But what explains the reason why some developing countries possess so few independent organizations while others have a multitude?

Take Pakistan for instance. Whereas in Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, NGOs have played such a prominent role that they have supplanted the state in some crucial areas, in Pakistan they are far less influential. Despite having 180 million people, the latter has relatively few important NGOs, think tanks, and independent monitoring organizations (IMOs), as pointed out by former ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam in his book Bangladesh and Pakistan. Despite a generally positive government attitude (at least towards domestic organizations) and much growth in recent years, the number of important institutions pales in contrast to Bangladesh’s total.

There are some excellent organizations (such as Kashf), but there is nothing quite like BRAC, Grameen Bank, and the other huge Bangladeshi NGOs. There is also far less scale and diversity than in India.

The situation is more or less the same when it comes to think tanks, IMOs, and other entities that might monitor, advise, or pressure the government. There are just four or five respectable think tanks, all of which are pretty small. IMOs are so uncommon that members of a working group on state building in Pakistan I chaired in October could not identify a single one.

The weakness of independent organizations even extends to the political arena, where two family-based political parties dominate, and the judiciary, which is often more beholden to local clans and powerbrokers than the law.

Pakistan’s underdeveloped civil society contributes to the country’s flawed political economy and partly explains its low level of human development. Politicians and officials feel little pressure to perform because there is no organized entity able to hold them accountable. The country’s poor are worse off than Bangladesh’s across a large number of indicators even though Pakistan’s income per capita is much higher.

None of this is a reflection on the generosity of Pakistanis, who generally do well on international comparisons of giving. According to the Pakistan Center for Philanthropy, charitable contributions make up nearly 1 percent of GDP, higher than India’s 0.6 percent and not far off from totals recorded in much richer countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The rate of giving in Bangladesh is closer to India’s than to Pakistan’s.

But, a relatively small share of this money is going to build institutions that contribute to state building and social development. The poor may be gaining adequate relief from destitution—the streets of Pakistan have far fewer beggars than India—in ways that did little to change the situations.

It is also not a reflection on the creativity of Pakistanis. There are some very innovative and successful civil society projects and NGOs in the country, but these are generally small in size and not well known beyond their immediate area of impact. They have contributed to Pakistan’s development, but not on the same scale as their larger brethren in other countries.

What then explains the weakness of the NGO sector in Pakistan?

One possibility might be the nature of Pakistani society. As Anatol Lieven describes in Pakistan: A Hard Country:

Society is strong above all in the form of the kinship networks which are by far the most important foci of most people’s loyalty. . . . the crucial question for Pakistan . . . is whether it is possible to create loyalties and ethics which transcend those of loyalty to kin.

Societies dominated by clans are more inclined to look to personal relationships for their needs and giving, seeing all impersonal institutions as being untrustworthy. Better to depend on someone you know than an organization run by people you do not know no matter how worthy the latter may seem.

Another possibility is the nature of the institutions that do spring up. As Akbar Zaidi explains in Economic and Political Weekly (subscription required):

Due to the lack of institutional development and institutional deepening, Pakistan’s macro and micro trajectory and development are highly dependent on the whims and fancies of the individual who happens to be in charge, whether at the national/country level, or as the head of a research centre or a public institution. . . .

Dynamic individuals may create innovative projects that have a real impact in a specific area, but unless they can develop a strong organization they are unlikely to ever be able to scale up to cover a large area.

The importance of individuals instead of organizations also contributes to the fragmentation of civil society, weakening its ability to bring about change. In Pakistan’s case, civil society tends to be focused on single issues (such as certain development issues or human rights goals) whereas the country really needs a comprehensive approach to development (that would, for instance, seek to promote both development and rights in an integrated fashion).

Zaidi continues:

For civil society in Pakistan . . . the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. . . . Many of them are the state’s partners, acquiring mutual benefits of some kind or the other. . . Development groups . . . are often co-opted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s “advisors” winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.

Civil society that cannot exist independent of the state, that hold values that prevent it from challenging those in power (whether for ideological or practical reasons), or that cater to the needs of the elite (as may be the case for some women’s groups in Pakistan) will be limited in its ability to promote progressive change.

