Citizens Against Corruption: What Works? Findings from 200 projects in 53 Countries

I attended a panel + booklaunch on the theme of ‘Citizens Against Corruption’ at the ODI last week. After all the recent agonizing and self-doubt of the results debate (‘really, do we know anything about the impact of our work? How can we be sure?’), it was refreshing to be carried away on a wave of conviction and passion. The author of the book, Pierre Landell-Mills is in no doubt – citizen action can have a massive impact in countering corruption and improving the lives of poor people, almost irrespective of the political context.

The book captures the experience of the Partnership for Transparency Fund, set up by Pierre in 2000. It summarizes experiences from 200 case studies in 53 countries. This has included everything from using boy scouts to stop the ‘disappearance’ of textbooks in the Philippines to introducing a new code of ethics for Mongolia’s judiciary. The PTF’s model of change is really interesting. In terms of the project itself:

-          Entirely demand led: it waits for civil society organizations (CSOs) to come up with proposals, and funds about one in five

-          $25k + an expert: the typical project consists of a small grant, and a volunteer expert, usually a retiree from aid agencies or governments, North and South. According to Pierre ‘the clue to PTF’s success has been marrying high quality expertise with the energy and guts of young activists’. (I’ve now added ‘Grey Wonks’ to my ‘Grey Panthers’ rant on why the aid world is so bad at making the most of older people).

-          The PTF is tapping into a zeitgeist of shifting global norms on corruption, epitomised by the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003). The idea that ‘they work for us’ seems to be gaining ground.

-          The PTF prefers cooperation to conflict – better to work with champions within the state (and there nearly always are some, if you can find them), than just to lob rocks from the sidelines (although some rock-lobbing may also be required).

-          It also prefers action and avoids funding ‘awareness-raising’, ‘capacity building’ and other ‘conference-building measures.’

So what works? On the basis of the case studies (chapters on India, Mongolia, Uganda and the Philippines), and his vast experience of governance and corruption work, Pierre sets out a ‘stylized programme’ for the kinds of CSO-led initiatives that deliver the goods:

1. Nail down the problem: use surveys, focus groups, right to information laws where they exist
2. Come up with (and implement) an action plan: get people involved with community report cards, community radio, public hearings and other approaches
3. Propose ideas for ways to reform the system or reduce the opportunities for corruption, drawing on the results of (1) and (2)
4. Discuss the ideas with stakeholders and amend
5. Campaign to persuade officials and politicians to adopt the ideas
6. Once you’ve won (bit of a leap, that – see cartoon) monitor the implementation of any measures introduced to reduce corruption.

This may look like a bit of a blueprint, but actually it isn’t – the PTF fits the model of how to work in complex systems pretty well. It acknowledges that outsiders can’t possibly understand the labyrinths of formal and informal power, or identify potential allies and windows of opportunity. Those have to come from within. By breaking funding down into small grants, and using only volunteer experts, it tries to keep power away from the consultancy/donor complex, and stay true to being country-driven. At the ODI, Pierre described the underlying theory of change as ‘the aggregation of millions of actions to reach a tipping point.’

He also expanded on the problem of aid institutions. Anti-corruption campaigning is often long-term, over 25-50 year time horizons. That means aid donors can support particular phases, but if they don’t have the staying power to see the work through, they need to avoid trying to control it. Unfortunately, ‘politicians and officials who think they can make their mark are the biggest menace for this work’.

Despite this critique, the book is a pitch for funding from the aid agencies, although Pierre believes that in the long term CSO anti-corruption work will have to find alternatives sources.

Which all sounds great, but the results debate is obviously getting to me, because I did have some sympathy with DFID’s Mark Robinson, who said at the ODI that although the UK Government (which has been a core funder of PTF) ‘is increasingly persuaded about the value of citizens’ transparency and accountability initiatives’, we really can’t be expected to judge PTF entirely on the uplifting case studies and stats collected by, errrm, the PTF.

I raised another issue: the rhythm of civil society action is almost always episodic – long periods of tranquillity (people getting on with their lives), punctuated by episodic spikes of protest. Attempts to turn this dynamic into some kind of permanent state of mobilization are probably destined for frustration and failure. Between spikes, the long term work of renewing or changing social capital, social norms and values etc takes place in the more permanent ‘grains’ of civil society – trades unions, neighbourhood associations, religious communities – that endure between spikes. It wasn’t clear that PTF understands and works with this – it seems to have permanent mobilization as its underlying model of how civil society works.

