Special Issue: The European Union and Latin America: Changing Relations || Romancing Civil Society: European NGOs in Latin America

Romancing Civil Society: European NGOs in Latin AmericaAuthor(s): Jean GrugelSource: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 42, No. 2, Special Issue: TheEuropean Union and Latin America: Changing Relations (Summer, 2000), pp. vi+87-107Published by: Center for Latin American Studies at the University of MiamiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/166283 .

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vi JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 42: 2

Romancing Civil Society: European NGOs in Latin America European NGOs have reoriented their Latin American aid policy to embrace the notion of building citizenship, developing civil society, and promoting democratization as the keys to long-term development. Stimu- lated partly by the new aid policy agenda, this shift also reflects a sea change in the thinking that shapes European NGO strategies. This article explores the significance of the new emphasis on civil society for EU policies toward Latin America and as a contribution to democratization.



Romancing Civil Society: European NGOs in Latin America

Jean Grugel

About 43 percent of all aid flowing into Latin America comes from the countries of the European Union. The figure rises to 53 percent if the

aid channeled through EU institutions is included. This compares to only 17 percent from the United States (Freres 1998). An increasing amount of

European aid, especially to Latin America, is directed through nongovern- mental organizations. Since 1992, more than 40 percent of the aid projects cofinanced between the EU and NGOs have been in Latin America. NGOs, therefore, are gaining influence in shaping the European aid regime for Latin America, and European NGOs are key external actors playing an increasingly pivotal role in Latin America. Yet the nature of their activities and their priorities for action in the region remain poorly understood. The intention of this article is to go some way toward addressing this omission.

European NGOs active in Latin America differ from their U.S. counterparts in a number of respects. With the exception of a few large foundations, such as Amnesty International, the U.K.-based OXFAM, and the Dutch semipublic foundation NOVIB, most European NGOs are smaller than those in the United States. As a result, funding is frequently an urgent issue and, in many countries, NGOs must rely on the state to survive. Many therefore lack the self-confidence that may characterize prominent U.S. NGOs.

U.S. NGOs can channel some of their activities through a number of national and interamerican institutions. For example, U.S. NGOs that took up the cause of human rights were able to operate through and strengthen the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights. As Keck and Sikkink argue, the link to government can also sometimes prove powerful and effective in shaping policy (1998, 102-3; see also Martin and Sikkink 1993). European NGOs do not generally enjoy similar institutional linkages. Finally, if U.S. NGOs have overwhelmingly been motivated by liberal concerns about human rights, understood broadly, European NGOs have, in contrast, been concerned with issues of development and economic entitlements and have, rather more recently, incorporated human rights and democracy into an agenda influenced ideologically by a critique of the spread of capitalism and the inequity of the North-South divide.

The role European NGOs play in Latin America has undergone a number of important changes since the beginning of the 1990s. In particular, they have embarked on a new phase of activity that embraces

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88 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 42: 2

building citizenship, developing civil society, and promoting democratization as the keys to long-term development in the region. This transformation has been stimulated partly by the new policy agenda (Robinson 1993) of the large donor development agencies, including the World Bank and the EU. But it also reflects a sea change in the normative thinking that guides European NGOs' development strategies. Whereas in the 1970s and

early 1980s, their approach was to emphasize economic entitlements as the basis for meaningful participation in society, European NGOs now

explicitly see citizenship as the only meaningful foundation for development and participation. This shift also leads European NGOs, for the first time, to support democratization as a conscious development strategy.

This article explores the significance of the new emphasis on civil

society as a means to achieving democratization and development in Latin America. It assesses what civil society means and why the concept has come to occupy such a prominent position in NGO development discourse. Using the example of NGOs from the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, Ireland, the article shows the kind of development policies that can emerge from an emphasis on "civil society." Finally, it asks how these activities contribute to democratization.

Generalizing broadly about European NGOs, as most of this article will do, can have its difficulties. The NGO universe in Europe is

extraordinarily diverse. NGOs differ in their size; their organizational culture; their relationships with the state and with suprastate bodies, such as the EU; their modes of operation; geographical spheres; and, last but not least, their underlying ideological orientations. National NGO communities in Europe also show important differences in their relations with Latin America and the degree of importance they assign to that region. In addition, coordination between NGOs, especially across states, is poor.

Generalization across Europe therefore is difficult, although contacts between European NGOs, especially over funding and policy, are increas-

ing. Indeed, European NGOs are operating more and more within roughly similar contexts and constraints. European aid now tends to be coordi- nated in conjunction with official European aid agencies, and it is possible to detect a similar emphasis on civil society in all national NGO communities. Consequently, it is increasingly possible to talk of a

"European approach" to aid and cooperation, despite the important differences between aid policies and NGOs in European states.

All European NGOs, to a greater or lesser extent, felt similar pressures to reform, modernize, and justify their activities in the 1990s. In addition, all share a commitment to development in the South and the construction of a moral basis for international activities, belonging to a "transnational ethical network" (Grugel 1999).

