Protest against TTIP. Demotix/Rachel Megawatt.All rights reserved.The emergence in 2011 of the pro-democracy movements of the Arab
Spring and the anti-austerity and anti-capitalist movements captured the public’s imagination
the world over.
From April-September 2013 we conducted
research in Athens, Cairo, London and Yerevan
and our aim was to build on and expand the existing research
on these new movements, not only by including new sites (e.g., London,
Yerevan) thus far overlooked
by
other scholars, but also by examining
the relationship of the activists
with more formal civil society actors including non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), trade unions, and political parties.
While media and academic coverage have suggested that the protestors were ordinary citizens
who had little or no connection with formal civil society
organisations, we
wanted to look a little deeper into the situation: to ask, how do
today’s activists relate to NGO's?
Is it possible to do sustained activism
to bring about social change without becoming part
of a ‘civil society industry’ through fundraising
structures and engagement with government?
Based on our research in four very different settings, we found some common
trends in the ways in which highly institutionalized and highly spontaneous actors interact.
We discovered that while at
first glance, NGO’s seem
disconnected from recent
street activism, this assessment was only partially correct and that the situation is more complicated.
While NGO’s did not initiate the demonstrations
in any of the cities where we conducted fieldwork or indeed play an active role in square
occupations, there
was NGO involvement behind
the scenes. NGO’s provided non-monetary resources
and individual NGO employees
participated in their personal capacity. The boundaries
between the formal NGO’s and informal
groups of activists blurred,
and there was much more cross-over and
collaboration than meets the eye.
Here are some of the main findings in our explanation of this phenomenon, which we
call surreptitious symbiosis.
Surreptitious symbiosis
We found that activists
often revile ngo’s for their relationship to power and money,
and what many described
as their loss of values and mission. But on closer consideration, the relationship between activists
and NGO’s turned out to be a more complex.
Activists rely on NGO’s for technical
support for things like meeting space and printing
to avoid direct
reliance on the material logic of fundraising, and at times even for legal aid.
Individuals involved
in activism, meanwhile,
also sometimes work for NGO’s, often relying on them for their expertise. Those who do work for NGO’s often experience them as constraining, supporting
protest and direct action networks. Junior NGO staff and occasionally senior
staff do participate in these networks to escape the constraints imposed, implicitly
or explicitly, by their NGO employers. We found that although some activists roundly rejected and
criticized the ‘managerialism’ of NGO’s,
other activists recognised that
their activities took a more institutional shape, but were creating alternative
spaces as well as new practices and forms of organizing which preserved the
ideational and emancipatory logic of activism.
Activists continue to denounce and in
some cases, openly oppose, NGO’s that have embraced the material and coercive
logics of the market and state respectively.
Yet alongside the critiques and denunciations, there are also
mutually-beneficial, albeit ‘below the radar’, interactions between NGO’s and
activists.
Thanks precisely to
this phenomenon
of surreptitious
symbiosis, we found that it
is possible to
do sustained
activism to
bring about
social change without
becoming part
of a ‘civil society industry’. But can this
be sustained in the longer term? The current relationship between activists and NGO’s, based on individual ties, is one which both sides are typically
keen to keep under the radar. It allows NGO staff to engage with and support movements
and activists and to feel as though they are making a difference without having to make that relationship public. For NGO’s, given the growing competition
for funding and pressure from both governments and donors in which NGO’s
are required to demonstrate
their professionalism and efficiency, being too close to movements that are radically critical of governments could be seen as endangering NGO contracting relationships or grant-based support. But this
approach was also convenient
for activists as it allowed them to present themselves as entirely distinct from NGO’s, remaining ‘clean’ and autonomous in their own eyes and those of others.
Is ‘surreptitious
symbiosis’ a temporary or a lasting phenomenon?
Below we sketch three, not mutually exclusive, scenarios.
NGO’s and movements: three possible scenarios
In the first scenario, our cyclical logic would predict that those activists who have continued to be active, a few years on from the peak of the movement,
will increasingly seek new
ways to fund or be funded, and to (re-)engage with the state and its policies.
Both of these processes are occurring as some movements attempt to institutionalize
and scale up. Still, these forms of institutionalization are perceived by the
activists as different from NGO’s, just as NGO’s are different from the trade
unions or political parties who used to be much more prominent actors in civil
society.
Our second scenario focuses on the emancipatory potential of the NGO staff that have immersed themselves
in recent activism. This tendency, combined with pressure from outside on NGO’s to prove
their continued relevance, may rejuvenate and
re-radicalize NGOs from within,
challenging the cosy relations some NGO’s
have with donors and the state
and instead emphasizing reconnection with grassroots
activism. This optimistic scenario would
require not only the participation of individual (junior) staff, but also
shifts in NGO leadership and organizational culture which may be difficult to
achieve. In this scenario the symbiosis would become more sustained and lose its surreptitious
character.
Finally, in a third scenario, if ngo’s
cannot be rejuvenated and re-radicalized from within, then the opposition
between activist groups and NGO’s may grow. It is clear
that the future of NGO’s is under threat: after a decade of virulent criticism, distrusted by governments and the general public alike, in a hostile financial
climate, they may have outlived their purpose, and may wither, die or
become hybrid organisations such as social businesses.
While for some activists this would be
a vindication, the demise of NGO’s could also have an
unexpected indirect
impact on
the more radical activism
that has
sought to
distance itself
from the lure of money and
jobs, but
has surreptitiously
also relied
on it. In other words, despite activists’ criticism
and their uneasy relationship with NGO’s, the demise of the latter would be the
loss of a valuable kind of ally.
It remains to be seen whether the move
towards institutionalization which we are beginning to witness can – as the
activists themselves insist – be distinct from older patterns of NGO
institutionalization.
For the full version, see “Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement between
activists and NGOs” by Marlies Glasius and
Armine Ishkanian, published in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit
Organizations.