PTF seems to belong to a family of ‘post supply side’ approaches to governance, which also includes the International Budget Partnership, the research of Matt Andrews or the Africa Power and Politics Programme, as well as Oxfam’s own work on governance and accountability.

What they have in common is the need to move from ‘best practice’ to ‘best fit’, to identify and support locally driven initiatives, and to support coalitions between champions within the system and those outside. Where they seem to differ is on the prominence of civil society in these discussions – at one end of the spectrum is PTF’s perhaps excessive glorification of its role; at the other the APPP’s rather contemptuous dismissal of civil society as irrelevant to the ‘real’ Paul Kagame world of big men and decent chaps sorting out political settlements (’citizen pressure is at best a weak factor and at worst a distraction from dealing with the main drivers of bad governance.’) I would love to see APPP’s David Booth and Pierre Landell-Mills go head to head on this.

To be continued, I suspect (not least because Matt Andrews is in London this week).

Civil Society, Public Action and Accountability in Africa

An important new paper from some big development names – Shanta Devarajan and Stuti Khemani from the World Bank, and Michael Walton (ex Bank, now at Harvard Kennedy School) – directs a slightly fierce (but welcome) political economy gaze at donor efforts to strengthen civil society (one of the more recent developmental fads). As with most such papers, after a monumental literature review, one of the striking conclusions is how little we really know, but it gropes gamely through the fog of ignorance and confusion and arrives at some interesting conclusions.

First, the authors find that something significant is going on among Africa’s citizens: “a large shift in Africa in organization among citizens. Village-level group formation in Africa increased dramatically over the 1990s when participatory approaches were emphasized in international development paradigms, promoted through aid, and adopted deliberately by country governments to deliver projects to communities.” Interestingly, that increased participation applies to both democratic and less democratic systems. The question is in what situations that upsurge in civil society has impact, and how (if at all) aid agencies can help.

The paper adds its support to the growing demand that aid interventions abandon futile searches for ‘best practice’ in favour of understanding what are the ‘best fits’ for any given context:

“In general, aid is most likely to be effective if it essentially organic, in the sense of (a) supporting existing domestic initiatives and pressures for change, and (b) in ways that are consistent with the initial state of the polity.”

But with that caveat, the authors give the thumbs up for some particular kinds of intervention. Italics in square brackets are my attempt at translating the rather academic language.

“There are a number of areas where there is a good prima facie case for support. This will typically be a function of the nature of overall polity. For example, there is the largest range of potential action for democracies with real political competition, albeit of a competitive clientelistic form, whether the regime is consolidated or fragile. [to have impact civil society needs to be able to get traction on the political process, and find potential allies within the state] Here are some categories.

• There is a strong case for general support on information-related initiatives—from information on politician performance, to school test results, procurement processes and so on.
• There is also a contingent case for support for local organizational initiatives that are working with and processing information that the evidence base suggests has potential in solving accountability problems. This domain can include NGOs working with right-to-information laws, think tanks analyzing budgets or regulator behavior, or service delivery outcomes, etc. [no point in supporting access to information if organizations aren’t able to use it or the information is not relevant to poor people]
• A related area concerns support for information for benchmarking of performance of local levels of government, e.g. municipalities; or across local service providers (schools; electricity and water supply), where service quality can be measured and compared [league tables can be effective in naming and shaming officials and politicians and otherwise galvanizing action]
• It often makes sense to support local client-power-related initiatives, but these are only likely to be fruitful if linked to broader change over the long route. [Bottom-up initiatives are good, but only if they can get traction on wider political process]
• Support for the strengthening of compact mechanisms is highly desirable if this has domestic political and technical support. [You need political leadership and/or influential allies within the state apparatus]
• There are two kinds of roles for civil society in the business sector.

o Support for processes that provide mechanisms for both identifying and resolving conflicts between business investment and social and environmental concerns, especially in mining and urban development. [Dispute/conflict resolution]

o Support for business associations working for public goods for business, e.g. agencies such as IFC that are concerned with private business, with the important concern that this needs to take account of conflicts of interest in aid, since such agencies are also often engaged with particular investment projects and firms. [Enabling environment]

Finally, in all cases, there is a need to base any support in an analysis of the nature and functioning of civil society. Civil society can be a force for pressuring the state to be more responsive to citizens and more equitable, or can be a source of exclusion and the reproduction of inequalities. Civil society will also typically work very differently under more and less democratic regimes. [Power and context analysis has to include the power and politics of civil society itself – there are few selflessly altruistic Robin Hoods in real life]

In general, aid should not be focused on “money”. This can be counter-productive. Rather, external partners can provide technical assistance in designing locally-grown interventions; they can play a role in financing information-gathering by local NGOs; and can finance experimental interventions (and their learning). Most valuable is likely to be support for a domestic process of innovation and learning involving a generalized approach of experimentation—of which RCTs are one, but only one, component. [Chucking big money at civil society initiatives is a good way to destroy them. Aid needs to be smart, and about ideas. Trial and error is a better way to pursue success than trying to roll out best practice at large scale.]