Thus, in Europe, consensus is greater than ever before on the broad contours of how to promote development and democracy in the develop-



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ing world, although the NGOs still differ enormously over what means should be used to build civil society. This article attempts to highlight these differences in the discussion of what civil society means to NGOs. But because the goal is to identify and assess what European NGOs contribute to Latin American democratization, some generalization is nonetheless necessary.

THE MEANING OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Civil society is the arena of associations and of individual and community agency. The term is used to designate the sphere of activity between the individual and the state. It is a notion that, as John Hall points out, is "at one and the same time a social value and a set of social institutions" (1995, 2). It addresses the problem of "uniting individual and social wills-of articulating a model of society that would at the same time represent the autonomy of its individual members" (Seligman 1992, 101). At its core lies citizenship, though it is also linked to the values of individualism and tolerance. Achieving democratization by building up civil society means empowering individuals to live in a modern world. As Seligman argues (1992, 163), it is a form of social organization that is inimical to societies in which identities are primarily ascriptive or ethnic.

Both the right and the left of Europe's political spectrum have

adopted the notion of civil society. Rightwing thought has particularly emphasized the importance of curtailing state power in order to "free" individuals, and has linked civil society with the expansion of the market. There is no necessary correlation between an active and plural civil society and economic liberalism, given that civil society is rooted in social, not economic relationships. Nevertheless, an overly state-centered model of development clearly stifles community and individual initiatives. Concern with civil society is also evident in a number of "New Left" projects in Europe as a result of the reformulation of ideas about class and community within the Left (Kenny 1997). The idea is defined very ambiguously, serving as a useful "container concept" to emphasize the importance of individual and community agency in preparing societies to deal with the exigencies of the modern world.

As a political idea, civil society has a long lineage, dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It fell into disuse for much of the twentieth century as political debate centered instead on defining an appropriate role for the state to make society more humane and livable, rather than on the individual or the community. Among twentieth-century thinkers, only Gramsci is invoked in contemporary discourse among leftwing civil society projects to rebuild community. Nevertheless, as state- centered development projects have collapsed or gone awry across

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Europe, it has become "the idea of the late twentieth century" (Geremek et al. 1992, 1, emphasis in the original). Civil society has moved from the domain of political theory into mainstream comparative politics. Putnam's work on "social capital" as the thread that binds societies together (1993a; 1993b) and his argument that the demise of community is responsible for many of the ills in contemporary societies have done much to popularize the idea. Scholars of international relations have also taken up the notion to express the strengthening of ties between nonstate actors across national frontiers (Colas 1997; Shaw 1994).

Supporting the development of active civil societies in Latin America has become the dominant leitmotif of almost all European aid to the region. References to the importance of civil society and participation in development and democracy can be found scattered throughout the documents of official aid donors and visible as justification for NGO aid projects. Yet civil

society is an elastic concept, and a search through the literature on

European aid reveals that the term receives a broad range of different meanings.

The idea of promoting civil society in developing countries has, in

practice, become associated with an array of different and even contradic- tory policies. Some of these policies aim to reduce the role and size of the state and to free the individual from state control; other policies hope to foster networks between the state and private agencies, or to build ties of

solidarity between and within communities, insofar as inclusion is seen as vital for democracy. In equal fashion, the notion of civil society has been used to promote policies that focus on making communities bear the burden of a weak, ineffective, or inefficient state. It has been associated variously with introducing market reform, strengthening interest groups, empowering the poor and marginal groups, institutional and legal reform, introducing pluralism, and promoting a moral and ethical approach to

politics. In particular, there are significant differences between what official

aid donors mean by civil society and what the term means to many NGOs, though some NGOs have moved closer to the official donors' position in recent years. In general, the official donors tend to see civil society as a social complement to the development of the market and economic restructuring that reduces the state's role in providing social assistance. Strengthening civil society thus essentially has become a way of promoting social cohesion as state provisions are reduced. According to Enrique Iglesias, president of the Inter-American Development Bank,

together with the need to redefine the relationship of the State with civil society, we believe that the new strategy of development, which is integral, competitive and based on solidarity, requires at the same time a programmed effort to ensure the participation and strengthening of civil society in bringing it about, as a basis of sustainable



GRUGEL: NGOS

development and school of training responsible citizens committed to economic growth and the maintaining of democracy. (Quoted in Pearce 1997, 79)

