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Development, NGOs and Civil Society

Development, NGOs, and civil society: the debate and its future
Jenny Pearce

Introduction
In reviewing the contributions to this Reader, I was struck by three things. First, by the wealth of empirically informed conceptual analysis they offer, succinctly addressing many of the key issues that emerged in the 1990s on the theme of development, NGOs and civil society. Second, by the mix of scholar-activist-practitioner authors, for whom the issues discussed really matter because if these were clarified, the world might become a better place. But third, and despite the quality and relevance of the papers selected for this volume, by the difficulty of generating wider debate about their content.

This is certainly not the fault of the contributions. On the contrary, they cover the range of problems admirably. It is that they are appearing in a world in which the collapse of intellectual and political signposts and reference points has fostered an eclectic outpouring of views and perspectives, without organised and coherent debate. As a result, good thinking and writing is lost, much is duplicated and reinvented, people talk but dont listen, people write and dont read, and vice versa. Development debates if they can be called that at the new millennium are like concentric circles orbiting each other but without touching. These circles appear to share a centre in that the same language and concepts are used by all, from the World Bank to Southern NGOs and grassroots movements. The reluctance to clarify the distinct meanings invested in these concepts reflects collective collusion in the myth that a consensus on development exists, or even that some clear conclusions have been reached about how to deal with global poverty. A headline in the International Herald Tribune of 7 January 2000 stated, for instance: Concept of Poverty Undergoes Radical Shift: Now a Solution Seems Possible.

Not only is there very little consensus, but the real world of development NGOs and official donors is characterised by mistrust and by fierce competition over resources and protagonism that are very damaging to the anti-poverty cause. In addition, the inadequacy of responses to global poverty are only too apparent. UNDPs 1997 Human Development Report gave a measured overview of progress and setbacks in addressing global poverty in the twentieth century, and a quantitative and qualitative picture of the scale of the problem still to be addressed (UNDP 1997, esp. pp.24-60). While there have been notable achievements, these have been neither continuous nor equally distributed. The economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s reflects what UNDP calls the ascents/descents character of development processes, suggesting that economic liberalisation has widened existing inequalities even when it encourages growth and accumulation for those already strong in the marketplace. Such strength may derive from legally acquired wealth, but also from coercive power and illegal dealings. Criminal mafias, many now in the South and post-Communist transition countries, have also expanded through the opportunities offered by the relaxing of global financial and trade controls. Between 1987 and 1993 the number of people with incomes of less than US$1 a day increased by almost 100 million to 1.3 billion people, one-third of the population of the developing world. Yet, between 1989 and 1996, the number of billionaires increased from 157 to 447; and the value of their combined assets exceeded the combined incomes of the poorest 50 per cent of the worlds poor (UNDP 1997: 38 and 110). Since the early 1980s, more than 100 developing and transition countries have suffered more prolonged cuts in living standards and failures of growth than anything experienced by the industrialised countries during the Great Depression of the 1930s (UNDP 1997: 7).

If one looks at the global picture rather than just that of the developing world, the problem of human poverty is much greater than the one-third of those in the South who are income-poor and the one-quarter who are poor in terms of the UNDPs Human Development Index. Over 100 million people in the industrialised countries also live below the income poverty line (UNDP 1997: 34). But it is not just a question of the number of people living below an agreed minimum: a category of poor on the wrong side of the relatively recent exclusion/inclusion dichotomy. Nor is it that millions who arent in fact below the line, live on its borders under constant fear of crossing over, suffering not just the threat of actual indigence but conditions of daily exploitation.(1) Rather, it is whether the inclusion side of the border is worth preserving, or whether what it claims to offer can really be made universally available. There are cogent voices in the South today who, along with their Northern intellectual allies, argue for an end to development as an idea. Majid Rahnema suggests that development could never offer a sustainable option to all the people on the planet even if it were successful:

Even if we do not accept the full implications of the post-development position given that, like dependency theory, it offers a strong critique but little guidance to action and policy, it is surely time profoundly to question the dichotomised schema of a successful North and unsuccessful South. Such a schema discouraged people from asking what kind of world we want to build and instead channelled us into thinking how the Other of the third world can become more like Us in the first world. Most of us thought that such a schema, first encapsulated by modernisation theory in the 1950s, had been so intellectually defeated by the 1960s that it was effectively dead. However, it returned in new form and with new vigour in the 1980s and 1990s. Undoubtedly, its resuscitation was encouraged by Fukuyama-like musings on the End of History as echoed by the millennium edition of Newsweek, which declared capitalism and democracy to be the effective victors of the second millennium. Yet, as Souths proliferate in the North, and Norths emerge in the South, we need to ask searching questions about development as both an idea and as an ideal as well as about what NGOs might contribute to it.

My introductory essay aims first to identify what this collection of papers tell us about the current state of thinking about development, NGOs, and civil society and to clarify the points of debate that have arisen over the last decade. Second, I shall argue that the age of a rhetorical consensus should be declared over. Instead, I would partly agree with Michael Edwards (1999) that we should definitively shift from the foreign aid paradigm towards a new idea of international cooperation, based on broad alliances between different actors and institutions involved in the struggle against global poverty and exploitation. Building global alliances or constituencies for change, he argues, would enable human beings to co-determine their future on the world stage. However, while it is evident that only through mutual engagement can any real difference be made and debate encouraged on what works and what doesnt, international cooperation cannot be based on concealing the divergence of values, interests, political positions and, ultimately, the power to pursue them within the present global order. Edwards calls for a dialogic and democratic form of cooperation which is not based on any universal model imposed from above, but on the politically feasible goal of a more humanised capitalism. The purpose of cooperation is, however, by no means uncontested; Edwards goal itself is a source of contention, as is the goal of development. His understanding of what is politically feasible is questionable. Where dialogue should take place, and how to ensure the equality of participation that Edwards also calls for, are extremely complex issues.(2)

Above all, however, this introductory essay will argue that the theoretical, normative, and political basis for a critique of the global order is still weak and/or absent among NGOs, and that the rhetorical consensus grows out of this vacuum. This has implications for practice and action and also for the generation of open debate in search of common ground and new forms of cooperation. From the contributions to this Reader comes the call for NGOs critically to examine and re-examine their role in the light of experiences during and, in particular after, the Cold War. For the past 15 years or so, NGOs have been courted by governments and multilateral institutions. The moment has come to count the cost of their response and to debate the criteria upon which choices about the future should be based. As NGOs find themselves under greater scrutiny and critique, it is surely time for some humbling self-analysis which includes the question, do they have a future at all?