Can aid ever lead to transformational changes in accountability relations? Almost certainly not, if designs are hatched and brought in from outside. However, aid can potentially provide a supporting role if it is aligned with the flow of internal initiatives, is consistent with domestic political strategy, and supports greater accountability at the margins of major projects. An aspiration to effect some form of system change is admirable, for both internal and external actors. But for donors this needs to be blended with humility over the limits and unintended consequences of external action, and a central focus on helping domestic actors learn by doing.” [Domestic politics rules. Aid is a bit player, for good or ill. Get over it.]

Is there a global crackdown on civil society organization and if so, how should we respond?

I’ve got a nasty feeling that we could be heading towards a strategic train wreck on the role of civil society in development. Let me explain. Increasingly (and not just among NGOs), development is understood in terms of politics, power, and struggles to redistribute the latter. That has produced a shift in resources towards advocacy and influencing, as a complement to more direct programming and humanitarian work, and in the best cases, a fusion of the two.

That’s great (indeed it is the central argument of my book, From Poverty to Power), but it is predicated (in our case at least) on support for ‘active citizenship’ at local, national and international level. Yet a recent discussion with Netsanet Demissie Belay (right), the Policy and Research Director of CIVICUS, the international citizen action network, highlighted just how threatened ‘civil society space’ has become, particularly for the more political influencing work. I could do with some help in thinking through the implications of this.

First a summary of Netsanet’s presentation, based on a synthesis of various analysis and research carried out by CIVICUS including Bridging the Gaps and State of Civil Society 2011 (reviewed here), which draw in turn on the work of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which rigorously documents legislative processes around the world, and has just published the excellent ‘Defending Civil Society‘ report. Conclusion? Civil society organizations (CSOs) worldwide face an increasingly sophisticated and varied range of restrictive measures. These include (examples are from CIVICUS and ICNL):

Old fashioned repression: in the words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin: ‘March without permission and you will be hit on the head with batons. That’s all there is to it.’

Restrictions on international funding (pretty essential in the poorest countries): Under Bangladesh law the Oxfam office can’t bring a penny into the country without government sign-off on what partners we fund, what we/they use it for and where it is spent. Government is looking at reducing regulation slightly (for example, dropping the requirement that we notify them of every foreign-funded trip our staff make and why they are making it) but not the overall premise.

Funding restrictions particularly target advocacy work: in Ethiopia, advocacy organizations are not allowed to use foreign funding; Equatorial Guinea restricts NGOs from promoting, monitoring or engaging in any human rights activities.

Deterrent red tape: Uganda’s draft Public Order Management Bill 2011 includes a requirement to inform the police seven days in advance of holding public meetings

Vague and blanket regulatory powers for the state. In Tanzania, an international NGO must “refrain from doing any act which is likely to cause misunderstanding”. In Turkmenistan, having a goal that is ‘impossible to achieve’ is grounds for dissolution (wonder how that works for faith organizations, let alone Oxfam’s mission of ‘building a future free from the injustice of poverty’ ….)

Barriers to registration: In Turkmenistan (again) national-level associations can only be established with a minimum of 500 members; in Russia (again) a gay rights organization was denied registration on the grounds that its work “undermines the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in view of the reduction of the population.”

The most recent addition is a crackdown on communications technology, epitomized by Ethiopia’s recent move to restrict the use of Skype and other forms of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communications and the 18 year jail sentence handed down last week to blogger Eskinder Nega.

And in case you thought this was just a southern phenomenon, CIVICUS points to some pretty draconian legislation in Switzerland (up to $110,000 penalties for unauthorized demonstrations) and Canada (prior notice of any demonstration of more than 50 people).