This usage differs fundamentally from how NGOs conceptualize the term. For them it retains a popular meaning that refers to organizations and

groups excluded from the formal political system (Pearce 1997). This view is a product of an emerging interest in social movements and a belief in social activism. Central America Week, for example, an umbrella organization bringing together several Irish NGOs that cooperate for an annual week of discussion and fundraising for Central America, describes civil society as being related to "the concept of citizenship" and "the entitlement to participate in public affairs." In this view,

today people mobilize as youth, women, homosexuals, blacks, Indians, barrio dwellers, workers, consumers. These groupings cut across several social classes-with the exception of the ruling classes- and at certain moments they join in various combinations around specific issues of common concern. The forces which make up Civil Society seek to represent the people, insisting on the organic link between social and economic policy; identifying structural poverty as the critical problem facing Latin American development and stating clearly that the current model of economic development does not address such poverty. (Central America Week 1996, 2-3)

Other NGOs interpret the term less radically but, generally speaking, all see it as reflecting notions of inclusion, the importance of local pressure or interest groups for development and democratization, and the concept of social mobilization and activism whereby "ordinary" people make demands on the state and manage to resist state pressures. Conversely, the term lacks the unequivocal link with market reform and economic growth that it has for official donors. For the Irish agency APSO, civil society in Central America is made up of "cooperatives, community groups, women and indigenous populations"; the agency sees its role as helping to strengthen "national institutions at every level in order to establish a systematic response to the cooperatives' and communities' needs" (APSO 1994, 5).

Besides the different perspectives between official funding agencies and NGOs, different national "civil society" traditions can also be distin- guished. Europeans extrapolate a general view of what constitutes civil society from their own national experiences and historical patterns of state- society interaction. These differences are sometimes obscured by the use of the same term, adding to the confusion about its meaning.

At least two contrasting ways of seeing civil society can be found in Europe. In the U.K. and northern Europe, civil society refers primarily to the sphere of private associations; it is seen as an entity with a strong capacity for self-regulation, able to resist state intervention and control. To an important degree, the state's role is seen to be circumscribed by the

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activities of civil society, and the relationship between state and society is necessarily sometimes tense. The second tradition, more typical of southern and central Europe, expects the state to play a role in creating, nurturing, and protecting civil society. The state is thus better equipped to determine the "proper" function of civil society than social organizations are. These differences affect the way NGOs are organized, as well as their

relationships with their respective states. They also affect the vision of civil society that NGOs promote in Latin America. In sum, they provide European NGOs with alternative philosophical bases for their emphasis on civil society.

These differences were brought out very clearly in a recent study of the traditions of European civil societies. (Sanz 1998).1 The study's goal was to find examples of "best practice" that could used in Chile. Case studies of civil society in the U.K., Spain, and Italy were commissioned through a Spanish NGO, AIETI. The results revealed profound differences between how the term was used in the three countries, each yielding very different advice for the Chilean government. In the U.K., the term civil society was used, as in the United States, to refer to organizations

that exist independently of the state in that they are bound neither by formal institutional structures, finance or law to the state. They are voluntary self-regulating bodies, which are generally self- funding ... [although] a number of organizations that are traditionally regarded as part of civil society now receive substantial income from the state. (Flinders and Smith 1998, 4)

In the U.K., civil society also signifies the generation of a distinct set of social values through interaction. Trust, for example, is a key concept and a fundamental value enabling civil society organizations to operate. A historically weak state, one that has been dependent on civil society to

provide basic services, is suggested as the basic reason behind the U.K.'s

relatively flourishing civil society and the strength of its social organizations. The case study report rejects the possibility that the central government could design policies to invigorate civil society and argues that such an approach would be inherently flawed because it would lead to the state's domination over civil society. Instead, the report suggests, civil society flourishes best where it is left to grow organically (Flinders and Smith 1998).

In Spain, by contrast, civil society is understood as those social bodies and organizations that are regulated by the state, the existence of which is guaranteed by law. A crucial argument here is that civil society flourishes where it is institutionally protected and encouraged by the state. Drawing on the way civil society has developed in Spain since the demise of the Franco dictatorship, the study argues that civil society refers less to the texture of autonomous networks and relationships in society or the values embedded within them than to the creation and protection of nonprofit



GRUGEL: NGOS

organizations and, if necessary, the establishment of public funds that enable them to survive. Civil society is not, therefore, the sphere of independent associations that limit and control the state but instead itself depends on the state for protection. Its relationship with the state is correspondingly less conflictual than in Anglo-American and northern European societies, and its role is inherently more circumscribed (Sarasa and Asens 1998).

Clearly, this second model presents a weaker vision of civil society than that generally held in the U.K. and the United States. It also, however, offers suggestions about how civil society can be promoted in new democracies that have a powerful state tradition, and it identifies a clear role for the state in that enterprise. The U.K. model, by contrast, sees civil society as an entity that can be built only from the "bottom up" and over time.

These differences in perception regarding civil society are important when it comes to defining NGO policies in support of that entity in Latin America. It is important to bear them in mind, for the examples in this article come from U.K. and Irish NGOs-or NGOs in countries that conceive of civil society as a "bottom-up" project of change.

