Non-government Organizations in Transnational Environmental Politics Social Science Research Council -MacArthur Foundation Program on International Peace and Security Spring 1999      "NGO" is an identity taken on by—or foisted upon—social movements when they become actors in the once-exclusive domain of older, more familiar structures of governance. The title "non-governmental" signifies that these organizations are newly-recognized as legitimate agents in political processes that previously took place in the terrain of nation-states and multilateral institutions (coalitions of states). Discourses about "devolution" and "globalization" often exaggerate the decline of the state. But events of the last decade have highlighted the limitations of nation-states as structures for managing transnational phenomena—such as international financial markets, or global warming and biodiversity loss—and certain local ones—such as the assertion of political agency by ethnic and religious movements. Policy makers have come to see NGOs as useful vehicles for dealing with these problems and for mediating between governments and disenfranchised or unruly sectors of society.      Transnational coalitions of NGOs are creating and operating in a new political space in the penumbra of emergent organs of global governance, such as multilateral environmental institutions. But a look at the context in which the concept of "NGOs" arose points to some ways in which NGO politics may not be as new as it appears to be.      Internationally, the 1970s - 1980s saw the eclipse of the long-dominant paradigm of state-guided modernizing development and the renewal of neoclassical economics and its policy incarnation, neoliberalism. The period also witnessed the defeat or retreat of many anti-colonial movements that had espoused a stronger role for centralized states in economic processes. Many NGOs in the developing world were founded by anti-colonial activists who had come to believe that state power was either not soon achievable or not adequate to their emancipatory ideals.      Many such movements adopted more formal—or more Western—forms of organization and took on the title "NGO" in order to make use of aid funds made available by the UN, charities in industrialized states, and bi- and multilateral aid agencies. Neoliberal programs in the global South, enforced by structural adjustment conditionalities, have brought reduction of state roles in production, social services, and pricing and allocation of vital assets (food, fuel, land, and housing) along with monetary and trade liberalization.      World Bank compensatory programs channeled meager but symbolically important resources to NGOs to enable them to ameliorate the disastrous—but supposedly temporary—local consequences of market-managed globalization. These agencies often prefer to bypass states and support NGOs because they perceive developing-country governments to be incapable, corrupt, or ideologically tainted. Also, neoliberal analysts can theorize NGOs as organs of civil society that arise, somehow naturally, to make up for short-term market failures. Thus, advocates of market-centered development models can endorse NGOs and still avoid acknowledging that their market models are failing in practice and worsening the conditions that the NGOs are being funded to amend.      Many governments that had been hostile to NGOs learned to accommodate, control, or co-opt NGOs, adopting the discourse of participation. States, entrepreneurs, and civil servants made redundant by state shrinkage set up "NGOs" of their own to tap the new trickle of aid funds. Many types of NGOs have arisen, representing a wide spectrum of social interests and agendas. For those born of radical social justice or ethnic autonomy movements, there is an ever-present tension between the compromises required to retain a share of the funding or "a seat at the table" and the desire to remain accountable to their bases and committed to their foundational ideals.      In the Caribbean where I was then working, it was leaders of women's, radical socialist, and Christian and Rastafarian social movements who documented and publicly decried the devastating social effects of deflationary structural adjustment and the model of export-dependent development on which it was based, even as they struggled to fill gaps lefts by debilitated state welfare programs. It was their voices, along with the spread of "IMF riots," that made those effects impossible to ignore.      For all this, the voices of NGOs are crucially important in exposing crises that state and supra-state institutions would not otherwise confront. This is clearly evident with regard to international environmental problems, the focus of my current research. Green social movements that gained momentum after the 1960s, and the environmentalist NGOs that grew out of them, have forced the problems of climate change and biodiversity destruction onto the international political stage. With rare exceptions, governments, UN agencies, and the World Bank had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward a limited acknowledgment of the urgency of these problems.      The impact of green movements is reflected in the two major environmental treaties--the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity--signed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. However, most governments seek interpretations of these treaties that require the least possible constraint upon their own economic freedom of action. Thus far, the actual changes in policies and practices achieved by the treaties have been far from enough to stem the dangerous trends they are meant to address.      In this context, NGOs remain a vital sources of pressure for more far-reaching change. The very existence of these transnational environmental institutions creates a political space in which NGOs can articulate issues and propose actions that traditional political actors will not, because to do so would challenge powerful sectors of industry and the political institutions and ideologies that have co-evolved with them.      But within the NGO camp are deep divisions. Risking oversimplification, I will distinguish two main categories of environmental NGOs. Some see sustainability as a difficult but primarily technical challenge, one that can be met by rational management practices. Others see environmental sustainability as fundamentally a social problem, solutions to which will requires more equitable distribution of environmental resources, both intragenerationally and intergenerationally.      Mainstream conservationist NGOs have been key in constructing the discourses, institutions, and practices of international environmental managerialism. Along with politically mobilized scientists, they wrote much of the text of what became the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). They continue to shape its implementation and provide much of the data meant to guide treaty deliberations. In the process, however, some of them have moved from their traditional preservationism to a technocratic-reformist approach I call "green developmentalism."      Green developmentalism tries to use market mechanisms to manage "natural capital." It relies on the economic valuation of natural resources, (generally calculated with reference to international market prices) and on property rights, including intellectual property rights. It is consistent with the priorities of the World Bank and the agendas of industrial-country governments. It helps to fosters the comforting illusions that we can have both greening and virtually unlimited growth and that environmental problems can be solved within present constellations of political and economic power. In effect, green developmentalism demands that nature earn its own right to exist in the international marketplace through the sales of ecosystem services (permits to pollute), ecotourism destinations, and genetic information (through biodiversity prospecting contracts). The danger, in my view, is that this strategy of "selling nature to save it" will transfer even more of the world's environmental assets and benefits to global elites.      NGOs of quite a different type oppose the treatment of nature and knowledge as tradable commodities. Representatives of indigenous peoples, peasant agriculturalists, and their allies are increasingly organized and vocal in the CBD and international biopolitics. Their objections to the buying and selling of nature are based on practical, ethical, and epistemological grounds. They have called, among other things, for "alternatives to the existing IPR system" and "a moratorium... on bioprospecting and ethnobotanical collections within indigenous peoples' territories."      This transnational coalition of opponents to "property in life" includes locally and regionally based movements, strongest in South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. What most distinguishes these NGOs is their insistence that "global" responses to environmental crises can have little success in the face of extreme social inequality. Just as development in any meaningful sense will require increased democracy and greater equality, so does environmental sustainability depend upon environmental justice, they say. These movements re-politicize international environmental discourse, unmasking state and private agendas that are often advanced behind the purported objectivity and efficiency of market-based resource management and the claimed neutrality of global managerialist institutions.      Within the new political space of international environmental institutions, conflicts continue between advocates of moderate reforms and more radical responses. These tensions have grown in intensity, I suggest, because attempts at international environmental regulation are reanimating long-standing disputes over international wealth and power gaps and over the means to and the meaning of "development"—conflicts that have been displaced from other international fora, at least until recently, by the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism.  back to top