The debate
An initial task for this essay is, therefore, to draw out the major themes that arise from this Reader and assess what they tell us about the current debate on development, NGOs, and civil society. I identify four critical themes: NGOs and neo-liberalism; international (Northern) NGO-Southern NGO roles and relationships; NGOs and the state; and theory, praxis, and NGOs.

NGOs and neo-liberalism
This theme is a useful starting point. The first contribution to this Reader is, appropriately, that of Michael Edwards and David Hulme reporting on the first of the three international conferences they organised across the decade - in 1992, 1994 and, together with Tina Wallace, in 1999 - on NGOs and development. This 1992 conference reflected the early stages of the tensions within the development NGO community as it found itself gaining unexpected respectability and potential funding from the world of official donors. Edwards and Hulme draw attention to the risks as well as gains implicit in the opportunity to scale-up:

By the mid-1990s, an untypically cynical tone creeps into the pages of Development in Practice. Gino Lofredo suggests that the appeals to caution articulated by Edwards and Hulme went unheeded. His satirical commentary on the mushrooming of EN-GE-OHs among Southern professionals is a warning to those who too quickly and instrumentally swallowed the official donor agenda and turned development into just another business in a neo-liberal era, dedicated ultimately to what he calls Sustainable (Self) Development. By the end of the 1990s, Stephen Commins, talking this time about Northern NGOs, points to the negative outcome for those who chose to become the delivery agency for a global soup kitchen. He suggests that the backlash has begun and that NGOs are no longer seen as offering significant advantages either in community development or in complex emergencies. Instead, they are useful fig-leaves to cover government inaction or indifference to human suffering both in complex emergencies and in economic restructuring.

To what extent have development NGOs succumbed to the pressures and incentives to pick up the social cost of neo-liberal restructuring, and thus enabled multilateral and governmental institutions to avoid breaking with their neo-liberal faith by re-creating welfare states? While the discourse of these institutions has become notably more socially aware and human-oriented, and less anti-state in an ideological sense, the underlying philosophy of market-led globalisation has not been questioned. Yet many progressive and well-intentioned NGOs of North and South - as well as the opportunistic ones - accepted funding from these institutions for carrying out community development, post-conflict reconstruction and more ambitiously, democracy-building, putting aside any residual doubts about neo-liberalism as such. Perhaps what has fuelled the beginnings of an anti-NGO shift is that, not surprisingly, NGOs were unable to offer the solution to the social cost of economic restructuring. Criticisms of NGOs have focused on their technical deficiency, their lack of accountability, and their overly politicised and critical character. This failure has undermined their credibility among the technocrats within donor institutions, who demanded rapid and measurable outputs from investments in the NGO sector. And it weakened the clout of the pro-NGO social development advocates within those institutions.(3)

If the UNDP figures are correct, global poverty and inequality have grown in many parts of the world under the neo-liberal policy agenda and the processes of trade liberalisation, privatisation, labour market reform etc. Even with its reputed one million NGOs (Salamon and Anheier 1997), Indias relative achievements in poverty reduction between 1976 and 1990 are attributed by UNDP to public spending levels - levels which were under threat in the late 1990s from a neo-liberal focus on reducing fiscal deficits and minimising the role of the state (UNDP 1997: 52). This does not mean that the picture is universally bleak, nor that macro-economic statistics did not improve in some regions and countries. Nor does it mean that some NGOs did not do some good work. It was simply always unlikely that increasing numbers of NGOs, however dedicated and efficient, could ever offer rapid solutions to a problem of this scale, or even alleviate it sufficiently to ensure relative social stability.

More worrying is the evidence that NGOs have sacrificed some legitimacy in their own societies by their willingness to participate in implementing the social safety-net programmes that accompany the donors neo-liberal policies. Richard Holloway (1999) has made this point forcefully:

An in-depth study of NGOs in Latin America, sponsored by ALOP/ FICONG(4) highlights the growing awareness of this problem in the South. The Argentinean case study, for instance, concludes:

The pages of Development in Practice were not the only ones to carry warnings during the 1990s about the potential cost to NGOs of implementing official donor agendas.(5) The introduction to the edited volume that arose from the second international NGO conference, NGOs and Development: Performance and Accountability in the New World Order, put it bluntly:

As a participant in that 1994 conference, it was clear to me that NGOs of North and South and the academics who worked with them had already tacitly split. This split was not organised around an open debate on the dilemmas themselves, but around two broad approaches to them. One emphasised the technical changes that NGOs should take into account if they were to remain relevant to the economically restructured order in which they were working. A proliferation of papers on institutional strengthening, capacity building, improving accountability, measuring effectiveness through log-frames and social development indicators, addressed some real and specific problems that development NGOs faced if they were to improve their interventions and prove their worth to donors. On the other hand, there was a minority who felt deeply uncomfortable with this new language and who stressed the need to get the politics right first and to resist donor-driven agendas if these served only to bureaucratise and depoliticise NGOs. It was easy to dismiss the latter as the traditionalists of the left failing to update themselves or utopians with no relevance to the real world. Those who preferred the discourse of politics also tended to weaken their position by not engaging with the fact that contributing real improvements to peoples lives is what it is all about, and that improving the capacity to do this is not in itself the problem. Those who tried to bridge this divide found themselves viewed as marginal to the central issues. For example, despite decades of debate around gender and development, a social and political issue with considerable implications for development practice, it was still viewed as peripheral by those concerned with the challenge to/adaptation of NGOs to the New Policy Agenda, and their survival within it (May 1995).