NGOs EMBRACE CIVIL SOCIETY

Why have European NGOs adopted the idea of civil society as the core of their activities in Latin America? How have agencies that exist primarily to alleviate poverty and promote economic development become so committed to supporting democratization? In part, the NGOs are simply respond- ing to the political agenda in Latin America as democratization has come to dominate regional events. In the democratization process, NGOs are particularly concerned with the emphasis on elite accommodation and institution building and its concomitant impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Trocaire, the largest Irish NGO working in Latin America, argues that in Brazil, one of major challenges facing democracy has been the issue of "citizenship: making every Brazilian a citizen in a truly participative democracy" (Trocaire 1994). Formal democratization, or the introduction of elections, for example, Trocaire sees as insufficient. By contrast, in the early 1980s, Trocaire would almost certainly have identified poverty as the central issue rather than concerning itself with the political system.

NGOs have begun to focus on civil society for four reasons. First, the term is increasingly used throughout Europe to express commitment to political and social change based on the resurrection of the values of community, social associations, and individual rights. Second, the changes in the mode of delivery of European aid have made NGOs more sensitive to the demands of international donors. Third, NGOs assign growing

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importance to the concept of international civil society, the activities of nonstate actors and transnational activism. Finally, civil society has emerged as a project for democratic empowerment in Latin America. NGOs have been influenced by a sense that civil society is the term that captures the complex reality and current state of development of Latin America's popular movements.

Civil society became an important concept in European social science in the 1990s, partly because intellectuals self-consciously used the term in trying to explain transitions in Eastern and Central Europe (Kopecky 1999). For NGOs, talking about civil society rather than "social movements" has thus been a way of placing Latin American democratization and social struggles within a broader, comparatively mainstream framework. Indeed, for many in the NGO community, the two terms social movements and civil society were initially virtually interchangeable. Given the term's origins within the liberal, antistate tradition, furthermore, equating social movements with civil society also seemed a less radical and thus less controversial approach.

International policymakers also took up the term civil society in the early 1990s. The Committee for Aid and Development (CAD), aid- coordinating agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, along with the World Bank, the United Nations Develop- ment Program (UNDP), and the EU, have all drawn attention to the importance of supporting civil society as a strategy favoring development and democratization (European Commission 1996a; European Parliament 1998; Smillie and Helmich 1993). The EU, for example, has tried to pursue development cooperation policies that promote "the rule of law and the

participation of civil society" (European Commission 1995, 7). The aid regime in all EU member states now links aid to improvements in political systems, the introduction of some form of democratic governance, and evidence of increased respect for human rights. The introduction of so- called political conditionality (Stokke 1995) in Europe has led to the

emergence of a Europewide discourse on development that emphasizes the importance of good governance, democratization, and reform of the state. As for the European Commission, "strengthening the networks drawn from civil society" (1996a, 1996b), developing "associational life" in

recipient countries, and "empowering civil society" are phrases used increasingly by all donors to describe the kind of development policies they wish to support. It would seem, then, that NGOs have been influenced

by and have adapted to intellectual trends in contemporary Europe and the thinking of official aid donors.

This apparent convergence of interests on the philosophical basis of

European aid reflects the new mode of aid delivery. Since the early 1990s, European NGOs have established a much closer relationship with official donors because of new governance networks in aid policy (Rhodes 1997)



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that incorporate NGOs in policy design and delivery. Fowler and James argue that "expressed in 1986 prices the flow of foreign aid channeled through NGOs rose from $2.7 billion in 1970 to $7.2 billion in 1990" (1994, 5). This trend has been further encouraged by the EU's endorsement of decentralized cooperation, which identifies NGOs as key civil society actors in Europe and as important vehicles for aid delivery. Development NGOs are now "looked to as vehicles ... to promote empowerment, civic education and domestic reform" (Robinson 1995, 360, 367). It has been estimated that the EU alone cofinanced 1,467 aid projects in Latin America in conjunction with European NGOs between 1992 and 1995 (Freres 1998, 415).

As a result of this new relationship, resource dependency is growing between NGOs and states. It affects countries in which the state has traditionally funded much NGO activity, such as Germany and Sweden, as well as countries in which NGOs once tended to maintain financial independence from government, such as the U.K. Thus the 1990s aid regime blurred the distinction between aid channeled through NGOs and bilateral aid programs by EU member states; NGOs became a vital component of bilateral aid regimes. European NGOs are thus being encouraged to use the language of the major donors in an effort to secure funding and to legitimate their work. Use of the term civil society undoubtedly allows them to fit into the donor community's concept of what should be done to support democratization, and it has strengthened their presentation of themselves as agencies with a comparative advantage over the state and the private sector in terms of aid provision.

Part of the attraction of the civil society project for NGOs lies in the clear role it delineates for them as international nonstate actors. Interna- tional civil society is becoming the arena for social activism in a system that is seen as increasingly interconnected or "global," a system in which the state's capacity to regulate or effect change has diminished. In the NGOs' view, globalization means that states can no longer be the chief focus for transformative social reform projects; NGOs themselves are the principal vehicles for global change.

