Civil Society and the Governance of Development

Opposing Global Institutions

Anders Uhlin, S. Kalm

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137461308
• eBook ISBN: 9781137461315
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book re-conceptualizes civil society engagement with global governance institutions in the field of development in terms of opposition. With an innovative theoretical framework, it maps and explains opposition strategies through detailed case studies on the EU, the Asian Development Bank, and the Global Forum on Migration and Development.

1

Opposition in Global Governance: An Introduction

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, civil society organizations (CSOs) have increasingly targeted international organizations (IOs) and other global governance institutions (GGIs). Sometimes this has taken the forms of mass protests expressing grave critique or outright refusal, as was the case with the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, subsequently referred to as the Battle of Seattle, and similar protest events directed against economic globalization in the years that followed. At other occasions civil society actors have formed campaigns to influence GGIs in a particular area. An example is the Global Campaign for Decent Work and Rights for Domestic Workers which, in 2011, succeeded in having the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopt its Domestic Workers Convention. Besides, a large share of political engagement is of a slow and continuous character, as when CSOs strive to affect policy by participating in consultations and lobbying individual staff members. A broad range of CSOs, for instance, participate in more or less frequent consultations concerning overarching policies as well as specific projects of multilateral development banks. These varied examples show how organized civil society activism is not restricted to the local and national political arenas, but increasingly target GGIs as well. They also demonstrate the different forms this activism takes. Many civil society actors do not have the financial or organizational resources to even engage with GGIs that may be headquartered in faraway locations, but among those who do, strategies display great variation. While some willingly cooperate with GGIs and welcome each opportunity for making their voices heard in consultations, others engage in outside protest, reject the institution on normative and political grounds and would not turn up for hearings even if they were given the chance to do so. Others do a little of both, or anything in between. It is thus clear that CSOs relate to GGIs in very different ways, while also having differing opportunities for so doing.

This more or less dissenting civil society engagement with GGIs can be found across many different issue areas; however, the intensity of civil society activism targeting GGIs varies greatly. Some issues are more politicized than others and GGIs with a high level of political authority tend to be most contested (Zürn et al. 2012). It is not a coincidence that all the examples above relate to the global governance of development in a broad sense. Much transnational activism since the 1990s has focused on challenging what the critics describe as the dominant ­neoliberal model for global development. Moreover, and despite the general high level of politicization in this area, few GGIs apart from those concerned with development have as much relatively non-conflictual engagement with CSOs who are often hired as project implementers and consultants.

The prevalence of civil society actors in global governance seems to demonstrate that states are no longer the only players to be reckoned with on the international arena (Lipschutz 1992; Kaldor 2003). This defies what was for long a guiding assumption in the International Relations (IR) discipline. Until relatively recently, few scholars turned their attention to non-state-led processes or recognized the relevance of actors other than states. This has indeed changed, and CSOs along with other non-state actors are now acknowledged – in research as well as among many policy makers – as significant agents within current global governance structures. But there is not yet any consensus regarding the nature and effect of this involvement. Some authors take this trend as an indication of the emergence of a global civil society, holding great promise for transforming international relations in enlightened, rational and peaceful directions (Boli and Thomas 1997). Others claim that CSOs are little more than instruments of state interests, which means that their increased visibility in global governance does not signify any fundamental change to the Westphalian pattern of interstate power struggles (Drezner 2007). Yet others argue that CSOs are granted access to IOs to the extent that they possess expertise, local knowledge or some other resource that the IO requires, meaning that the trend towards involvement amounts to little more than the fulfilment of a functional-rational need (Reimann 2006; Tallberg et al. 2013b). Curiously, the ambitions and strategies of the CSOs themselves are missing from much of the debate on GGI–CSO relations in the discipline of International Relations. While scholars of different theoretical and political convictions come to conflictive conclusions from their observations, many tend to share a general point of view in their matter of inquiry: the trend towards CSO involvement is analysed from a top-down perspective, which privileges questions of how, when and under what conditions GGIs open up for civil society engagement. But the agency, motivations and strategies of CSOs themselves are largely left outside of this picture.