A third reason might be the army’s long-standing domination of the political system. During General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship (1977-1988), for instance, the state sought to eliminate or discredit NGOs that it saw as a threat, leaving Pakistan’s civil society in a state of disarray. Men in uniform have ruled the country directly for roughly half of its existence, and indirectly for much of the rest of the time.

A fourth possibility is the heterogeneity of the country. Pakistan has much greater ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity than Bangladesh, making it more difficult for NGOs that do well in one place to expand elsewhere. Needs (including those related to management and dealing with officials) vary between regions, and even within them. India is also very diverse, but it is in some important ways more cohesive than Pakistan, having more established norms of governance and a more integrated elite.

Whatever the cause (and I welcome reader input on the explanation), this is one area where donors should be playing an important role.

Investing much more in researching, documenting, and building up the capacity of the more successful NGOs (whether directly or through the establishment of a local organization to do so) such that they could increase their reach and scale holds much promise. The better these are at management, raising funds from non-state actors, and performing their various tasks, the more influential and independent they will become, and the more likely they will grow into nationwide organizations on the scale of BRAC or Grameen Bank.

Establishing new NGOs in a few critical areas should also be a priority.

For instance, a think tank focused on increasing economic growth (as suggested to me by Haroon Sharif of DFID) could help promote policies (through research, lobbying, media relations, etc.) to achieve this aim.

An IMO focused on gathering and analyzing information related to one aspect of government service (such as education) would shed much needed light on the performance of the state, providing Pakistanis with more tools to hold leaders accountable.

An organization focused on building institutions that cater to the poor, such as the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, could make society more inclusive.

There are also many organizational models that have worked in India and Bangladesh that could be replicated in Pakistan.

Donors must, however, remember the necessity of nurturing the independence of these organizations if they genuinely want to help them grow. NGOs dependent on donors are unlikely to ever develop the capacity and relevance to make real impacts on their societies. The focus should be on building up organizations run by Pakistanis, fully funded by Pakistanis, and geared to meeting the needs of Pakistan.

* * *

NGOs are not a panacea. Despite the presence of strong civil society actors, corruption has reached alarming proportions in Bangladesh and India, and neither state has a government that is highly responsive to the needs of citizens, especially when they are poor. In Bangladesh’s case, an overdeveloped NGO sector may actually be contributing to the country’s abysmal governance by relieving the state of many of its responsibilities.

They are, however, a crucial element in a much larger system of elements that determine how development oriented a society and state will be. And they are pretty inexpensive to fund, especially given the limited alternative ways to influence the political economy and social development of a country like Pakistan.

Promoting NGOs that were strongly rooted in Pakistan society and eventually mostly self-funding and independent of both the state and foreign actors would ensure the maximum impact at the lowest cost. A lot could be accomplished with a relatively small sum of money, especially when compared to the total budgets allocated by Western governments to aiding Pakistan. $100 million, for instance, could help launch or strengthen a series of independent institutions. This is but one-fifteenth of USAID’s annual allocation for the country.

The biggest challenge may be managerial—some aid agencies are not entrepreneurial enough for these types of projects. But groups such as International Development Research Centre are.

Donors who want to help Pakistan and other fragile states would do well to make use of the NGO sector in a strategic way.

The above is based on my work chairing the working group on State Building in Pakistan during the 2011 Global Economic Symposium.

My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.

Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)

Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.

The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!

So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.  

But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.

We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media.  We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing.  And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.

But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts  - not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.

First, an excerpt from the New York Times yesterday.  We join Bono, a contributing columnist at the Times, as he’s setting out a list of 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years “more interesting, healthy or civil” – ideas which “have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.” Here’s number 3:

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.

Bono just endorsed contraction and convergence – a big deal, for three reasons.

First, it’s clear he gets the key things that you have to get. He gets that the real potential is not in everyone having equal per capita emissions, but in everyone having equal per capita emission entitlements - the difference being, as he says, that with the latter, trading enables low emitters to profit from it while still staying within the overall emissions budget. (Fuller explanation of that point here.)

He also gets, consequently, that we’re talking about a potentially very important new source of finance for development – one that’s different from aid. This is especially important when public finances are about to experience massive cutbacks in a lot of OECD donor countries, with aid budgets probably among the first casualties.