This self-image extends to democratization in Latin America. Euro- pean NGOs argue that they have a particularly dynamic role to play beyond that of giving aid to Latin American counterparts. In their view, they are

directly involved in the task of building local civil societies through "international civil society," which involves giving international advocacy and transnational networking a role. Civil society now "represents the arena where modern forms of political agency take root" (Colas 1997, 3). NGOs have high expectations for the scope of transnational activism and an equally strong belief in "value-based advocacy networks" (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 200).

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It would be no exaggeration to say that European NGOs currently see the development of transnational activism as a key to their work in Latin America. Save the Children Fund in the U.K., for example, claims that its approach includes "the development of partnerships with NGOs, local authorities, international NGOs and a number of local interest groups, [and] businesses." Thus, "in recognition of the dynamic role to be played by local actors, particular emphasis is experiences, through action orien- tated research, training, capacity building, exchanges networking and information work" (Save the Children Fund [sic] 1996).

Thus European NGOs are increasingly cooperating in horizontal relationships across state boundaries, undertaking information exchanges and project planning as well as projects and advocacy activities. They express a growing commitment to the formation of a "transnational ethical network" that centers on supporting democratization and establishing relations of equality (Grugel 1999). Their participation in the network is an affirmation of their desire to promote a moral, nonmarket approach to development and democracy. The network emphasizes accountability and the democratization of social relationships, not only within states but also between transnational nonstate actors. Their collaboration in this way serves as a partial counterbalance to European NGOs' role as implementers of official aid policy.

The final reason for the prominence of civil society in the discourse of European NGOs is rather more complex and less instrumental. It is an indication that European NGOs have been sensitive to the changes that took place in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. European NGOs, from the outset of their first period of activity there in the 1970s, had viewed Latin American base communities, popular organizations, and social movements as allies and partners. During the struggles to overthrow dictatorial rule, European NGOs drew on academic studies that highlighted the

importance of popular organizations, self-help groups, neighborhood committees, peasant associations, and the spontaneous and unorganized activities of people in mass protests. This gave rise to tremendous optimism about the strength of association networks in Latin America and their capacity to promote democracies that would redistribute power and wealth in the region. Special emphasis was placed on apparently powerful social movements as agents that could effect sweeping change, instead of traditional political organizations, parties, or trade unions. As Escobar and Alvarez put it,

today's social movements ... do not restrict themselves to traditional political activities, such as those linked to parties and state institutions. Rather they challenge our most entrenched ways of understanding political practice and its relations to culture, economy, science and nature. (1992, 7)



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During the first phase of democratization in the 1980s, European NGOs supported dynamic social movements as instruments both to put an end to dictatorship and to challenge newly appearing "socially disembedded democracies" (Chalmers et al. 1997, 552), systems in which the formal democratization of political institutions was not accompanied by change in social relationships. Support for social movements seemed to be the way to create socially meaningful democracies. European NGOs extended their contacts with Latin American social movements throughout that decade; most argued that development and democratization meant challenging the persistence of authoritarian political practices and cultures from below, as well as eliminating social injustice and exclusion. As a result, European NGOs developed practices to support local movements throughout Latin America. Their key aim was to help local NGOs and social movements develop survival strategies in the face of economic hardship and political repression. Their strategies differed substantially from those of the European political parties, which had expressed support mainly for political reform throughout the late 1970s and 1980s (Grugel 1996). The NGOs were more concerned with policies to support or create basic social and economic entitlements than with formal democratic mechanisms.

By the beginning of the 1990s, however, Latin American social movements were, on the whole, weaker and more fragmented than they had been a decade earlier. This is not the place to debate the multiple and complex reasons why social movements in Latin America diminished in

importance with democratization. But we do need to note that the initial burst of optimism regarding the emergence of a coherent set of popular movements with the common goal of effecting radical political transformation collapsed as the movements disintegrated, as their impact on the state subsided, and as their leadership was coopted into mainstream politics once the democratic transitions were well under way.

As a result, European NGOs reluctantly concluded that simply supporting social movements as a strategy for change was insufficient. Social movements, it seemed, had been united as a distinct social sector only because of the particular circumstances of dictatorship. The end of authoritarianism signified the resurgence of competing social projects, less overtly "political" activity by a number of social movements, and an endorsement of private individual action for some. Social movements in Latin America were also, on the whole, too weak to resist the imposition of elite democratization or even dramatic reductions in social provisions that accompanied the reorganization of the state.

This realization, however, did not undermine the European NGOs' conviction that stable democratization requires profound social change. It was clear, nevertheless, that such change would only come about slowly and not automatically after the establishment of electoral democracy. The outbursts of mass popular action in the social movements of the 1980s and

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the Latin American tradition of popular organization for political purposes were far from precursors of consistent and strong civil societies based on active social organizations, autonomous from political pressure, involving a culture of citizenship and tolerance. The collapse of the social movements was interpreted as the result of weak civil societies; this very weakness was then held up as a cause of unstable and uneven democratization.