The possibility that improvements in efficiency and management should best be driven by political choices rather than vice versa was buried in the false dichotomy between political and technical agendas - an issue taken up later in this essay. This dichotomy, I would argue, is one of the reasons that NGOs failed to develop their own critique of neo-liberalism and why many ended up implementing a model with which they felt deeply uncomfortable.(6) Indeed, it might be said that 20 years of economic liberalisation has damaged the NGO sector, fragmenting it and fomenting competition in which, as the free market model argues, only the most efficient survive. The rush to efficiency, as if it were a discrete and neutral outcome of technical decisions, appears to have been at the cost of the time-consuming and messy business of debating other values, such as how greater efficiency could be pursued without a cost to social change objectives.

Although it was never homogeneous, the NGO sector has transformed over the last two decades, in more than quantitative terms, to incorporate a multiplicity of agendas, functions, and values. In the meantime, neo-liberal restructuring has been implemented throughout the South. Thus, rather than starting the new millennium having proved the case for international development cooperation, NGOs are having to confront a crisis in foreign aid from which they themselves are beginning to suffer, even though within the declining aid budget they are as yet still relatively favoured. The end of the Cold War and the irresistible rise of neo-liberal philosophy have transformed the rationale for aid. The North now evades responsibility for poverty in the South given that no geopolitical interests drive aid programmes and that Southern governments, which are now unable to play off the superpowers, have a much weakened voice in international fora. The burden is placed (in part correctly) on the Souths ability to put its own act in order - but only through competing in a global economy where the odds are already heavily stacked against it. Aid focuses increasingly on the emergencies, disasters, and conflicts which hit the headlines and Northern public opinion.(7)

The crisis in international cooperation, and the future role of NGOs within the economic reality of globalisation, was the context of the third NGO conference, NGOs in a Global Future, held in January 1999. Reflecting the fragmentation of perspectives over the previous decade, this conference was probably the most eclectic of the three: a complex, wide-ranging conference where the diversity of experience and views was perhaps the hall mark (Wallace 1999: 2). The fundamental challenge laid down by the organisers in their background paper did not receive the attention it deserved. They had called still more clearly for a shift away from the roles that had come to dominate the neo-liberal age of the late twentieth century - in other words, from development as delivery to development as leverage. NGOs were called to return to their role as promoters of social change and of non-market values of cooperation, non-violence, and respect for human rights and democratic processes, and to make these the bottom line in decisions over economics and the environment, social policy, and politics (Edwards, Hulme, and Wallace 1999: 13). Rather than unhappy agents of a foreign aid system in decline the organisers urged NGOs to rethink their mandate, mission and strategies(ibid.: 16) and to look towards the gradual replacement of foreign aid by a broader agenda of international cooperation in which NGOs reshaped their roles and sought alliances around common goals with other social and civic organisations. The conference discussions themselves, however, though attended by representatives from a wider spectrum of NGOs from North and South than the earlier two, failed to engage with these ideas and no clear future directions emerged.

Nevertheless, the parameters of debate are now clearer. This is after years in which many NGOs of North and South have more or less reluctantly let themselves be led and/or influenced by official donor agendas and techno-efficiency determinism. Official donors have reached out to NGOs while also pushing the neo-liberal restructuring that many believe is part of the problem faced by the poor, not the solution. At the same time, in the course of the 1990s, donors have begun to question the effectiveness and representativity of NGOs, not just international, Northern-based NGOs but also those in the South. Many donors have begun in the process to rename their NGO Units as Civil Society Units and have become interested in funding a broader range of associations in the South than middle-class intermediary groups, of which NGOs are an example. Such a shift begs many questions about the donors assumptions, but for the purposes of this Introduction, it is yet another reason why NGOs of North and South are being forced to re-think their role and purpose as well as their relationship with each other.

International (Northern) NGO and Southern NGO roles and relationships

The 1990s saw major changes in the relationships between international (Northern) NGOs and Southern NGOs, the nature of which is well illustrated in this Reader. If a key problem to emerge in the 1992 conference was that of South-North NGO partnerships, as the decade wore on, this idea of partnership was increasingly seen to misrepresent the power of Northern NGOs as funders of Southern ones. As official donors also began to fund Southern NGOs directly, so the latter gained more independent institutional identities from Northern NGOs and began to set their own agendas and to develop research, policy, and advocacy capacities. In the late 1990s, Firoze Manji argued that British international NGOs (or BINGOs, as he calls them) had failed to accept this shift. Their arguments against the direct funding of Southern NGOs reflected their ongoing paternalism as they voiced criticisms that applied to themselves as much as to Southern NGOs (e.g. lack of accountability, being driven by donor agendas, responding to potential funding rather than to need), and a basic fear for their own future.

The growth and increasing protagonism of Southern NGOs is a theme of the decade. But, concerns also began to focus on the implications of the decline in the easy funding that had fuelled previous years of growth and on questions of NGO legitimacy rather than on the problems of expansion. Mick Moore and Sheelagh Stewart argue, in their 1998 contribution, that development NGOs in poor countries need to re-establish public confidence in order to persuade donors to continue to channel funds through them. They identify four areas of concern: the failure of NGOs to develop accountability in their own countries rather than to wealthy foreign organisations; the need for internal reform and mechanisms to institutionalise suspicion within NGOs that are undergoing structural growth, and thus to regain trust and confidence in the eyes of the public, government, and donors; the need for NGOs to pre-empt the often intrusive and inappropriate formal quantitative performance evaluation favoured by donors, by developing quality ratings of their own; the need to overcome the tendency of a proliferation of small NGOs to compete with each other by seeking economies of scale through collectively provided services within the NGO sector. Collective self-regulation could, the authors argue, enable NGOs to confront the criticism which might in part justify the reduced funding.

Debate about the future directions of Southern NGOs has become critical given the challenges they face at the beginning of the new millennium. It is also difficult to foster such debate precisely because the events of the 1990s served to fragment and divide the sector so much. Signs that such a debate is beginning, however, are emerging. In the region I know best, Latin America, the ALOP/FICONG volume alluded to earlier illustrates the efforts being made to confront todays dilemmas and to enable NGOs there to decide their own future through a more transparent dialogue with the North. Shrinking aid budgets have not affected all regions and NGOs in the same way. The problem in Latin America, with its long history of NGOs, has been the tendency of the aid community to see the region as relatively rich or middle income, while democratisation has been used to justify withdrawing core funds from organisations who were initially supported as a means of achieving it. In addition, given the regions rich history of social organising, donor interest in broader civil society rather than NGO funding has forced NGOs to justify their existence to grassroots organisations as well as to donors.

