Abstract
Since the publication of its first volume in 2010, the series Non-Governmental Public Action edited by Jude Howell has offered titles that have expanded the array of subjects whose actions are analyzed in development studies and fostered a comparative approach between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries for the study of non-governmental public actors, such as NGOs, advocacy networks, trade unions, rights-based groups and social movements. This volume, which presents a multidisciplinary selection of works carried out under the ‘Non-Governmental Public Action Research Programme’ between 2004 and 2009 (
Since the 1980s, and in particular in the last decade, the third sector has expanded. Even in Western countries, the everyday running of key economic sectors, such as health care, social care and welfare and culture, is increasingly relying on the work of private non-profit institutions. Internationally, NGOs and other non-governmental actors have become the main players for international aid programs and key players in the management of humanitarian crises. NGOs, such as Greenpeace, Oxfam and Slow Food, have increased their international stature and, nowadays, appear truly global players directly involved in international and national policy making. While these elements outline a political and social scenario that seems to fulfil the prediction of Daniel Bell (1976) and other theorists of the post-industrial society, they raise questions about the management and organization of international non-governmental initiatives and the cultural impact of the actions and the very presence of these institutions on local and global levels. More broadly, they suggest the need for a profound reinterpretation of the local and global, as well as the North and South, political, social and economic divide. The book offers a contribution to rethink these themes:
First, it explores how global political contexts […] and global policy processes shape national and local level non-governmental public action and how in turn global policy initiatives are refracted by domestic politics. Second, this collection examines how differential power relations configure interactions between Northern- and Southern-based non-governmental public actors, shaping how federated structures work, how global initiatives unfold, and how non-governmental public actors respond to changing global contexts and policies. (Jude Howell, pp. x–xi)
Whereas the public debate, not only in Western countries, tends to portray international non-governmental public actors as towering, global entities whose agency is difficult to locate, the papers collected in the volume, problematize this idea. The dimension of exchanges, discussions and translations of symbols, meanings and initiatives underpinning the relationship between the international and local branches of the non-governmental institutions, were scrutinized. In so doing, they challenge the idea of international NGOs as coherent and unterritorialized entities. International messages and initiatives are always translated, adapted, territorialized in the local cultural milieu. Thus, the impact of the global process within a country can have contradictory results, as emerges from Jude Howell’s study (pp. 41–65) of the securitization of civil society in the post-9/11, as well as from Arini Amarasuriya and Jonathan Spencer’s research (pp. 115–32) on the hostility to the activities of international NGOs in Sri Lanka. It follows that a success in transnational policy advocacy may not lead to secure, untroubled changes in the national context. This standpoint is demonstrated by the research of Jean Grugel and Enrique Peruzzotti in their study of the children’s rights campaign in Argentina (pp. 18–40), and by Duncan Matthews in his analysis of the implementation of intellectual property rights in developing countries (pp. 66–92).
The entire volume is characterised by a reading of global dynamics from the perspective of the national and local level. In this way, the world appears a broad network of local communities in which governmental and non-governmental actors play. Within this network, rather than the linear results of global, unterritorialized agencies, global initiatives emerge as aggregations of the everyday, mutual interactions of local actors. Thus, the analysis of Richard Crook of the different ways in which non-governmental public actors engage with multilevel policy processes (pp. 93–114), and the study of Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle of the different ways in which relationships between Southern and Northern environmental groups are negotiated (pp. 153–77) help to problematize the conventional assumption that Northern actors dominate the transnational policy advocacy process, shedding light on the ways in which Southern actors play key roles. Thus to understand global initiatives, as suggested in the past by James Ferguson (2002), it appears crucial to look at the ways in which connections and disconnections are culturally and politically negotiated between different communities and localities: a process in which the use or the non-use of economic resources can be crucial. The value of this approach is proven by Andre Spicer’s study on Indymedia’s resource renunciation (pp. 133–52) and by Diane Stone’s analysis of the Open Society Foundation and political role of its philanthropy (pp. 178–99).
This multidisciplinary collection offers new insights for rethinking the role and the action of global non-governmental public actors, and offers a positive starting point for students and researchers who want to begin a research on the political and cultural role that NGOs are playing on the global and local level or for those who are interested in a multidisciplinary and a multi-level approach to study the wide array of actions and organizations that are involved in poverty reduction and social justice.