Therefore, in this book we want to explore the perceptions, tactics, motives and interactions of civil society actors themselves. More specifically, we want to understand the varied ways in which relationships between civil society actors targeting the same institution are patterned and how these actors choose strategies towards that institution. A bottom-up-oriented perspective, we argue, is needed to move away from state-centrism and understand questions of how CSOs develop different tactics and strategies, why they perceive of some GGIs as legitimate and not others, what makes them choose among different repertoires of action, and under what conditions they engage in relations of cooperation or conflict with other civil society actors in global governance. This knowledge is vital for more fully comprehending contemporary relations of power and influence in global governance (cf. Grugel and Uhlin 2012). It may furthermore be vital for assessing the democratic qualities of global governance arrangements, which are often associated with access, participation and influence of civil society actors (Steffek and Nanz 2008; Scholte 2011a; Pallas 2013).

We hence side with the strands of research that have taken a more bottom-up perspective to civil society engagement with GGIs, focusing on the advocacy and influence of transnational activists (Fox and Brown 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998; O’Brien et al. 2000; Tarrow 2005; Smith 2008; Scholte 2011a; Pallas 2013). But we add to that literature by conceptualizing CSO activism as opposition in global governance. The term ‘opposition’ has etymological roots in the Latin word ‘oppositus’, which means to be positioned against (Kubát 2010: 15). In its ­broadest definition, it refers to any act of resistance: spontaneous or ­organized, individual or collective. In its more common, narrower, sense, it refers to institutional opposition. Opposition as a concept, as patterned ­interactions among the contenders and as a strategy to influence power, was thoroughly explored by scholars of comparative politics in the 1960s and 1970s (Dahl 1965, 1968b, 1973; Barker 1971b; Ionescu and de Madariaga 1972; McLennan 1973; Sartori 1976). This literature was mainly concerned with opposition in modern democracies, where oppositional political parties counter and challenge the government. Opposition has with a few notable exceptions (Mair 2007; Helms 2008; Deitelhoff 2010) been absent from scholarship on global governance. In this book we argue that the relationship between CSOs and GGIs can (with caveats and restrictions) be thought of analogously to that between oppositional parties and a government in power. We also maintain that elements of the comparative politics literature on opposition can fruitfully complement existing global governance scholarship, helping us to gain a fuller understanding of CSO–GGI relations.

Research questions and contributions

The overarching ambition of this study is to understand how CSOs interact between themselves and towards GGIs. For this purpose, we revive the notion of political opposition and rework it theoretically to fit the context of global governance. We argue that ‘opposition’ can assist in understanding patterns of CSO interactions as well as in explaining their choice of strategies towards GGIs. We have three ­specific aims. First, the overarching theoretical ambition is to re-­conceptualize CSO–GGI relations in terms of opposition. Second, we aim to use this re-conceptualization of opposition to describe the pattern of inter-­organizational relations in novel ways. Third, we aim to use the re-conceptualization of opposition to help explain individual organizations’ choice of strategy. Each ambition corresponds to one research question: (1) How can opposition help us understand CSO–GGI relations? (2) What is the pattern of civil society opposition ­targeting GGIs? (3) How can CSOs’ choice of strategy towards a particular GGI be explained? While the first question is treated in chapters 1 and 2 and throughout the study, the second and third are specified in ­chapter 3 and answered in chapters 4 to 6.

Our main theoretical contribution is that we introduce the concept of opposition in a global governance context. To this end, we combine insights from the literature on opposition in comparative politics with research on global governance, transnational civil society and social movements. The empirical contribution consists of the knowledge generated from the case studies that we present, namely the European Union (EU), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). As concerns the EU, we focus on its policies and practices of development cooperation. Two of our institution-cases are regional and one is global in terms of membership. All of them are involved with development, which is a hotly contested issue area. Its specific character will be further discussed at a later stage in this chapter.