Mariano Valderramas concluding chapter (in Valderrama León and Pérez Coscio 1998) draws on the evidence from nine case studies. The problems he emphasises are less those of restoring donor confidence, than of how NGOs can re-connect with their original social change objectives, while also managing to retain access to a diminishing source of funds. The future of development NGOs, he argues, is not only influenced by globalisation and liberal reforms. The funding crisis has drawn attention to the external dependence of NGOs and has provoked great uncertainty, but the problem cannot be reduced simply to one of fewer resources. Donors have shifted their funding to specific and short-term projects based on erratic criteria in topics and geographical priorities, with much greater conditionality attached, and without covering institutional overheads. NGOs have been encouraged to look for local resources and self-financing from, for instance, philanthropic businessmen. The case studies showed that this alternative is very limited. To engage in self-financing activities - which usually involve selling services and implementing projects for the state, local governments, and official aid agencies - although it brings financial dividends, often distracts development NGOs from the mission that gave birth and sense to them (ibid.: 420). Valderrama concludes that:

Valderramas fears are that the rational response of most NGOs is to solve their short-term funding problems by undertaking activities which disperse them and give them a mercantilist character. Although he offers no clear path forward, he does not necessarily see the solution for NGOs to increase their size in pursuit of economies of scale. Echoing to some extent the suggestion of Moore and Stewart, he argues for more synergy between development NGOs, and greater coordination also with Northern NGOs. Coordination could also help build a more favourable local environment for the NGO sector, for example by influencing the media and public opinion.

These same issues already confront, or soon will, Southern NGOs in many other parts of the world as funding that is channeled through NGOs comes under greater question and scrutiny. But, as the Latin American case shows, the funding crisis is precipitating a more profound self-questioning among NGOs about the direction in which external funding has taken them. Is a continued claim to social and political protagonism justified, when such funding has often distanced them from grassroots movements and processes? Could a shift towards more horizontal communication among Southern NGOs help overcome the bilateral and vertical character of the donor-NGO relationship, something which has fostered such fragmentation and competition among NGOs? What kind of reception would Valderramas plea meet among the Northern NGOs, many of whom are also going through a process of upheaval in order to adjust their role to external changes?

Firoze Manji points to the reluctance of many Northern NGOs to change paternalistic patterns of engagement with Southern counterparts and build new alliances based on solidarity not charity. By the beginning of the new millennium, however, Northern as well as Southern NGOs are facing tough questions about their future identity and survival. Southern NGOs, particularly the larger ones and those willing to scale-up further, may now have gained some relative independence from Northern NGOs, but not from the official donors who have financed this expansion. Northern NGOs that have continued to act as conduits for official aid,(8) have also had to face dilemmas of how to preserve their own agenda. The ability to raise funds from the public undoubtedly helps, as does the greater diversity of funding sources to which Northern NGOs have access. The heterogeneity of size, ethos, and influence of NGOs within the North is at least as great as in the South; and responses to the changing context are equally mixed. For instance, the Transnational Institute (TNI) suggests that some of the largest private foreign aid agencies are already transnational businesses (Sogge et al. 1996).

In the vanguard of responses to change is undoubtedly Oxfam GB and the members of Oxfam International. Their vision is to build a global network around a corporate Oxfam identity that can seriously challenge the hegemony in development policy of multilateral and bilateral institutions. However, the emphasis on decentralising the management of programmes to the South (but with constant vertical and horizontal communication among them), and a shift away from the project mentality that has dominated the world of development aid, have brought a costly organisational restructuring. For some, the shift will create a global institution, with trunk and branches in the North but roots in the South, through which will flow the evidence and information needed to shape and legitimise Oxfams advocacy role on the international stage. For others, it is another hegemonising project which is in contrast to the strategy of broader alliance-building and vertical (i.e. with grassroots organisations and movements) as well as horizontal cooperation argued for by Michael Edwards, or the international solidarity model of Firoze Manji.

Another vision was articulated by Michael Taylor, the former Director of Christian Aid (Taylor 1997) who argued for a serious shift to internationalism by Northern NGOs, not just attempts to address international issues from Northern strongholds. Thus, no international NGO would have a core identity in a Northern country, but would be one part of an organisation each of whose parts, wherever located (i.e. North or South), would build up a strong and competent capacity of their own and speak to the international organisation together. His model is the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign with its national coalitions in Northern and Southern countries that meet together to agree a common international platform. And last, but by no means least, it is important to mention the conclusions of David Sogge and Kees Biekart, that private aid agencies may well not have a future at all:

There are undoubtedly many other models and propositions. But at the core of this debate is not just relationships between NGOs of North and South, but whether or not the non-governmental organisation as such is still useful or relevant to a change agenda in either part of the world. The emergence of the donors broader civil society strengthening and democracy building agenda in the course of the 1990s, for example, should not only provoke a concern for their own financial future among Northern and Southern NGOs. It should also provoke a serious debate on the implications of this donor agenda for grassroots movements and their own relationship with them. To what extent is the shift in emphasis towards advocacy, lobbying, and education, while enhancing disaster-relief and emergency capacity, a sufficient rationale for Northern NGOs to exist? Have Southern NGOs proved themselves more effective than states in the development process? And, if not, what kind of state, as well as what kind of NGOs, should we be thinking about?

NGOs and the state
Goodhand and Chamberlain offer a significant entry point to a theme that recurs throughout this Reader. They discuss a complex political emergency, something which has become only too common in parts of the South, where the state is chronically weak and yet the means of waging war are sophisticated and available. In their case study of Afghanistan, NGOs themselves mostly external creations and staffed by members of the countrys very small educated élite are occupying the space left by the collapse of the state and so wield great influence in the absence of effective government institutions. Goodhand and Chamberlain conclude that such NGOs are not a panacea for the intractable problems of development in Afghanistan, although they clearly have a role given the erosion of state and civil society structures in the country. However, there is a real danger that as NGOs try to negotiate spaces with the different strongmen who control them, they in fact end up severely compromised.

