|
Editorial, volume 10, number 2
Many of those civil society organisations which are concerned with issues of social and economic justice find themselves trying to maintain a balance between the difficulties of surviving within a hostile environment and the challenges posed by swimming against the tide, and seeking alternatives to it. They are caught between accommodating themselves or selling-out on the one hand, and being neutralised or cast as outdated radicals on the other. As the ethical and human values that accompany the forces of globalisation are shifting, so it becomes far harder to draw the line between adapting to change and simply abandoning ones principles. Old ways of defining the struggle - rich and poor, haves and have-nots, industrialised North and developing South - are no longer adequate as rallying-cries, still less as organising principles. Monoliths and dichotomies have given way to a multi-layered universe of plural choices and options, one in which it is easy to lose any sense of shared purpose or direction.
For value-based organisations, such as most development NGOs would describe themselves, the question of how to act within a dynamic moral universe is central. Which are the changes that such organisations should embrace? And what are non-negotiable principles which should inform such choices? On what basis can alternatives to the prevailing value-system be constructed - and where, if at all, do conventional North-South partnerships fit into the scheme of things?
These are very large questions, and the various contributions to this issue of Development in Practice can hardly address them in their entirety. What does come across, however, as Penny Plowman underlines, is the critical importance for civil society organisations to get their own house in order in terms of the values they proclaim; and for real integrity concerning the political implications (and limitations) of their actions. This kind of intellectual honesty and rigour will of course not do away with all the problems associated with inequality and inequity, and it would be naïve to suggest that it might. But the lack of such candour will almost certainly make it harder for any such organisation to make a profound contribution to the search for sustainable alternatives, or to forge alliances with others in this effort.
The growing emphasis by development NGOs on advocacy and campaigning is often seen by them as their most critical contribution to changing the status quo in favour of those who are poor or disempowered - drawing on their own first-hand experience in what has been called practice to policy leverage. Jennifer Chapman and Thomas Fisher examine two long-running international campaigns and try to identify the ingredients of success at the local as well as the international level. Among their conclusions, the process of reversing the flow so that the advocated policy changes also translate into changes on the ground - policy to practice - is an essential criterion both in achieving any real transformation in the lives of poor people, and in order to sustain it. Anne Tallontire looks at the evolution of alternative trading organisations from a moral solidarity to an economic partnership model, with a particular focus on the experience of Cafédirect. The conundrum for such organisations is how to be economically viable, and therefore persuasive on a social and political front, without becoming just another profit-driven venture or requiring to be propped up by constant subsidies. Alnoor Ebrahim shows how one of the best-known and longest-serving forms of alternative economic institution, the cooperative, has in the case of rural Gujurat, served to allow the better-off to consolidate their wealth rather than acting as a means to redistribute this more equitably among the local agricultural producers. Mark Schreiner and Feleke Tadele look at experiences in the so-called informal economy sector of revolving savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) and exchange and barter in Argentina and Ethiopia respectively. In both cases, these practices live alongside the formal system, but in neither do they serve as a fundamental challenge to it.
In his case study of development-induced displacement in Turkey, Dennis Paling found that villagers who were forced to leave their ancestral small-holdings in order for a large dam project to go ahead, have not since returned to the land. Instead, the furtherance of national economic imperatives has resulted in the loss of livelihood, and way of life, of a small farming community. Diana Mitlin highlights the lack of attention given by development agencies to work with the urban poor. There are many reasons for this, some of them rooted in unarticulated but nevertheless powerful myths about the intrinsic wholesomeness of the bucolic life, and the apparently inevitable exposure to moral and physical hazards in the towns and cities. Fears about the unchecked flow of migrants from the rural areas are linked, for sure, to critiques of the push factors, such as the lack of public investment in small farmers. But the fact that paid work, goods, and services are more readily available in cities is a rational pull factor too. Urban poverty may be squalid, but that doesnt make it wrong for people to prefer this to being poor and isolated in the countryside. However, while is ever less call for unskilled labour in the formal job market, Mitlin suggests that neighbourhood improvement schemes should at least be more closely linked to income-generation projects. Indeed, the mix-and-match of part-time jobs, in-kind exchange, and participation in the occasional voluntary sector-run income-generation project is what many people are compelled to survive on.
Running parallel to papers which draw out the limited scope for generating sustainable alternatives to the formal and increasingly globalised economy, other contributors stress the social and cultural activities that might accompany such attempts. Alan Rogers underscores the need to use existing organisational structures in literacy programmes, rather than creating artificial, project-bound ones. And Gerry Abbott stresses that mother-tongue literacy in plurilingual societies would further, and not hinder, national development, while also bemoaning the lack of attention generally given to this area in development theory and practice. Echoing this, Mike Powell raises concerns about the continuing tendency of the Northern academic and aid community to look to its own scholars, researchers, practitioners, and institutions rather than looking beyond them, and fostering the capacity of their Southern counterparts to make their own contributions to the debate, and to the search for alternative development paradigms.
 Previous
|
Next Abstract 
|