Conceptualizing opposition in global governance

We will now describe the rationale for theorizing CSO strategies in terms of opposition. Our ambition has been to account for the full spectrum of more or less dissenting civil society engagement with GGIs. We do not want to focus on only one type of strategy and disregard others. This, we argue, is a shortcoming that marks much of the existing scholarship on the topic. Previous research tends to follow two parallel paths. One is the literature on non-governmental organization (NGO) and interest group lobbying that explores different forms of ‘inside’ activities (attending hearings, approaching individual staff members) and seeks to explain when these are successful (Betsill and Corell 2008b; Chalmers 2011, 2013; Dellmuth 2012). The other is the literature on transnational activism, which focuses on social movements that pursue contentious politics in relation to the GGI and therefore tend to engage in various ‘outside’ protest activities (O’Brien et al. 2000; della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Tarrow 2005; Smith 2008). It is thus the different civil society repertoires of action that have formed the basis of a division within research. This division is unfortunate since manifest political behaviour is not necessarily correlated with ideological positions or perceptions of legitimacy, which this division tends to assume. Furthermore, empirical observations indicate that many civil society actors combine inside and outside strategies, which this research may overlook. And lastly, the division conceals from analysis some dimensions of inter-organizational interactions, that is, the relations between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsider’. What is needed therefore is a way of capturing the full range of civil society engagement strategies and interactions, which feature some degree of disagreement with the GGI in question.

The term ‘social movement’ is often used in this context. But in order to account specifically for CSO activism towards GGIs, we have found it slightly inadequate and we will now describe why. For one thing, many scholars see protest activity as a defining feature of social movements. This limits its applicability to the ‘outside’ part of the division mentioned above, which means that the ‘inside’ activity is neglected in the analysis. And even when defined differently, there are still limitations to its usefulness in a GGI context. To Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani (2006: 20), a social movement is a process in which actors are involved in relations of conflict towards a specific adversary, are tied by dense and informal networks and share a collective identity. Compared to our context, a similarity is the existence of a specific adversary, namely the GGI in question. But it would not be correct to say that it is a movement in della Porta and Diani’s term that is in focus here. Although many of the civil society actors that target a particular institution are likely to identify with some (or other) broader social movement, many of them are not, so we cannot assume at the outset that they are all participants in the same movement. And this means, in turn, that the networks and linkages between them are multiple, uneven, possibly antagonistic and not necessarily as dense as della Porta and Diani’s definition suggests. Furthermore, while all of them want to influence the GGI and some of them are quite radical, many of them may be largely sympathetic with the institution’s mandate and have much more modest proposals for change. The degree of conflictive stance is therefore neither uniform nor necessarily as confrontational as the social movement term suggests. This is not meant as a critique of the social movement literature, which we find in many ways useful. Rather, the limitations of the concept arise because we want to cut through the empirics a bit differently. To sum up, we have been searching for a way of conceptualizing the full landscape of civil society actors that seek to influence a particular GGI and who do not necessarily share the same goals or collective identity, a conceptualization that moreover may help us understand the forms of relations and interactions between them as well as their strategies towards the GGI in question.

We have found that the concept of political opposition can do precisely this. The term is normally reserved for national-level politics, and with very few exceptions, it has not been used in global governance analyses. Our ambition is hence to begin to develop the concept of opposition in a global governance context. We are primarily interested in its potential as a conceptual tool for grasping a particular empirical phenomenon, rather than as a normative concept or benchmark – although the tw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figure and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1 Opposition in Global Governance: An Introduction
• 2 Global Governance, Civil Society and Opposition: Empirical and Theoretical Context
• 3 Opposition in Global Governance: An Analytical Framework
• 4 European Union Aid and Development Cooperation
• 5 The Asian Development Bank
• 6 The Global Forum on Migration and Development
• 7 Conclusion: Opposing Global Institutions
• Notes
• References
• Index