The first question this prompts is ‘why now?’According to Doug Rutzen, who runs the ICNL, it’s actually been going on for a while – “between 2005 and 2010, over 50 countries considered or enacted restrictive measures constraining civil society.  The drivers of this crackdown include the Bush Administration’s “democracy promotion” agenda combined with the decline of US soft power after the Iraq war and the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib; the patina of political legitimacy provided by Putin and others; the sharing of “worst practices” by governments; both legitimate concerns over development effectiveness and even the unintentional support for constraints arising from the concept of “host country” ownership; and the “war on terror” paradigm, which was used to constrain civil society in the US and globally.”

To some extent, CSOs are also victims of their own success – the ‘colour revolutions’ in the countries of the former Soviet Union in the last decade, or the Arab Spring events of this one, both alerted governments to the threats posed by an active civil society. In addition, there may be a perception of impunity – governments like Ethiopia and Rwanda remain donor darlings despite their draconian attitude to any kind of opposition, because they deliver on growth and poverty reduction. That must send some kind of message. On similar lines, there is an increasingly widespread perception among developing country elites that the ‘western model’, both economic and political, is losing out to other development models, such as that of China, that entail a much more constricted role for civil society.

Finally, there is also the tricky question of whether some of the ‘crackdown’ is actually legitimate government oversight, both because of slow progress on transparency and accountability by CSOs and NGOs, but also because of the use of ‘soft force projection’ by the US and others to achieve foreign policy goals by selectively supporting protest movements.

The next question is ‘why are the INGOs so quiet?’ We shout about everything from land grabs to arms treaties, but often stay quiet when it comes to the ability of our preferred partners to go about their business (Netsanet himself was jailed for over two years in Ethiopia for his work as national coordinator of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP)). Some evidence-free guesses as to why that might be the case:

Fear of ejection from the countries in question (well-grounded fears too, in many cases)

Fears over the safety of staff (but our partners often run much greater risks)

Professionalization – maybe staff in country have come to see their role as more project administration than ‘speaking truth to power’?

Does campaigning for CSOs seem too much about process and the right to have meetings, and so too remote from the lives of poor people (and a tough sell as a campaign issue)?

Have we at some level bought into the ‘economistic’ understanding of development that sees growth as more important than human rights, portraying Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia (both hostile to civil society space) as the heroes of African development?

There are some formal international processes we could plug into. The UN has Special Rapporteurs on ‘the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Frank Larue) and (since 2010) ‘the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association’ (Maina Kiai). Under the auspices of the Community of Democracies, a group of concerned governments has established a Working Group on “Enabling and Protecting Civil Society” to monitor and respond to developments concerning civil society legislation around the world. Also, 14 governments have jointly pledged financial support for the “Lifeline: Embattled NGO Assistance Fund” to help civil society activists confronting crackdowns.

So should the development community be doing more, and if so, what? Working at multilateral government, lobbying our home governments to make it a foreign policy priority, defending CSOs (and/or supporting those who defend them) on the ground? What is most effective in different situations? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

People power, transformation and existential crisis: the state of global civil society:

Civicus, a global network of civil society organizations, recently published a pilot ‘State of Civil Society’ report, which it hopes to repeat at regular intervals. Some excerpts:

“2011 marked a critical juncture for civil society. Authoritarian regimes buckled under the weight of citizen pressure, and prevailing political and economic orders faced unprecedented opposition from people power movements in a great wave of protests across many countries. The opening of new arenas and avenues for civic participation and mobilisation in turn provoked significant state backlash against activists and CSOs, with a heavier focus on restricting internet usage. Foreign investments by emerging powers, particularly China, impacted on civil society space in donor recipient countries, but this was not matched by a rise in advocacy by CSOs based in emerging powers to press for more progressive foreign policies by their governments.

On the global stage, civil society continued to experience limited access to key multilateral forums and despite the rise of a cluster of economic and political powers, states tended to use the year’s key global meetings to advance national interests. Many CSOs are facing existential crises, which includes problems caused by a deteriorating funding environment. New and broad-based coalitions between diverse civil society formations are needed to best capitalise on what is currently a generational opportunity to demand transformational political, social and economic change.”

The report draws heavily on Civicus’ Civil Society Index project, covering some 30 countries, and identifies five key themes across civil society in 2011: civil society response to emergency and crisis; protest, activism and participation; the space for civil society; the resourcing of civil society; and civil society’s role in the multilateral arena.Each theme has a dedicated section in the report.

On the regulatory environment, which is worrying a lot of Oxfam country offices and partners, it says:

“In 2011, several regressive laws were instituted or proposed that negatively impactedon the operating environment for civil society. A number of countries targeted the foreign fundingof CSOs, e.g. Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel and Kyrgyzstan.

