Civil Society Assistance Fails: Outside Aid Distorts Focus on Groups to U.S. Agenda

Civil Society Assistance Fails: Outside Aid Distorts Focus on Groups to U.S. Agenda

Amy Hawthorne, Carnegie Endowment, 2005, Unchartered Journey: promoting democracy in the middle east, eds. T. Carothers & M. Ottaway, p. 102

Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 8-9

Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 125

But Bourdieu’s notion of “champ” (or field) is of interest here to give more grounding to the reasons why PASSIA and BISAN might have actually hosted and promoted such limited (managerial) views on civil society. Bourdieu’s emphasis on the variety of capitals (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic) whose accumulation individuals compete for in a given field, provides interesting motivations to analyze the position of the two NGOs. Not only does writing a report or organizing a series of seminars on civil society provide a non-negligible economic capital, but it also enhances social and symbolic capital of the involved actors; socially, these NGOs are meant to play a leading role towards their sister organizations and fellow country (wo)men through courses and lectures given to other NGOs. In other words, such writing or courses giving includes a strong element of networking with dozens of institutions. Symbolically as well, this enhances their social position since it gives them the chance to appear through podium discussions, lectures and conferences on the issues that matter to them.

But by competing in a rather exclusive manner within the field of international donors, some local NGOs tend to forget about their domestic role and anchorage: gradually, apposition enhanced thanks to international “trophies” might become a double-edged sword when claiming to fight more on the domestic field. This will be further discussed and circumstantiated in the last chapters.
CIVIL SOCIETY FUNDING GOES IN SEARCH OF PROJECTS TO MEET ITS GOALS

Michele Dunne, Carnegie Endowment, 2005, Unchartered Journey: promoting democracy in the middle east, eds. T. Carothers & M. Ottaway, p. 217

Finally, those designing assistance programs face the practical problem of needing to spend the funds allocated for democracy promotion, whether or not they are able to do so in a way that supports policy goals, which themselves remain poorly defined. USAID and MEPI have understandably chosen to work in areas such as civil society, local government, judicial reform, and women’s rights that seemed the easiest and least sensitive. There has been little assessment of areas in which reform would be the most meaningful, which must be determined on an individual country basis, and few attempts to coordinate policy engagement and assistance programs with a view to making progress in those areas.
USAID RULES AND PROCEDURES CRUSHES THE UNIQUE CHARACTER OF INDIGENOUS CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS

Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 104-5

The reason behind these very restrictive conditions is linked, to a large extent to the question of support to armed groups in the Territories. To make sure that no US tax payers’ money goes to what the State Department has defined as terrorist organizations, Palestinian NGOs must sign a waiver (the so-called “Anti-Terrorism Waiver”) stating that funding will not go to support terrorist infrastructures and that their services will not benefit “terrorist individuals or organizations.” Thus, all projects submitted to USAID funding are controlled and vetted by U.S. officials. Project details include not only the type and location of activities, but also details of all the personnel involved. USAID can then vet the whole organization or the participation of certain Palestinian individuals.

Therefore the various types of contracts provide and escape for not signing the waiver. By having a contract, this gives more legal guarantees to USAID that money will not be misused. This is a purely American technical question (so far). The interview with another American quasi-governmental organization also stressed this legal technique to avoid signing the waiver. As its director put it bluntly:

“Our way to deal with the anti-terrorism waiver required by USAID is to split between grants and contracts. In our cases, we have an approximate 50-50 percentage of both. To put it simply: the advantage of the contract is that they do what we want. In grants, they do what they want.”

This can be interpreted simply as a way to bypass the very difficult question of signing or not USAID’s waiver about terrorism. But, from the point of view of donors about whether they feel that they can chose whatever programs and partners suit them, it gives a sense of the potential lack of autonomy left to Palestinian civil society partners. Were the US money a tiny and scant proportion of international aid, the issue would not be that important. But USAID is by far one of the largest single donors in the region with regard to civil society projects and dozens of local and international NGOs depend on its funds, therefore rendering its way to “do development very influential for many years to come. This again, gives a sense of how little space for maneuver the local NGOs have.

Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 129

Despite a formal variety of views, there tends to be only one version of civil society privileged by some of the local NGOs and international donors. This reduced and reductive version, though discussed in a variety of ways, actually becomes a sort of fixed dogma. We will explore how this can be the case, and how the historical context under which local NGOs evolve actually shape(d) and influence(d) the discourse about civil society.
INTERVENTION OF USAID INTO CIVIL SOCIETY ASSISTANCE SHAPES THE CHARACTER AND CONTENT OF LOCAL CSOs

Benoit Challand, Research Fellow-European Institute in Florence, 2009, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, p. 193

This distance, or better, this hiatus, is very similar to the limited conception of civil society used by most international donors and appropriated by a few powerful local recipient NGOs. Both outside donors and inside recipient NGOs rely on rather exclusive definition of civil society that is constantly infused into the parlance of large international donor institutions. The role of Putnam is an apposite example of the recycling of social-political theories into the priorities of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank. Selective theoretical discussions can definitely make a difference since they largely influence donors and can definitively make a difference since they largely influence donors and NGOs’ practice. To be concrete, we have tried to demonstrate that first, civil society promotion tends to limit itself to a particular range of NGOs (shortcomings of the theories of civil society by proxy). Second, few NGOs tend to become the privileged partners of international donors at the expense of a much larger number and broader range of civil society organizations (shortcomings of the process of implementation between donors and recipient NGOs). Finally, the (neo-)Orientalist claims that there cannot be a civil society in the Arab-Muslim world have had an influence on donors (for being selective and discriminating against Islamic – as opposed to Islamist – organizations), and on key local intellectuals who reinforce the view that there is no civil society in the region (shortcomings in the conception of civil society in a transcultural setting).

All of these three shortcomings can be summed up as follows: Programs and projects concerning the promotion of civil society, as implemented through the interaction between western donors and local NGOs, tend to have a differentiated and hence exclusionary impact upon the civil societies of receiving countries, especially in the Arab-Muslim worlds. This exclusion embodies a version of civil society which is not about intrinsic political participation (civil society in itself, or an sich), but about a reflexive appropriation of the discourse about key civil society organization (civil society for itself, or fur sich). In a catchphrase, only these civil society organizations having the institutional and discursive means to sell themselves under the accepted label of “NGOs” will be successful in their bureaucratic interaction with international donors and their quest to receive funding for their activities.