Complex political emergencies are extreme expressions of the wider issue concerning the role of NGOs in countries where the state is weak. Two case studies in this Reader focus on how NGOs can avoid further weakening the very idea of public goods and service delivery, to which many development NGOs remain committed. Christy Cannon discusses the complexities of this in Africa, where a functioning public sector has never existed. Her study of NGOs in the health sector in Uganda suggests that NGOs could attempt to enhance the capacity of government at the District level, where NGO leaders and government medical personnel can get to know each other better and the latter can be help to influence and lobby national government. Christopher Colliers case study from Zambia follows a similar theme, suggesting that NGOs should help poor people to make claims from government not to expect less from it because they are providing the goods and services. Such a role, however, requires the active participation of NGOs in decisions about public resources, not a simple service-delivery role that by-passes the state, as many donors have favoured.

In the above illustrations, the idea that national states have a role in the provision of public goods is not questioned. How to strengthen the state and make it sensitive to the needs of the poor is the critical issue, they suggest. The nature of the debate on the relationship between states, markets, and civil society has evidently advanced qualitatively by the end of the 1990s, with the state making a come-back of some kind. This is illustrated particularly well by Alan Whaites. It is wrong, he suggests, to see development as nurturing a strong civil society while ignoring the weakness of an ineffective state. He argues that redressing such imbalances should be the aim of development, on the understanding that an effective government structure is just as essential to development as is a strong civil society. Weak states can become hostage to the most powerful groups in a society, creating a real obstacle to development. This links to the arguments presented earlier in this essay about the impact of neo-liberalism on how the role of NGOs in development is conceptualised. International NGOs, argues Whaites, in effect contributed to the strengthening of civil societies at the expense of the state when they took advantage of the shrinkage of government services that was brought about by structural adjustment programmes.

Alan Whaites makes the important suggestion that the theoretical framework derived by development practitioners from liberal philosophers of civil society, such as de Tocqueville, cannot be applied unreflectively to situations in the contemporary South where, the problem is weak rather than strong states, and where the weakness of civil society has arguably been exaggerated.

There is some evidence to support this argument. But the issue is perhaps less the strength or weakness of the state than its capacity to develop the ability to distance itself from dominant groups. There is a long history of Marxist theorising on the capitalist state to this effect. It is perhaps time to recall the famous but long-forgotten debate of the 1970s between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas on whether the capitalist state is the instrument of the particular ruling class groups that occupy positions within its machine of government, or whether the state can look after the interests of capitalism because it is structurally set up to do so, and that this ability includes a distance from the direct influence of the ruling class. Adrian Leftwichs collection of essays on development and democracy concludes that where the latter obtains, late capitalist development has been more effective (Leftwich 1995).(9)

In conclusion, it is not enough to simply reverse the paradigm that came to the fore in the early 1990s, so that from strengthening civil society we shift to strengthening the state, or simply to building a greater equilibrium between the two. Another series of questions are needed if NGOs are to take up the challenge outlined earlier of re-appropriating their own agenda of social change in the face of donor imperatives and those of the economic liberalisation policies that have driven globalisation over the last two decades. Questions such as the following: In whose interests should the state act? What kind of relationship do we want to build between the state and civil society? How does the operation of the market and capitalism in general affect our vision? And ultimately, what kind of world do we want to live in? In other words, prior to or at least alongside the policy issues raised by Whaites, lie a series of theoretical, normative, and political questions. The failure to address these questions in the name of the supremacy of practice and/or of technical determinism, I shall argue, lies behind the loss of direction and fragmentation of NGOs in the 1990s.

Theory, praxis, and NGOs
Many NGO workers are committed to the idea of making a practical contribution to building a better world. As such, they contrast their action-oriented approach to those of academics who reflect, analyse, and criticise from their ivory tower. In the field of NGO studies, there has been a rapprochement between the two, and the pages of Development in Practice reflect this to some extent. However, the remaining essays in this Reader seek to go beyond this collaborative potential on policy and practice, and ask what might be the potential for collaboration in the realm of development theory, normative reflection, and politics.

A key argument of this introduction centres on the failure of NGOs to develop new tools for theoretical analysis and normative critique following the collapse of different socialist models of development that had previously guided their action. The result has been a problem-solving approach to development, defended on the grounds that too much abstract theoretical debate prevents practical achievements. Michael Edwards has argued that:

Much of what is described here is familiar to anyone with recent experience of the NGO world, but I would disagree that there is not a serious intellectual challenge which is as important to sort out alongside getting the praxis and attitudes right. It might not be an empirical research problem as such, but it is about where NGOs ultimately decide to locate themselves in the global system. This raises not abstract theoretical questions but core issues such as: What and who is your practice for? Among other outcomes, the failure to ask such questions has led to the false linguistic consensus of the 1990s and, to be somewhat harsh, to an intellectually lazy reliance on a handful of concepts and words as a substitute for thought.(10) This has weakened and confused practice and, I would argue, contributed to the present crisis of legitimacy within the NGO sector. Several articles in this collection, as well as my own experiences from Latin America, lead me to such a conclusion.

Two articles appeared in 1996, and are reproduced here, which made a valiant attempt to call NGO attention to the practical implications of different ways of using concepts. Sarah White makes a fundamental point about the concept of participation. The word must be seen as political because it has no intrinsic connection with a radical project, since it can just as easily entrench and reproduce existing power relations. We can invest meanings in such concepts through learning from praxis and being guided by theoretical clarity and ethical principles. But if we treat them as unproblematic, neutral, or technical terms, they can become words whose meaning is defined by whoever chooses to do so and for whatever purpose. The concepts are then depoliticised and in effect rendered useless for shaping praxis. White demonstrates this by deconstructing some different ways in which participation as a concept can be used, and how that influences processes on the ground in Zambia and the Philippines. There are always questions to be asked, she suggests, when participation is invoked, about who is involved, how, and on whose terms; and the interests of those represented in the concept must be analysed. Finally, she underlines that if participation is to mean anything, it will challenge existing power relations and will bring about conflict: the absence of conflict in many supposedly 'participatory' programmes is something that should raise our suspicions.

