Vancouver, Canada
The creation of a more just, equitable, and environmentally stable world depends in large part on refashioning national governments and global institutions to make them more responsive and accountable to the world’s citizenry, several speakers declared at an international conference here last month.
Activists and nonprofit groups working to change policies of institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization must find ways not only to engage political and corporate leaders, some speakers cautioned, but also to collaborate with ordinary people working to improve their local communities, whether in developing countries in the global South or industrial countries of the North.
“Global change without good old-fashioned local organizing is not possible or sustainable,” said Srilatha Batliwala, from India, now a research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, in Cambridge, Mass. “We would ask our friends in the North not to feel that global action is something that people in the North have to do and that local action is something we in the South have to do.”
From some 90 countries in both hemispheres, more than 700 activists and nonprofit leaders held four days of discussions of how citizens can participate more effectively in decision making at every level of society. The occasion was the fourth world assembly of Civicus, a global alliance of people and groups promoting greater participation around the world by “civil society” organizations that lie outside the government and commercial spheres.
“Today, there is a new emerging understanding that governance is the action that is taken by humanity, through both government and nongovernmental organizations, in managing the resources and processes to try to work for a much more just world than we have today,” said Kumi Naidoo, the secretary general of Civicus. “The world and democracy will benefit from creating an enabling environment where a multiplicity of citizens’ voices are heard on an ongoing basis.”
But the world’s economic transformation over the past couple of decades has seen commercial interests push the concerns of civil society to the margins, said Ann Pettifor, co-founder of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, which seeks to persuade international lending institutions to forgive the national debt of the world’s poorest countries. As a result, she said, “money rights are now more important than human rights” in many parts of the world. And the central question, reflected in the conference theme of “putting people in the center,” she added, is: “How can civil society build new structures and institutions that will move people values to the center?”
Major demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and most recently in Genoa, Italy, in July to protest what critics consider to be the harmful effects of economic globalization have focused the world’s attention on citizen activists, who increasingly are asserting their right to participate more directly in decisions that affect their lives, whether concerning labor standards, human rights, or global warming.
A widespread perception that only the rich have access to political power has stoked a growing cynicism about public leaders and the political process, Mr. Naidoo observed. “We live in a world today where unfortunately democracy is in crisis,” he said.
In the past decade, while democracy was taking root in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet bloc, he said, “the real power was shifting to the regional and global levels,” where institutions like the World Bank imposed rigorous conditions on countries seeking their support.
“There is a real problem with the governance paradigm at the national and global levels,” declared Mr. Naidoo. “The growing levels of inequality today both within and between nations are absolutely unsustainable.”
Great disparities exist not merely in material resources but also in the power to change one’s circumstances.
“The majority of the world’s people are neither seen nor heard, and have no say in decisions that affect their lives, even in matters of life and death,” said Anuradha Vittachi, director of OneWorld International Foundation, which oversees the OneWorld communications network, based in London. “And the people who do get to make those decisions don’t feel obliged to be accountable to them.”
Besides the concentration of power in multinational corporations and international institutions that characterizes economic globalization, however, is a more benign form of globalization, she said, “a new flat secular citizens globalization where the world is seen not as one market but as one humanity.”
And facilitating that process are new forms of global communication. “The Internet is potentially the greatest equalizer ever in communications technologies,” Ms. Vittachi declared. “De-eliticizing communications is of key importance.”
OneWorld’s Web site, http://www.oneworld.net, Ms. Vittachi said, has become a major resource for civil-society organizations, with some 200 radio partners and links to more than two million pages of material. But because knowledge is power, she added, “not everyone will appreciate this newfound form of power to the people.” China, in fact, has banned One World -- although such restrictions are difficult to enforce.
Only 10 percent of the world’s population now has access to the Internet, Ms. Vittachi acknowledged, but she advised taking the long view. “We can use the Net to make the voices of the grass roots really count,” she said.
While much of the discussion at the conference emphasized the importance of collaborating with both business and government, only a scattering of business executives and public officials attended. One who did was Mats Karlsson, vice president for external affairs at the World Bank, in Washington.
The World Bank is responding to its critics and changing the way it carries out its development mission, Mr. Karlsson said. But “civil society’s leaders must step up and lead,” he added, by taking a firm position against the violence that has marred protests in Genoa and elsewhere. “There’s a risk that those who use violence are capturing the attention of the media, which threatens to take away their focus on something that is much more constructive.”
He added: “We need a trusted space to come together and to ensure that we get real change.”
* * * * * Criticized at earlier assemblies for giving too little emphasis to the concerns of young people, Civicus invited youths to participate in a number of ways, from volunteering to help facilitate the meetings and run the audiovisual equipment to covering the conference for a youth news service.