Drawing on the growing interest in civil society theory in academia, a number of democratization studies began to delineate precisely what might constitute a strong civil society, how it might be created, and how it might relate to political society and the state during democratization. Democracy, it was now argued, was based on "the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security ... the right to share ... to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society" (Marshall 1964, 71-72), as well as the creation of formal institutions, such as elections and competitive parties. Alternatively, democracy was ultimately "the right to have rights" (Jelin 1996). Democratization thus came to involve the creation of social citizenship. Seen from this perspective, democracy could only acquire meaning at the micro level of social relationships and therefore would

require substantive social change as well as formal institutional reorganization.

The main obstacles to substantive democracy in Latin America, according to Oxhorn (1995), are the strength of the state tradition and the

tendency of political society to incorporate and swallow up social

organizations. ForJelin, the explanation for civil society weakness in Latin America lies ultimately in the persistence of a culture of deference. Thus,

even when formally defined and agreed rights existed in theory, in everyday life people did not act upon them; they did not demand them, did not act upon them and did not take possession of them. In general, the lower social sectors treated their subordinate position as normal, thereby confirming the view that social hierarchies were the natural order of things. (Jelin 1995, 87)

In the wake of this kind of research, building up civil society was

gradually conceived of as a way to democratize Latin America. It

emphasized the importance of a long-term transformation of society and of agency. According to this view, strong civil societies were not an automatic consequence of democratization but instead depended on embedding social norms and cultures of tolerance and respect, establish-

ing diverse social spaces, dismantling patrimonial and clientelistic social

practices, living with difference, and, fundamentally, turning individuals into citizens. At the same time, observers began to see democratization as the only stable way to promote economic and social change.



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This kind research influenced the NGOs' perception of development and democratization. Civil society as a project capable of transforming politics, society, and culture in Latin America was taken up enthusiastically by European NGOs as a long-term strategy for the region. Above all, it implied the design of strategies for developing citizenship.

At the macro level, this implied challenging cultures of populism, clientelism, and authoritarianism, which had long prevented the poor from participating in society. At the micro level, it suggested the implementation of small-scale projects with the poor and marginal groups, not just to alleviate poverty, as in the past, but also to support social groups and local NGOs fighting for their rights as citizens.

CASE STUDIES: NGOS FROM THE U.K. AND IRELAND

In practice, European NGOs support the development of Latin American civil society basically in two very different ways: project work and advocacy activities.2 The U.K. and Ireland are not major contributors of state or NGO aid to Latin America; U.K. NGOs spend only about 10 percent of their budgets in the region (Grugel 1998). Nevertheless, U.K. and Irish NGOs have traditionally been among the best organized in Europe and have been especially prominent in the shift toward civil society promotion as a development strategy. For these reasons they were selected for analysis.

Support for small-scale projects in Latin America is the most traditional form of NGO activity. Project work means either directly supervising, staffing, or running a development project in Latin America or supporting a local NGO or social movement to do so with funds or training. As an approach, it assumes that civil society, democracy, and development should be built from the bottom up; because many of the projects aim to supply the means to alleviate economic hardship, it also links democracy most closely with economic entitlements.

U.K. NGOs are engaged in a number of small-scale projects, which, they argue, will contribute to democratization by promoting the participation of poor, marginalized, and excluded groups, both economically and politically. A good example involves two small U.K. NGOs, Coda and Womankind, and a Nicaraguan collective of women builders, the Maria Jose Talavera Collective in Condega. The collective was formed in 1987 with eight members. It erects small houses and makes concrete blocks for use by the construction industry. Forming the collective was a solution to problems such as high unemployment, women's exclusion from formal sector employment, a sexist work culture that prevents male employers from taking on female laborers, and poor women's need to provide for themselves and their dependents.

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Supporting the collective promotes democratization: it gives the women rights by incorporating them into the workforce. It also helps to alleviate their poverty. In 1992 Coda organized courses for the members to train them as electricians and thereby widen their employable skills, while in 1994 Womankind organized a series of courses on health and safety in the workplace. The collective has since expanded and created employment options for other women in Condega. Cooperation among the three organizations continues.

Other projects supported by U.K. NGOs include a series of initiatives to integrate women into the workplace across Latin America, funded by the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR). Examples include technical assistance projects undertaken by a number of specialized NGOs; projects to promote democracy and participation, such as funding schools and financing newspapers and radio stations; resettlement and indigenous human rights programs in Central America (CAFOD); and work to

reintegrate street children and prostitutes into mainstream society (Childhope, ActionAid, and Womankind).