And he gets that the clock is ticking (“If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated”). As David and I note in the post-Copenhagen analysis we did for Brookings, the risk of waiting later and later and later to start talking seriously about developing countries’ fair share of the global emissions budget - something we’ve been doing for years, and are still doing now –  is that developing countries will find that all or most of the available carbon budget to 2050 will have been used up before they come to the table. Hardly promising conditions for a serious global deal.

Second, Bono’s advocacy is a big deal because it could really jump-start the process of strategic renewal so badly needed among the NGOs campaigning on climate change.

NGOs had an appalling year in the run-up to Copenhagen.  Throughout last year, the main NGO coalition, tcktcktck.org, was vague about its headline policy asks (“ambitious, binding, fair” – but no definition of what these words actually meant). Then the green NGOs blundered into the start of Copenhagen by proposing a peak year for global emissions two years later than the IPCC said was needed. And by the end of the summit, they had collapsed back into the usual rhetoric about rich countries bullying poor countries – overlooking, as Mark Lynas stressed in his must-read Guardian piece, the extent to which actually, something different was going on at the summit.

Last year saw development NGOs increasingly trying to push the wider civil society coalitions towards a more effective stance. They didn’t always (or even often) succeed; but behind the scenes, they were doing as much as they could. When that wasn’t enough, to their credit, agencies like Avaaz and Oxfam proved willing to break visibly with green NGOs on key issues – like what the global peak emissions year should be. So far, though, the ONE Campaign - with its very considerable advocacy firepower - has kept a low profile in all this.  Its main focus in the climate context has been on additional finance for development to tackle climate change – rather than on emissions trading as a source of additional finance for development.

Bono’s article potentially changes all that, given his passing acquintanceship with ONE.  If so, then the significance is not just that it brings another highly effective development NGO into play on the big game. It’s also that it potentially encourages the emerging development / climate coalition to focus on the two biggest questions on the table: what’s the size of a safe global emissions budget, and what’s the fairest way to share it out.

Love him or hate him, Bono’s one of the few people that can take a radical, very far-reaching idea like equal shares to the atmosphere as the foundation for a global deal on climate and just mainstream it – with the UN Secretary-General, with the World Economic Forum, with the Pope, whoever. Which bring me to the third reason why this is a big deal. Not only can Bono and the ONE Campaign pitch this idea to Ban Ki-moon, WEF or Benedict XVI. He can pitch it to the most important group of all right now: G77 leaders.

He can get access to the people who most need to recognise that not only is their solidarity with China on ‘no-targets-for-developing-countries’ harming their long term future by preventing a global climate deal, given that they’re in the front line of climate impacts – it’s also ensuring that they miss out on a potentially huge new flow of finance for development. A simple message that might, just might, get low income countries demanding their fair share of the atmosphere - in doing so, becoming some of the very strongest advocates of an effective global deal. Cross your fingers.

Well, David and I would like to see policymakers agree that emissions should peak right now, given that emissions have fallen so much as a result of the credit crunch. The development NGOs who are most active on climate change – Oxfam, Christian Aid and Tearfund, as well as Avaaz - are a little more cautious than that, arguing that emissions should peak by 2015; but they’re still basically on the same page as the IPCC, which said in its last Assessment Report (pdf - see table at the foot of page 15) that to limit global average warming between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees Celsius, global emissions must peak between 2000 and 2015.  Chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has also said that 2015 is the deadline.

Astonishingly, though, the main federation of environmental NGOs – the Climate Action Network - says that any time up to 2017 is fine. WWF International agree. TckTckTck used to say 2017 too (as I noted when they published their policy position); they’ve subsequently revised their target to 2015, but still have documents on their website using the old date. (Nothing like a consistent message, eh?)

Be very clear: this isn’t just hair-splitting. Once the peak date for emissions slides beyond 2015 and towards 2020, according to the IPCC, we’re heading for a world that’s not 2.0-2.4 degrees C warmer, but 2.4-2.8 degrees C. That is what the environmental NGOs are arguing for. Shortly before they spend a fortnight calling everyone else at the Copenhagen summit ”fossil of the day“. It’s breathtaking.

So, if you can’t make it to the summit but still want a way to take action and make your voice heard ahead of Copenhagen, how about this. First thing on Monday, get in touch with any environmental NGOs you support.  Ask them their position on the global peak emissions date. And if it’s any later than 2015, then cancel your subscription.