The second article is on the concept of civil society and development, a conceptual marriage that, with my colleague Jude Howell, I have spent some time exploring (Howell and Pearce forthcoming). Alan Whaites also seeks to show how lack of conceptual clarity confuses practice. In particular, he focuses on two visions of civil society. On the one hand, there is that embedded in the liberal Tocquevillean approach which contrasts civil and traditional society, identifying the former with groups who have detached themselves from primordial loyalties of blood and kin and cut across such boundaries to form coalitions around small issues. On the other, is the view of Jean-François Bayart, which has a more universalistic vision of civil society more appropriate, Bayart would argue, to the African context; and which includes primordial associations.(11) Whaites calls for greater attention to how civil associations emerge out of community groups along lines that de Tocqueville articulated, and implicitly for some caution towards the notion of reinforcing primordial attachments in the name of civil society. This contributes to what ought to be a major debate among development practitioners in terms of who to work with in the South, and why. But without the intellectual work on the concept of civil society, the debate is effectively avoided. I would add that another view of civil society, particularly critical in countries with traditions of left-wing mobilisation and organisations, is that which appropriates the term for the Gramscian counter-hegemonic struggles against the market as well as the state. This challenges NGOs to select who they are going to support according to certain criteria, something that requires serious conceptual and strategic discussion.

There is no correct view of civil society, but there is an essential point to make about the way the concept is used. The use of the term as a normative concept, i.e. what we would like civil society to be or what we think it ought to be, is often confused with an empirical description, i.e. what it is (Pearce 1997). The constant slippage between the two in the development literature and in the practice of multilateral agencies, governments, and NGOs has contributed to a technical and depoliticising approach to the strengthening of civil society which ultimately has had political implications. It has, for instance, mostly privileged the vision of Western donor agencies and turned civil society into a project rather than a process.(12) In other words, by assuming that there is no debate around what we would like civil society to be, and assuming it is an unproblematic and empirically observable given whose purpose is unquestionably to build democracy and foster development, the vision of powerful and well-resourced donors predominates. Failure to clarify their own position means that many NGOs end up simply implementing that vision on the donors behalf. If doing so coincides with their own objectives, there is no problem; but if it is an unintended outcome of lack of reflection, there is.

Finally, two articles from the turn of the millennium issues of Development in Practice, draw our attention to other aspects of the discussion about theory, praxis, and NGOs. Lilly Nicholls discusses the conceptual weaknesses of the efforts to generate new more human-centred ideas on development. The critical question she raises is whether the ideas of Sustainable Human Development (SHD) and People Centred Development (PCD) are sharp enough to inform praxis:

Nicholls conclusion is very negative. The ideas are based on such complex and abstract principles that the gap between the theory and a realistic development strategy and action plan cannot be overcome. In addition, the ideological ambiguity and internal contradictions of the ideas themselves limit their translation into an effective development strategy. The argument that theory matters to practice centres on the need for conceptual tools that guide the implementation of policy, not for abstract principles that sound good but have no relationship to action.

Finally, and to show that out of Development in Practice comes more than just critique, is the paper by Amina Mama. What she demonstrates is that doing research that builds theory and knowledge not from abstract principles but from the ground up, may be a more fruitful way forward than the attempt to take such principles to the ground and merely apply them. Mamas research team, composed of African women researchers in the ABANTU for Development network, carried out an investigation under the difficult conditions of military rule in Nigeria on how a gender perspective could be incorporated into a regional programme to strengthen civil society. Despite the difficult conditions, the researchers used a participatory method, starting from local, actually existing, understandings of policy within NGO communities. The researchers uncovered levels of gender activism that might not have been discernible without the participatory method and insights into locally diverse relationships between state and civil society, opening up possibilities for praxis that might not have been possible otherwise.

In conclusion, this section makes a plea for NGOs to reconsider the way they view the relationship between theory and praxis. In the first place, it calls for recognition that theory underpins everyones understanding of the social and political world; it is not extraneous to it, and we are all part of its construction and potential deconstruction.(13) Theory and the policies which derive from it have political effects and implications that should not be ignored and which suggest that the more explicit the theoretical assumptions that inform our understanding, the more responsible we are in our commitment to the people whose lives we claim to improve. The problem-solving approach to development, on the other hand, leads to a technocratic, solution/output-focus (as opposed to a learning/process-focus), which views people as clients, beneficiaries, and recipients rather than as active participants in agendas for change.

These issues echo debates taking place within my own area of peace studies which, like development, is fundamentally concerned with an agenda for change. Two colleagues have argued against the danger of producing technically exploitable knowledge rather than knowledge to enhance capacity for enlightened action (Featherstone and Parkin in Broadhead, 1997). The construction of the latter kind of knowledge is the responsibility of practitioners as well as theorists. Among other potential tools, those of critical social theory provide some important starting points. These have begun to inform peace researchers and are, I would argue, of relevance also to the field of development. They ask us to recognise, for instance, that knowledge is historically constructed and that we are agents in, not outsiders to, that process. It suggests we must ask what and who the knowledge is for, and how can we develop a practical and theoretical knowledge that is non-exploitative and transformative. It assumes that nothing is immutable given that everything has been constructed by someone and for some purpose; it only asks us to clarify the purpose for which we would reconstruct what presently exists.

The debate & and its future
This introduction has identified four critical areas for reflection and debate that have come out of papers published in Development in Practice over almost a decade, as well as from other sources.