Few Irish NGOs are active in Latin America. Trocaire, which is

supported by the radical wing of the Irish Catholic Church, is almost alone in having carried out sustained activity in the region since the 1970s. It

spends nearly IRti2 million a year in Latin America, most of which supports projects run by local NGOs. Priorities include human rights, indigenous rights (especially in Brazil), conflict resolution, and the integration of women into the workplace and decisionmaking. In particular, Trocaire has

provided support to Peruvian NGOs to set up human rights education

programs and to offer legal assistance to workers, unions, and community groups. For several years, it has also helped Brazilian NGOs that promote the dignity offavela dwellers, including their right to be consulted about

housing plans and urban development. Trocaire argues that housing is a social good and cannot be subject solely to the demands of the market.

Promoting democratization through project work has also transformed NGO project assessment. Empowering Latin American civil societies means not only developing strategies to resist authoritarian cultures there, but also challenging traditional North-South patterns of international NGO activity. Hence European and Latin American NGOs try to overcome the traditional hierarchies. Project evaluation was traditionally seen as the job of the "authority" or "expert" and as the responsibility of the financial "owner" of the project (the European NGO). Evaluation focused on financial accountability and value from the donor's perspective. Now many projects are evaluated, at least in principle, from the

perspective of what they have contributed to development and democratization in Latin America. The evaluators tend to come from Latin America, normally another NGO that has had no relationship with the project, and evaluation is no longer the donor's job. This has increased the cost of



GRUGEL: NGOS

projects and has also, to some degree, bureaucratized project assessment, but it has also placed the two sides on a more equal footing. At the same time, it has contributed to diffusing power and responsibility among NGOs. Living Earth Foundation from the U.K. and Tierra Viva from Venezuela, which used a third Latin American NGO to assess their joint operations, describe the advantages of this form of assessment:

The strategy of working with an external evaluation body was ... to accompany and support the identification of important elements for the development of projects. To highlight aspects which needed to be reworked or redefined in terms of projects. To maintain an objective vision of the development of the project .... The external evaluation contributed to the process of continuous evaluation, highlighting certain elements and facilitating strategies to correct aspects which had not been picked up by the Tierra Viva team, for example reinforcing the diagnosis element of the training and development of thematic units. (Tierra Viva 1995, 29)

The kind of activity European NGOs undertake in international advocacy networks is very different from project-based activities. It is considerably more ambitious in that it aims to mobilize international society in support of democratization strategies. Potentially, it affects the lives of far more people than project-based work. In the U.K., some NGOs, in collaboration with Latin American partners, are lobbying states and the U.N. to promote a final resolution of Latin America's "dirty wars" of the 1980s. For the NGOs involved, this means more than bringing former Armed Forces or death squad members to trial. They place more emphasis on finding out the fate of the disappeared, tracing victims, and creating a social climate in which the victims' families receive respect and recognition for their loss.

U.K. NGOs, most notably Save the Children, also lobby to clarify the fate of the disappeared in Central America. They support a local NGO in El Salvador, Pro-Search (Pro-Busqueda), which tries to trace children who disappeared during the civil war of the 1980s. Save the Children also

cooperates with the Olaf Palme Foundation, the University of Central America in San Salvador, and the Institute for Human Promotion (INPRHU) in Nicaragua to develop programs to rehabilitate children traumatized by violence. NGOs press Central American governments to incorporate a charter of children's rights into their constitutions. Some European states, notably Spain, Italy, France, and Sweden, have indicated their willingness to support NGOs working on these problems, indicating very successful lobbying by the NGOs.

Collaboration between U.K. and Latin American NGOs has, in a few cases, caused advocacy projects to snowball. One example is how Save the Children has been drawn into promoting an AIDS education network in Latin America. Save the Children identified AIDS education and prevention as a Latin American priority in the early 1990s. Collaborating with the

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Peruvian Institute for Education and Health (IES), it produced a textbook about AIDS for use in Peru's schools. Contact was established with a Cuban NGO, and the three organizations are working on a similar text for use in that country. Meanwhile, Save the Children has brought in another British NGO, the U.K. Aids Consortium, for advice and assistance. Although this group has no overseas experience or contacts, it is now working with Save the Children and two Brazilian NGOs, the AIDS Prevention Support Group (GAPA) and the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association on AIDS (ABIA). As a result, a South American Aids Consortium was set up in 1995 that is seeking funding for a comprehensive European-Latin American study of AIDS prevention.

Do NGOs CONnTRIUTE TO LATIN AMERICAN DEMOCRATIZATION?

The sincerity and commitment of European NGOs to building more democratic, just, and egalitarian societies in Latin America are beyond doubt. But how effective is their strategy of local support and partnership? The impact of European NGO work and, by implication, that of all external

agents in terms of building civil societies in Latin America needs to be put in context and critically evaluated.

