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- Convenors:
-
Naomi Hossain
(SOAS University of London)
Patrick Kilby (Australian National University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Challenging Authoritarianism
- Location:
- Library, Seminar Room 7
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Will growing restrictions on liberal civil society block inclusive and equitable development or empower governments to take necessary development decisions? Are they driven by values or by greed? This panel will engage with the contradictions of changing civic space in developing countries.
Long Abstract:
The space for liberal, formal human rights-based civil society organizations, including NGOs, has narrowed markedly around the world in the past five years, even as 'uncivil', unruly, and virtual civic activism has been on the rise. Governments claim to restrict civil society and NGOs to protect national sovereignty against alien values. Civil society groups counter-claim that these are naked power struggles. Aid actors view changes in civic space as an unmitigated bad for development. But is that the whole story? How and why is civic space changing, and why now? Will these changes block inclusive, sustainable and equitable forms of development? Or insulate governments against popular discontent so they can make tough but necessary development decisions? Is the growth of rightwing, populist, violent, and apparently unorganized or leaderless civic engagement more 'authentic' than the aid-funded NGOs of the post-Cold War period? How will they affect civil society, and in particular local NGOs? To what extent is changing civic space the normative and organizational outcome of shifts in geopolitical power - in particular the rise of China, India, and Russia as counterweights to American global domination? This panel invites theoretical and empirical papers that engage with these contradictions at the heart of the problem of changing civic space in developing countries.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 19 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Civic space appears to be displacing the concept of civic agency in ways that depoliticise development discourse. Bringing, once again, politics back in to development analysis can benefit from civic space being critically scrutinised from the perspective of civic-driven change.
Paper long abstract:
Many parts of the world show a tendency for governing regimes and their non-state affiliates to selectively limit the individual and collective scope of citizens to advocate for their interests. The issues and forces involved are more complex than those captured by the concept of 'shrinking civic space' which seems to reconfirm a western model of governance and development as the global norm. It can be observed that in some countries, civic space is being selectively reconfigured to legitimise authoritarian populism: Philippines, Nicaragua, Brazil. Others show a propensity to reshape the room for civic agency towards a renaissance of nationalism, often with appeals to empires of the past: Orban in Hungary to the Habsburg empire; and Erdogan in Turkey to the Ottoman empire. Our comparative treatment of countries will use the lenses of civic driven change (CDC) to analyse the extent to which, as currently understood and deployed, civic space provides an adequate political reading of the processes involved. Doing so will also apply critical perspectives of epistemicide to gauge interpretations of and investments in civic space within the repertoire of international development cooperation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the potential for NGOs to use the media and particularly social media as a tool for holding public officials to account is contexts where civic spaces are rapidly closing.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the potential for NGOs to use the media and particularly social media as a tool in developing countries where civic space for holding public officials to account is rapidly closing. The media has long been regarded as 'the watchdog of society' and a key tool for accountability, but how do NGOs continue to navigate relationships with the media in contexts where not only are political spaces closing, but spaces for public debate and accountability through traditional media are also closing.
One of the tactics being explored at a growing rate is the potential for social media to bypass the restrictions being imposed on the traditional media. This research uses questionnaires and interviews with NGOs based in three African countries - Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda - to better understand how NGOs are navigating closing civic spaces through the media and social media. Civil society have had to change the way in which they engage with citizens and public officials through the media. In contexts were public broadcasters have often been unofficial 'state' broadcasters and print journalists are often enticed to report on corruption and accountability only when remunerated, NGOs are harnessing the potential of social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter to continue holding public officials to account. This paper explores the perspectives of NGOs on the way in which media is changing in their contexts, how they are adapting to changing civic spaces and the potential for social media to overcome restrictive regimes.
Paper short abstract:
A key feature of closing civic space in Brazil since 2016 has been the withdrawal of government support for institutionalised engagement with social movements and NGOs, after decades of state/civil society co-construction of social policies. This paper discusses the implications for the rural poor.
Paper long abstract:
Over the three decades between the promulgation of the post-military "Citizens' Constitution" in 1988 and the election of the military-backed President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Brazil developed an approach to state/civil society co-construction of social policies that became something of a global model. Under the Workers' Party (PT) governments of 2003-2016 this model helped to deliver unprecedented progress in reducing rural poverty and hunger. Some of the main beneficiaries were 'Traditional Peoples and Communities', marginalised groups who depend on natural resources from land to which they often lack legal title. Their social movement organisations were able to use alliances with NGOs and supportive bureaucrats to secure access to the policy process through institutionalised participation spaces. Participatory institutions such as the National Food and Nutritional Security Council (CONSEA) played a key role in helping movements to negotiate inclusion of their grassroots constituencies in government programmes. However, they failed to achieve any substantive changes in land rights legislation or the highly unequal structure of land tenure in Brazil, and the PT governments continued to favour agribusiness over the rural poor in state resource allocation. After the impeachment of PT President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 the space for institutionalised participation was drastically curtailed, and violence against land and environmental rights defenders intensified. In January 2019 one of Bolsonaro's first acts as President was to abolish CONSEA. This paper discusses the implications for the rural poor of a reliance on institutionalised participation for engaging the state in the face of closing civic space.