1. Neo-liberalism and neo-liberal-driven globalisation have seriously harmed the anti-poverty and anti-exploitation struggle in the world today. The benefits to the few have not compensated for the increased poverty, inequality, and uncertainty which very many have experienced. The idea of NGOs as value-driven facilitators of change has been adversely affected by the decision of many of them to implement the welfare, social-net programmes of institutions that are committed to economic liberalisation and concerned to reduce its social cost. At the same time, fragmentation and competition has grown among NGOs and encouraged further division within a historically heterogeneous community. The millennium begins with the challenge to NGOs to reflect critically on this reality. As the more ideological form of neo-liberalism which dominated the 1980s and early 1990s is replaced by concerns to build a more regulated global capitalism, NGOs must decide where they want to stand in relationship to it rather than drift into implementing the donor-defined agendas of the new age, just as many of them did in the past decade or more.
2. The role of Southern and Northern NGOs, and their relationship to each other, are having to evolve in response to the new world order and policy agenda of the 1990s and beyond. This has been widely recognised, and different models are gradually emerging. But if the differences are to be respected while cooperation rather than competition is fostered, a more open and transparent debate and self-reflection needs to take place among NGOs of the South as well as between them and NGOs in the North. It is likely that NGOs, like the relatively privileged social groups who mostly staff them, will be polarised around the social and political tensions of the broader world. Some may choose to institutionalise themselves as service-deliverers, others to engage in the growing number of spaces for dialogue on global governance issues. Others may accept that they are ultimately facilitators not agents of social change (Pearce 1993), and re-connect with grassroots activists. This does not render irrelevant the search for common ground in order to build more effective alliances. But it should be recognised that the survival of the very idea of NGO and the NGO sector, at least in its present form, can no longer be assumed.
3. NGOs cannot and should not replace the state in promoting development. While there have been many discussions on what should be the relationship between the two, and how NGOs can make the state more accountable and sensitive to the needs of the poor, there has been less debate on what the role of the state is and what we would like it to be. Is it worth fighting for in some form, given the apparent anti-state logic of capitalist globalisation? Or should local and regional sites be the new focus of attention, as the World Banks 1999/2000 Report suggests? Greater care in how the concept of civil society is used is important if it is to be given a role in rethinking the state. Used as an empirical description of voluntary associations and social groups, it necessarily reflects the social differentiations embedded in any society. These may not determine the character of the state, but they do shape it in critical ways. They are in turn shaped by the dynamics of the market as well as power relationships of all kinds. As such, civil society, used in this empirical sense, can also have an impact on re-shaping the state; and therein lies room for action and change. This is contingent on the particular objectives each group might have, and is by no means inevitably progressive.
4. In order to clarify what action and change they want to bring about, NGOs, as one set of associations within an empirical civil society, need to develop the basis of their theoretical, normative, and political critique of the global order and of the discourses of development that have hitherto dominated the post-war epoch. They should not assume that practice is sufficient and that people who try to conceptualise processes are necessarily diverting energy from the real problems. Not only is practice always a reflection of implicit theoretical assumptions, it can rarely be improved by technical solutions alone, which themselves mask political and normative choices. This should be one major lesson for NGOs of the last decade or more. The purpose of greater clarity around the basis of critique should, however, be to improve practice and promote debate and to seek common ground with others engaged in the same enterprise.

I will conclude by reflecting a little more on the impact of current shifts in thinking on the global order on the choices open to NGOs at the beginning of the new millennium and the potential impact on their future. The paradigmatic shift towards building new forms of global governance and a role for civil society, however understood, has been established. Acknowledgement that some form of regulation in the global economy is necessary, is becoming more explicit. Today, the World Bank puts forward the message for cooperation. This reflects another clear step away from the ideological neo-liberalism of the 1980s and which was marked in its 1997 Report by acceptance that the state and civil society as well as the market have a role in its tripartite model for country-based development. Now the Bank argues:

As spaces for global cooperation and participation from above proliferate, NGOs face a new set of choices, a situation which makes the plea for debate and clarification of the foundations of their critique more urgent. The benefits of cooperation and resistance to co-option depend on knowing first why and for whom you choose to dialogue in supranational spaces which are dominated by more powerful institutions and corporations, and second on understanding the limits to dialogue. Willingness to struggle for what you believe to be right must surely remain a tool of the powerless and their allies, part of their necessarily diverse repertoire of contention(Tarrow 1998: 20). Clarity on what you believe to be right and why is, therefore, essential.

NGOs are not political parties, nor are they grassroots social movements. Their identity crisis lies in the fact they are in-between, and have won a part in the drama to some extent because of the crisis in the former and the often temporary, unstable nature of the latter. In the development field, the neo-liberal antagonism towards the state also played a key role, of course. If NGOs are institutionally reified outside this context as part, for instance, of an emerging Third Sector,(14) we can easily forget that they are merely organisational spaces which reflect the choices open to the better-educated and socially aware middle social sectors of North and South, i.e. those with relative privileges vis à vis the rest of their societies in class, ethnic, and/or gender terms.

For development NGOs, i.e. those concerned with global poverty and exploitation, the choices for how to engage with or challenge global capitalism at the beginning of the millennium are becoming clearer. There is the option of continuing to work within the evolving neo-liberal approach to globalisation, administering welfare to those that market forces cannot reach. Alternatively, globalisation can be recognised as an inevitable process, but NGOs can take advantage of new supranational spaces to argue for new forms of regulation in markets and international regimes in favour of the poor. Multinational corporations are also opening up spaces for dialogue with their NGO critics around the theme of corporate ethics. Or NGOs can actively side with the anti-globalisation movements, in all their diversity, as they emerged in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations. As Seattle showed, anti-globalisation may or may not mean anti-capitalism, but it does mean anti-neo-liberalism, even in its moderated form. On the other hand, NGOs can take the financial consequences of an option which prioritises grassroots support work, building on the Gramscian idea, for example, of the organic intellectual. This would reflect an understanding that global change depends on how the relative and absolute poor, the millions of the worlds working and workless population with no material stake in the perpetuation of the existing order, choose to act.

These do not exhaust all the options for NGOs, nor are these options all mutually exclusive. There is room for plural choices of action and tactical alliances. But what is dangerous is to enter any of these without clarity of purpose, and without thinking through the implications from the perspective of a theoretical, normative, and political critique of the existing global order.