Given their increasingly important role in the European-Latin Ameri- can biregional relationship and, indeed, in the global context, NGOs have a concomitant political role as well. Yet a number of commentators have

pointed out the limitations of development through NGOs. Much of this criticism has come from sources close to the NGOs themselves. For

example, Edwards and Hulme have warned that the multiple mandates of

European NGOs may diminish both their sense of mission and their

capacity to provide effective services for their clients in the developing world: "there are signs that greater dependence on official funding may compromise NGO performance in key areas, distort accountability and weaken legitimacy" (1996, 961). It has also been suggested that NGOs have become organizations that use the apparently radical idea of citizenship as a palliative at the expense of promoting structural change (Riddell and Robinson 1992). Other commentators have warned that the expanding role of NGOs in aid is itself a source of problems. Thus, "a danger is that some NGOs will become little more than contractors for government .... The

greater the level of financial dependence, the more fragile the degree of independence" (Smillie 1995, 119).

Academic observers of the impact of Northern NGOs on their Southern partners have also pointed to some negative effects of NGO activity. In a study of NGOs in Central America, MacDonald concludes that

many projects



GRUGEL: NGOS

either completely failed to contribute to the material well-being of the community or made contributions which were only marginal. Some problems are attributable to the faults of the agencies .... Many of the problems were associated with inadequate prior consultation with the communities involved .... To a large extent, however, failure occurred because of broader national forces over which the NGOs had no influence: international market forces, state and international donor policies, and so on. (1997, 144)

The pitfalls also include pressures (from donors and governments) to operate efficiently, questions of honesty, how representative and

socially embedded NGOs and their local partners are, and how well the NGOs can straddle two policy agendas: their own, based on a notion of civil society as people-centered development and democratization; and that of their funders, who use the term to mean capitalist modernization and liberalization. Yet another pressure is the magnitude of local and structural obstacles to democratization.

NGOs are not "perfect" organizations always on the side of poor or

marginal groups; nor are they always effective instruments of change. As Ndegwa points out in a study of African NGOs, the "evidence strikes at the heart of the thesis that civil society organizations such as NGOs necessarily invest their resources in support of democratization efforts" (1996, 1). Ndegwa's study reveals that a number of African NGOs have responded chiefly to governments rather than their supposed clientele. Others have lost local legitimacy through their dependence on funding sources from outside the country. These are also very real dangers for the NGO sector in Latin America. The financial dependence of Latin American NGOs on their European counterparts, furthermore, may keep them from developing mutual horizontal ties, may stifle initiatives, and may make them respond to the demands of external donors over those of their own local communities. Ndegwa warns that this was a consequence of financial

dependence for a number of African NGOs that lost touch with their own civil societies.

Aid strategies based on building up civil societies also bring particular problems. First, there are inevitable limitations to how far civil societies can be built from outside. If civil society is a set of social values as well as organizations, then those values need time to develop and flourish within communities. They cannot easily be "taught." Second, European NGOs

support projects only for a specified length of time. This can vary from one to five years, but they all eventually withdraw. This has frequently led to the collapse of the initiatives they have funded and sometimes to the disintegration of Latin American NGOs, which often depend on external funding to survive. Any strengthening of the fabric of Latin American civil societies through promoting local NGO activity may be only temporary.

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Finally, there is the question of whether the kind of projects European NGOs support are "right" for building civil society. Many of the

projects they fund, such as those described here, are at best a fragile way to strengthen civil society and deepen democracy because they depend on individuals to transform their immediate environment. International advo-

cacy networks try to challenge privileges embedded in the state or the international order through international activism, but they, too, are limited in the issues they can address. Therefore gains in citizenship may not

necessarily survive beyond the life of a project, and rarely challenge the

system of social and political privilege that NGOs identify as the root

impediment to democracy in Latin America. Citizenship gains of this kind are easily reversed.

This is not to suggest that the work of European NGOs is unimpor- tant. Conveying international solidarity, working to construct idealistic visions of democracy and a transformed global order, moving toward

partnership and equality with similar and like-minded social groups in Latin America are undoubtedly important steps toward building better societies and a fairer global order. But NGOs, especially foreign-based NGOs, may not be the main vehicle for building substantive democracy in Latin America. NGOs cannot work miracles; they cannot and should not be expected to overcome, through goodwill or even good practice, the absence of democracy in Latin American social and political relations and

productive practices, which are rooted in historically and culturally embedded power structures. The importance of European NGOs, then, lies ultimately in making the point that building democracy requires social and international changes; it is not merely a question of finding the "right" formula for state institutions. But international activism of this kind signifies a commitment to change; it is not a solution in its own right.

NOTES

1. The author thanks Christian Freres and Antonio Sanz of AIETI for facilitating access to information about this project.

2. The information in this section comes from a survey of the documentation of a number of U.K. and Irish NGOs carried out in 1996 and 1997. A series of interviews with employees and coordinators from selected NGOs was also conducted. More detailed reports can be found in Freres, ed. 1997, 1998. A list of the NGOs consulted during the research can be found in the appendix of both volumes.



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Documents

Special Issue: The European Union and Latin America: Changing Relations || Romancing Civil Society: European NGOs in Latin America