The role of civil society organisations in managing for development results
Release Date: 05 February 2007
By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary-General
It is now widely recognised that civil society organisations have a critical role to play in harnessing meaningful community participation in development processes. However, as globalisation becomes a reality in our everyday lives, and with the increasing democratic deficit both at domestic and international levels, the role of civil society must go beyond acting as a catalyst of change at the local level to include pressing for changes in power structures to enable marginalised groups to play a greater role in influencing decisions that affect their lives.
The discourse on “Managing for Development Results (MfDR) has emphasised the importance of managing development aid for the benefit of aid recipients. It has emphasised the need for greater government accountability and a “results-oriented” management style for aid resources. Various declarations of principles and case studies on how these aims are pursued in different contexts have been published in recent years. A greater emphasis has also been placed on governments’ roles and responsibilities – governments of both recipient and donor countries – as they are the primary actors in managing development aid.
Without going into the debate regarding what “development” means, suffice it to say that this concept has been widely understood – primarily by donor agencies and the International Financial Institutions – as a “macro” activity, with a special emphasis on economics, and with various stages of how government’s role in development is viewed. In the 1970s, the state was considered the primary actor in development. By the early 1980s, it was increasingly realised that the state alone could not cope with development demands, and calls were heard for “rolling back the state” to make space for private and voluntary initiatives.
Today, there is a general consensus that states, markets and civil society all have roles to play. There have also been shifts away from attempting to address development demands purely through economic reforms, financial stabilisation and structural adjustment, toward the inclusion of issues of governance. For civil society, however, the key challenge is to help redress the imbalances that currently exist in the global economic system between rich and poor, both at the level of nations and at the level of individuals. The question remains how best to support the emancipation of the poor when the injustices of the global economic order call for immediate action.
By nature, civil society organisations are generally closer to the poor and the marginalised than most other kinds of institutions. Civil society organisations originate from a pressing – sometimes desperate – desire among the poor and marginalised for better lives. Civil society organisations exist because their members often have no other meaningful options than to come together and collectively consult, plan and act, in order to have any chance of addressing concrete, specific needs and/or of influencing decisions that affect their lives. In today’s world, where an increasing number of decisions that affect people in their everyday lives are taken far away from home, whether at domestic or international levels, the role of civil society organisations in amplifying the voices of the poor and marginalised is more important than ever before.
In our view, any MfDR approach must also take heed of Stephan de Vylder’s observations regarding the “sustainable human development” approach. In writing about the latter, de Vylder observes that it “starts with the recognition that people’s knowledge, skills, experience, culture, energy and inventiveness are every country’s most valuable resource and… people and their traditions must be regarded as assets and not liabilities.”
This approach, he notes, “gives prime emphasis to the role of human beings in their social context.” For that reason, “a strong civil society, in which norms of reciprocity, cooperation and trust are respected, would be the best way to underpin sustainable human development.”
Successful management of aid resources for development results requires that the role of civil society is not merely that of a mobiliser of local groups and individuals, nor even that of a “watchdog” on outcomes, but that civil society also plays an integral part in decision-making at all levels. For this to happen, there is an absolute need to reform the current international economic order and democratise global governance, as these are skewed against developing countries, and against the poor and marginalised everywhere.