Many governments imposed measures restricting the ability of individuals to exercise their freedoms of assembly, association and expression, including in Belarus, Malaysia, Uganda and several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Also many governments proposed or enacted legislation affecting the formation, registration and general lifecycle of CSOs, such as in Algeria, Cambodia and Iran. Following intensive campaigning from domestic and international civil society, plans were shelved or delayed to introduce restrictive civil society laws in Cambodia, Iran and Israel. However, the threat of legislation remains a potent weapon for governments to subdue civil society voices. More positive reforms were introduced in Montenegro, Rwanda, Tunisia and the Kurdistan region in Iraq.”

The report then provides several pages of analysis of each of the 30 countries in the Civil Society Index. The report is a great idea – just as we and many other development organizations are recognizing and stressing the crucial importance of civil society organizations and ‘active citizenship’ in development, there is an alarmingly generalized effort by governments to restrict their ability to operate – it’s a regular topic of conversation in any field trip. So overall, the idea of a periodic ‘state of civil society’ report is an excellent one, but I think it would work better as a more forensic and arms’ length survey of trends and challenges, a bit more like Amnesty’s annual report on human rights around the world. As it currently stands, there is a bit too much editorialising ‘civil society organizations/governments need to do X, Y, Z’ and not enough hard data and legal analysis. But it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Africa Power and Politics – David Booth responds

ODI’s David Booth responds to my post on the ODI’s Africa Power and Politics Programme

“The APPP could hardly have hoped for a more encouraging reception for its first policy brief than the one provided by Duncan’s blog of 15 April. Encouraging and suitably challenging!

The point of a policy brief is to be, well, brief, and focused on implications. So it’s not surprising if Duncan finds some of our formulations a bit too pithy and in need of substantiation.

Duncan quotes us generously, but there is much more where that came from, freely downloadable from the APPP website. It’s also worth saying that the evidence base we are drawing on is not just APPP research but a large body of other work, including stuff to which Duncan refers us.

Let me pick up just a couple of points of apparent disagreement.

Citizen pressure and public goods

Obviously, one of them has to be our proposition that citizen pressure and bottom-up demand for accountability is a weak factor in improving the governance of public services. This poses a rather direct challenge to the way most international NGOs view their mission, so Duncan’s ‘alarm’ is understandable.

We are aware of walking into a lion’s den in posing this issue so bluntly. But we are doing so with good reason. There is a real conflict here between the conventional ‘progressive’ viewpoint and what virtually all documented experience shows.

In elaborating, we said: ‘… client “voice” is a weak source of results-based accountability unless accompanied by strong top-down pressures of some kind’’. The qualification is important. It is meant to capture two things.

One is the almost universal finding that public service improvement comes when there is successful action to improve provider motivations. And this doesn’t come mainly from the bottom-up (even in the UK, where service users are much more empowered, providers respond poorly to having ‘demands’ placed on them). The other is the fact that the documented successes in so-called ‘social accountability’ almost always involve political forces (new parties, new leaders or something of the kind); rarely are they just movements of ‘citizens’.

This is actually what the IDS research and related ODI and IDS evaluations tell us. None of them provide a blanket endorsement of civil society action on accountability. If this seems surprising, it’s because there has been a huge amount of over-selling of ‘demand side’ interventions on the basis of partial reading of the evidence.

So I hope Duncan’s alarm will soon give way to agreement. The challenge to conventional thinking about ‘good governance’ applies to all of us, not just to the soft target provided by official donor governance work.

The politics of aid

There are many other points I might pick up, but I will leave democracy, Amartya Sen and universal rights for another occasion. And on the important question of how to avoid sliding back into ‘decent chap-ism’, I will defer to my APPP colleague Tim Kelsall.

For now, let me just comment on Duncan’ scepticism about uptake of APPP findings by official aid. Of course, yes, the obstacles are pretty daunting. Backing off and concentrating on the ‘do no harm’ agenda at home, as suggested by Mick Moore and Sue Unsworth, has much to be said for it. But it is too easy to take the existing aid set-up as a given, and see the function of research as limited to feeding its appetite for ‘take-aways’.

As we said in the brief, aid needs to fit the needs of development, not the other way round. For sure, this is not a simple matter. It is about public attitudes and the long-term shaping of opinion in the North, and not just about the civil servants or the ministers who are currently in charge of things – which is why, as Duncan notes, drivers of change and political economy analysis don’t change behaviour all that much. But public attitudes to development have been substantially remoulded in recent years by NGO campaigns, not always for the good but significantly nonetheless – and with Oxfam often in the lead.