The events in Seattle await a full evaluation, but it is one of the most significant recent events in relation to the subject of this Reader. All NGOs, including development NGOs, won unprecedented acknowledgement of their power and influence in the wake of those events; The Economist (1999) nervously asked: Will NGOs democratise, or merely disrupt, global governance? The Economist tends to lump all critical groups into one basket, and thus claimed the battle of Seattle is only the latest and most visible in a string of recent NGO victories. The reality is very different, of course. Seattle actually reflected the differences that exist among lobbyists, organised labour, campaigners, and protesters worldwide, of which the NGO is only one variant. One observer noted that Even in the run-up to WTO week in Seattle, the genteel element- foundation careerists, NGO bureaucrats, policy wonks [sic] were all raising cautionary fingers, saying that the one thing to be feared in Seattle this week was active protest(St Clair 1999: 88). There will be many debates, as there should be, about whether it was direct action, dignified restraint, or the arrogance, ignorance, and bad planning of Northern, particularly the US, governments, which made the difference in Seattle. Whatever the conclusion, it cannot be denied that creative street-protest played its role. The real question is that of how the momentum will be maintained as corporate capital and governments prepare a new trade agreement. This is precisely the kind of situation which forces development NGOs, for whom any such agreement is a major issue, to clarify where they stand, as well as to recognise the limitations of their role and show humility with respect to the many other forms of social and collective action.

Given the diverse and in many respects contradictory set of possibilities, we ought perhaps to abandon the search for the role of NGOs in development, or the role of civil society, and even such a thing as an uncontested goal of development. We could concentrate much more on discussing the choices for action and the principles and implicit theoretical assumptions that guide them. We could assess by learning from practice, discussion, and critical thought, rather than ideology or check-lists, the real impact of external interventions in situations of poverty and exploitation, and decide on that basis where and how to act in the global order. Making assumptions explicit is one way of identifying differences, clarifying choices, and ultimately fostering debate and cooperation among people who are committed in some way to building a better world.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Janet Bujra, Donna Pankhurst, and Deborah Eade for reading and commenting on this paper.

Notes
1 If the poverty line is US$2 a day, for instance, the figure of those below it is 2.8 billion, almost 50 per cent of the worlds six billion people. I am also grateful to my colleague, Janet Bujra, for reminding me that the emphasis on global poverty per se can conceal the social relationships of exploitation which remain critical to any understanding of poverty and impoverishment.

2 There is an important debate in the field of discourse ethics on this very point, from which Edwards interest in a dialogic form of engagement derives. The Mexican-based philosopher, Enrique Dussel (1998), for example, challenges the propositions of Jurgen Habermas, with their origins in the North, arguing that the discourse principle must first be realised in the community of victims, the majority of whom are in the South, as part of the process of recovering the right/ability to speak. I am grateful to Ute Buehler, for drawing my attention to this literature.

3 For instance, preliminary findings of the Operations Evaluation Department (OED) of the World Bank on the contribution of NGOs to development effectiveness in Bank-supported projects found that NGO partnerships do not always lead to successful outcomes. While NGOs in all their various forms are numerous, the number with proven development capabilities and a willingness to work closely with governments on a meaningful scale essential in most Bank-supported projects remains small. This and other factors has led to skepticism among some borrowers and Bank staff about the role of NGOs in Bank operations. For some borrowers, NGOs are viewed more as critics than as potential partners. For some Bank staff, NGOs are seen as adding demands on their time without corresponding benefits (World Bank NGO Unit Social Development 1998: 13).

4 ALOP is the Latin American Association of Promotion Organisations (Asociación Latinoamericana de Organizaciones de Promoción). FICONG is the Institutional Strengthening and Training Programme for NGOs in Latin America and the Caribbean (Programa de Fortalecimiento Institucional y Capacitación de ONGs de América Latina y el Caribe).

5 International NGOs, many of whom received money from their governments, increasingly adopted the language of efficiency and competence in order to earn their funds and then demanded it of their partners in the South. See Tina Wallace (1997)on the impact of the log-frame.

6 In the article reprinted in this Reader, Edwards and Hulme had observed even in 1992 that while NGOs have succeeded in influencing official donors and governments on individual projects and even on some programme themes (such as environment in the case of the World Bank), they have failed to bring about more fundamental changes in attitudes and ideology, on which real progress ultimately depends.

7 There has been a 20 per cent drop in real terms in Official Development Assistance flows from the OECD Development Assistance Committee countries, from US$60.8 billion in 1992 to US$48.3 billion in 1997. The average percentage of GNP given to overseas aid declined to 0.22 per cent in 1997, less than one-third of the 0.7 per cent target (Rasheed 1999: 25).

8 Edwards, Hulme, and Wallace (1999: 8) suggest that this is because donors still value reliable delivery and financial mechanisms of accountability which Northern NGOs are considered to be a safer option than Southern counterparts; in addition, few Southern NGOs have the capacity to deliver large-scale humanitarian relief.

9 This conclusion certainly came out of my own contribution to that volume (Democracy and development in a divided country: the case of Chile), which attempted to explain the relationship between the changing nature of the state in Chile, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the success of the macro-economic model of the 1980s and 1990s. The variable of the state and its relative distance from powerful socio-economic interests was a more critical issue than democracy or dictatorship per se.

10 To be fair, Marxism often served in the past to provide a common language through which to avoid critical thinking and debate.

11 This debate is replicated in much of the literature. Gellner (1994) articulates the liberal view while an anthropological critique is found in Hann and Dunn (1996). Wachira Maina raises the policy implications for this distinction in his case study chapter, Kenya: the state, donors and the politics of democratisation in Van Rooy (1999: 134-167); and Mahmood Mamdani (1996) makes it a very central theme.

12 This is the topic of Jude Howell and Jenny Pearce Civil society: technical solution or agent of social change, forthcoming in a volume of papers delivered at the 1999 Birmingham conference, edited by Michael Edwards, David Hulme, and Tina Wallace.

13 These reflections derive from an unpublished paper I presented with Sarah Perrigo to the Political Studies Association conference in Nottingham, March 1999, entitled From the Margins to the Cutting Edge: Challenges Facing Peace Studies in the Next Millennium. I am grateful to Sarah for her contribution to our discussion on political theory and peace studies which informs these reflections.

14 An important contemporary discussion not addressed in this Introduction concerns those who see NGOs as part of a voluntary and non-profit sector of increasing political and economic significance. Lester Salamon (1997) and others associated with the journal, Voluntas, and the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, are putting forward a particular construction of the role of non-state organisations that is gaining considerable influence in the academic and policy world.

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