And one of the two opening keynote speakers was Craig Kielburger, a Toronto resident who at age 13 founded an organization to combat the abuse of children around the world. Free the Children International now has more than 100,000 members in 27 countries, who together have helped to build some 300 schools, and are pressing to improve child-labor laws and the status of street children in dozens of countries.
Many charities have viewed their role as protecting children or working in behalf of children, but rarely as working with children, said Mr. Kielburger, who is now 17. But youthful energy and expertise -- particularly in mastering the intricacies of online technology -- are a resource too important for voluntary organizations to ignore or to squander on trivial tasks, he said.
“We need you to believe in us, to challenge us, and not to underestimate who we are and what we can do,” said Mr. Kielburger. “Our generation may just surprise you.”
* * * * * Participants in the Civicus conference were encouraged to experience firsthand some of the citizen action under way in the Vancouver area. One afternoon was devoted to site visits to local shelters, community centers, and an organic farm. And participants also could take advantage of special dinners with community activists held at ethnic restaurants around town.
On the final evening of the conference, Civicus recognized six activists who embody its ideals and who all are the recipients of separate awards honoring their actions:
- Mustapha Adib, a Moroccan army captain imprisoned for denouncing corruption in the Moroccan Air Force. Mr. Adib is still in prison and did not attend.
- Jockin Arputham, founder of India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation, which is committed to improving the lives of millions of Asians who live in slums.
- Marguerite Barnkitse, who opened residential shelters in Burundi in 1993 for children fleeing from warfare in that region.
- Adriana Portillo Bartow, who leads a project to learn the fate of thousands of Guatemalan children who disappeared during the war.
- Natasa Kandic, who founded the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, which has been monitoring human rights in Kosovo.
- The Reverend Timothy Njoya, a leader in Men for Equality for Women, which supports women’s rights in Kenya.
* * * * * As a small organization with a global agenda, Civicus constantly risks having its energies dissipated and resources depleted in trying to do too many things at once. In response to suggestions from its members, the organization has decided among other things to streamline its governance by shrinking its board of directors from 23 members to 13. The new board now includes seven women, as well as two members under 30.
The challenges for Civicus include expanding its membership, Mr. Naidoo said. It plans to alter its dues structure to make membership more affordable for poor people and organizations, and also to translate its materials into more languages to make them more accessible. It may more actively invite the participation of other segments of civil society, including professional associations, trade unions, and religious institutions.
Civicus is also hoping to diversify and beef up its support. “I’m greatly concerned about the future, because revenues from membership dues have been flat for the last three years,” reported John Richardson, director of the European Foundation Center and the outgoing treasurer of Civicus. “We’re very dependent on a small number of donors,” particularly the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies.
Civicus programs will continue to support research and analysis about civil society, as well as the improvement of the legal, fiscal, and social conditions for citizen participation worldwide.
But new projects are afoot as well. Civicus has recently overhauled its Web site (http://civicus.org) to provide much more information. By teaming up with Aidmatrix, a nonprofit online network based in Dallas, Civicus hopes to enable visitors to its site not only to download advice on such practical matters as grant-proposal writing or running a meeting effectively but also to interact with one another in a virtual community of citizen activists.
Further plans call for developing a crisis-response program, so that Civicus can respond quickly with public statements and other support whenever civil society comes under threat -- from unfavorable tax legislation or punitive legal measures, for example.
And by creating some 18 “affinity groups” on topics as varied as gender equity, youth participation, the environment, and religious institutions, as well as six geographic regions, Civicus hopes to engage its members much more significantly in the intervals between its biennial world assemblies.
* * * * * At the last world assembly in Manila two years ago, Civicus announced its intention to develop a kind of gauge to assess how well civil society is faring in different parts of the world. Here in Vancouver it unveiled the results of the pilot phase of that project.
The Civicus Index on Civil Society measures the strength of civic participation using four independent criteria: structure (what kinds of institutions exist and how active and collaborative they are), space (how supportive the legal and social environment is for such groups), values (attention to issues like human rights), and impact (how influential the groups are in shaping policy decisions).
For the first phase, researchers calculated the index in 14 countries: Belarus, Canada, Croatia, Estonia, Ghana, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Scotland, South Africa, Ukraine, and Uruguay. Civicus has published separate reports on each country, as well as a handbook describing how to use the index.
The index publications are available from Civicus, 919 18th Street, N.W., Third Floor, Washington, D.C. 20016; (202) 331-8518, e-mail indira@civicus.org. Prices had not been determined at press time.