Given this success, it seems a bit soon to give up on the possibility of shaping a more mature general consensus on what matters and what doesn’t in governance for development. I think we should talk about how we can work together on this.”

Duncan: Thanks David, and I really hope you’re right about getting aid donors to think more about politics and context. But using blogger’s prerogative to have the last word, I’d just like to say that there’s at least one straw man in here – the idea that NGOs like Oxfam see change coming about purely by bottom-up civil society organization. In fact, both our theory of change, and the practice of our advocacy usually involves cross sectoral alliances with business, allies within government, churches as well as community organizations, peasant associations and the like. I’d go further, often, NGOs’ most important role is to act as catalysts and convenors, bringing groups together who would not normally talk to each other. So where I differ with you is not that change comes about from a combination of top down and bottom up, but in the APPP Policy Brief’s far too dismissive line that ‘citizen pressure is at best a weak factor and at worst a distraction’. I think events in North Africa are just the latest reason (on top of all that work by the IDS Citizenship team) to say that that statement is simply wrong. US civil rights movement, anyone? The struggle against apartheid? I notice you don’t repeat it in your post – perhaps it wasn’t quite what you meant to say?

What does the future hold for civil society organization?

I’ve been struggling to make sense of the changing landscape for civil society organizations, North and South, and could do with your help. Here are some initial thoughts, but please send in your own, plus useful references:

One door opens, another shuts
There are contradictory and ambiguous trends for civil society at national and global levels. On the plus side:
· Growing size, strength and sophistication at national level and globally of CSOs of all shapes, sizes and coalitions. (For an example, see previous post on the Global Campaign for Education)
· Recognition from other actors (international institutions, aid donors, TNCs) of the importance of CSOs as partners and stakeholders

But on the negative side, according to a new report by Civicus, the crackdown in countries such as Ethiopia, Zambia and India has accelerated in 2009-10, affecting some 90 countries,:

“What began as a knee jerk reaction to a horrific event in 2001 (9/11), assumed a life of its own by the end of the decade. The world is presently witnessing a cascade of laws and regulatory measures to restrict the rights of citizens to freely express their views, associate and assemble. Peaceful demonstrators, activists, journalists, human rights defenders and ordinary citizens are increasingly facing motivated prosecution, harassment, physical abuse and threats to their lives for challenging well-entrenched power structures. The proffered justifications range from counter-terrorism to national security, cultural relativism to national sovereignty and government ownership of development processes as opposed to democratic ownership.”

The rise of the BRICS has had similarly ambiguous impacts, giving greater global prominence to civil society-led change in countries such as India and Brazil, and challenging the Washington Consensus previously opposed by so many CSOs, but also providing alternative, no-strings-attached sources of investment and diplomatic support that have made it easier for anti-democratic governments to ignore Western pressures to democratize.

In the North, the shift to the right in Europe and the US has had ambiguous results. Cutbacks have encouraged governments such as the UK to highlight the role of the ‘Big Society’, including (at least rhetorically) a central role for CSOs. But this role is frequently restricted to service delivery, rather than advocacy – there may be a larger share of a dwindling aid budget available to CSOs, but it is likely to have a political price tag. Aid volumes are likely to stagnate or even fall, if history is any guide, leaving development NGOs with a choice between a defensive ‘stick to your promises’ campaign, a push for innovative forms of financing (eg Robin Hood Tax, tax havens), a rebalancing towards quality of aid rather than quantity, or a shift in focus towards domestic resource mobilization (commodity royalties, domestic tax reform).

So how does the zeitgeist feel to you?

Do development agencies need to look more like the private sector?

NGOs and others in the development sector spend a good deal of time beating themselves up about their many failings (listed in loving detail in the book). Recently, however, the private sector has picked up the baseball bat and got stuck in – arguing that all we need to do is adopt lean, efficient market approaches, instead of all that fuzzy, inefficient, participatory NGO nonsense.

Some have decided to show us directly how its done – resulting in a plethora of ‘social enterprises’, ‘social entrepreneurs’ and ‘philanthrocapitalists’ getting into development, both as whizzy ‘bottom of the pyramid’ businesses, and as funding agencies – the most celebrated being the Gates Foundation, well on the way to becoming a major aid donor in its own right. Now Michael Edwards of the Ford Foundation seems to have decided to fight back. Read More …