medicines, where consumers lack knowledge about the medicines they are purchasing and awareness of their health rights. This exposes low-income consumers of medicines to various risks against which they have little protection. These include sub-standard medicines, over-priced medicines, inappropriate dosages, incorrect usage, incomplete treatments and increasing anti-microbial resistance. With a profit motive guiding the retailing and dispensing of medicines low-income consumers risk falling into greater poverty and indebtedness as they find themselves unable to afford medical treatment. Focusing on the cases of Tanzania and India, Phares Mujinja, Meri Koivusalo, Maureen Mackintosh and Sudip Chaudhuri argue in their chapter that consumers of medicine cannot put their faith in the market mechanism to secure the drugs they need. Rather, they propose that non-governmental public action has an important role to play in ensuring that the rights of consumers in accessing essential medicines are protected and thereby injustices and inequalities in the field of medicine are diminished. Non-governmental public actors can intervene in a variety of ways such as promoting essential drugs lists, organising wholesale trading of essential medicines, pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Social Justice on the Shop Floor: Trade Union Reform in Russia, China and Vietnam
• 3  From Corporatist to Autonomous: Unemployed Workers Organisations and the Remaking of Labour Subjectivity in Argentina
• 4  Analysing Activist Cultures in the Egyptian Workers Movement
• 5  The Role and Potential of Co-Operatives in the Poverty Reduction Process
• 6  NGOs, Consumer Rights and Access to Essential Medicines: Non-Governmental Public Action in a Low-Income Market Context
• 7  Surviving the Civil Society Dilemma: Critical Factors in Shaping the Behaviour of Non-Governmental Actors136
• 8  Citizen Engagement in Public Health Service Delivery: From Collaboration to Accountability
• 9  Analysing Partnership in Aid Chains: A Case Study of the Catholic Church
• 10  Conclusion
• References
• Index