Paper short abstract:
While initial industrialisation depends on nation-states breaking mercantile cities' protected civic spaces, sustained development requires cities' re-assertion of a new type of civic space, with characteristics diametrically opposed to the old and significance often lost by eliding the two types.
Paper long abstract:
It is widely agreed that cities play a unique role in economic development, partly through their creation of civic space (for emergence of free markets) and property rights (for entrepreneurialism). But researchers still divide between identifying autonomous city-states as guarantors of development, and viewing destruction of big cities' wealth and power concentrations by the nation-state as essential for moving mercantile into industrial capitalism. This paper (drawing especially on Adam Smith, Jane Jacobs, Sheilagh Ogilvie and Michael Postan alongside contemporary observation) challenges both views' assumption of a three-stage progression from village to city to nation-state - arguing that, for continued development, new (industrial/post-industrial) cities must re-assert power within the nation-state after pre-industrial cities are subordinated to it. While initial industrialisation requires central government to capture and break up the restrictive civic space of pre-industrial cities (based on trading and rent-extraction), industrial advance requires production-based cities to carve-out power from central government, creating new civic space that is often held back by persistence of the old. 'New' developmental cities differ from their more static predecessors in terms of citizenship and residency, relationship to rural hinterland, property-rights assignment, rent/investment-income balance, international trade dependence, degree of specialisation, labour markets, extent of finance-commerce-industry-government-church integration, and relationship to central government or ruling elites. Patterns of European and North American industrialisation can be traced to the fall of their city-states and rise of new city-regions, while obstacles to disempowering 'old' or establishing 'new' forms of urban civic space emerge as blockages in other regions' development.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the new policy of government purchasing of welfare services from NGOs in China and its impacts on state-civil society relations. It shows how it restricts the civic space and co-opts civil society into a social stability-maintenance function.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2013 the Chinese government, under the premise of increasing state capacity and improving efficiency, has rolled out a national programme to deliver welfare by contracting services to NGOs. Given the novelty of this policy, existing research has mainly explained its institutional origin and design across China. This paper, however, examines the impact of government contracting welfare services to NGOs on state-civil society relations, and on the development of efficient and inclusive welfare services. It draws on empirical evidence from an ongoing ESRC-funded research from three different locations in China and three welfare service sectors, namely, migrant workers, people living with disabilities, and people living with HIV/AIDs.
It presents fourfold findings: first, the purchasing process is not a level playing field, but instead favours NGOs with pre-established relations with local authorities, and excludes rights-based groups that are politically sensitive; second, governments' bias towards certain NGOs implicitly re-constructs social needs into those with priority, while certain NGOs and social groups, are excluded from government welfare funding; third, together with the contraction of alternative sources of funding -foreign in particular due to the Foreign NGO Law (2016)-, service contracting makes NGOs highly dependent on government funding for their survival; fourth, service contracting drives NGOs away from their mission, vision and values, becoming functional arms of the state in the delivery of welfare. We argue that the policy of purchasing social services from NGOs in China is, in fact, a mechanism of co-optation of civil society that fulfils a social order-maintenance function.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will look at the development and current regulatory situation of NGOs in each of the four major countries of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), in the context of a closing civic space in the face of hostile governments.
Paper long abstract:
NGOs in South Asia are as diverse as the countries of the region and covers not for profit entities ranging from large educational institutions to small grassroots NGOs. They have in common a community purpose based on values shared by their governing members and supporters, rather than a profit motive, or being a part of government (Lissner 1977; Kilby 2011).
I will mainly focus on local NGOs in South Asia, which are values based, and dedicated to the social development of their communities. This still includes a vast spectrum of NGOs ranging from those that are more activist and built around social movements for transformational change across communities; or have a strong religious base for their values, and seek to see these values adopted more broadly. This naturally leads to values conflict, and while NGOs seldom attack each other directly, they often seek support government or other patrons to limit the reach of those NGOs that do not share their values.
This paper will focus on local NGOs in the four countries of South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the challenges they face from hostile more authoritarian governments, which are increasingly supporting more religious based populist NGOs to support the government agenda of opposition to the liberal and human rights values of secular NGOs. At the same time government is using its regulatory power to limit these secular NGOs. The paper will conclude with some reflections on how NGOs can respond to these pressures.
Paper short abstract:
The influence of Chinese aid on civil society space and development in Cambodia.
Paper long abstract:
The world is facing and challenging a dramatic political change. While some countries have transformed from an authoritarianism to a more democratic one by providing more freedom and space to civil society, the rest countries, those in the global South, have traversed between the two political systems. Political development Southeast Asian nations, including Cambodia, have likewise conquered a similar challenge, but it is more likely moving toward an authoritarian style of leader. Given that the contemporary civil society space in Cambodia is shrinking compared to the past two decades. This paper focuses on how domestic political affairs, especially political survival of the regime, and the regional influence, especially Chinese roles, has moulded civil society activism in Cambodia. It argues that the shrinking space of Cambodian civil society activism is induced by the growing of China' influence, in term of its aid and investments, in the region, and, in tandem with the regime's strategies to endure their office tenure.