I’m not kidding. Policymakers aren’t the only ones at Copenhagen who need to be held to account. If the green NGOs can’t get their figures right on something this fundamental, this basic (even as the development NGOs manage it just fine) then they need to – what’s that phrase from the Bali summit? – “leave it to the rest of us; please, get out of the way“.

Weakness on China is especially egregious now that the country is above average global per capita emissions. Campaigners should be demanding that China ties itself to a date when its emissions will peak and then to commits to deep cuts by mid-century. (Armed with such a commitment, of course, China itself could then begin to turn the heat up on America – rather than allowing the US congress to bleat about US competitiveness.)

A failure to ask hard questions of China is bad for lower income countries. Not only will they suffer worst as the climate changes, they are going to wake up in ten years’ time to find that most of the global carbon budget for 2 degrees has been spent. Their interests are being sacrificed on the altar of G77 solidarity, with the global NGO community helping sharpen the knife.

The problem is similar, if less extreme, for the world’s other rising powers. Their per capita emissions may be lower than China’s and NGOs less terrified of offending them. But still, a country like India has 17% of the world’s population – which gives it quite a stake in our collective future. It is also massively vulnerable to a changing climate (especially as a lack of water disrupts food production).

But yet India is notoriously rubbish at international climate talks. So all the more credit to Malini Mehra, from the Center for Social Markets, for her persistent (and unusual) attempts to shine a light on India’s failings.

“In recent months, India has sought to challenge its image overseas, and in growing quarters at home, as recalcitrant and obstructionist on climate change,” she writes in her latest critique.

“[But] in a showdown this week with the old guard, the reformist environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, had to tone down his climate advice to India’s Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Political correctness won, but the loser was India’s climate security.”

Here’s the rest of her analysis:

In a tumultuous week for Indian climate politics that saw Delhi hosting a major UN technology and climate change conference, a regional meeting of South Asian environment ministers, a Sino-India climate change workshop, and MOUs with China, Japan and Norway, the political air is charged. As the week opened, the driver-in-chief of these high-level meetings, Jairam Ramesh, was engulfed in a firestorm over a leaked confidential communication to the Prime Minister.

As the Major Economies Forum got underway in London with Gordon Brown saying there was no ‘Plan B’ for Copenhagen, news broke in Delhi that Jairam Ramesh had allegedly proposed dumping the Kyoto Protocol, ditching the G77 in favour of the G20, and taking on carbon cuts without concomitant financial or technical guarantees. In a country with a well-entrenched political consensus on India’s role in international climate negotiations, the Minister’s alleged remarks were seized on as heresy. Partisan press reporting, well-oiled with anonymous quotes by India’s aggrieved negotiators and threats to resign, added fuel to the fire. Outraged opposition parties railed that the Minister had capitulated to the United States and NGOs charged him with damaging India’s credibility with developing country partners.

In the storm that followed, the papers were full of indignation at Ramesh’s supposed deviation from India’s traditional hard-line climate position, but silent on India’s climate risk.  No words spent on why it might make sense to be ‘flexible’ on climate change. No effort to explain why new approaches were imperative if India wanted to craft a fiendishly difficult global climate compact. Instead, everything was cast as a sell-out to western interests – an unedifying neo-colonial spectacle more focussed on political point scoring than protecting India’s people. Why is it that we are more concerned with doctrinal purity than climate catastrophe?

We have been down this road before. In July just after the G8 meeting in L’Aquila when Dr. Manmohan Singh acceded to language agreeing a 2 degree Celsius limit to warming, a similar political firestorm erupted. His actions were also interpreted as a capitulation to western interests and a restraint on India’s right to development.

Confusing degrees with percentages, some politicians screamed about agreeing to “two per cent” under U.S. pressure.  That the Maldives and Bangladesh were asking for a 1.5 degrees limit with much deeper emissions cuts by all nations, went unreported. As President Nasheed of the Maldives, the world’s lowest-lying island nation, said in Delhi last week: “with so much damage being caused by less than one degree of warming, why on earth would we aim for two degrees?” At present trends, we are heading towards a 6 to 7 degree world by 2100. As the world’s fourth largest emitter and potentially the worst victim of climate change, India cannot afford the complacency its political class is fostering. Our water and food security lie wounded, our coastal aquifers are turning saline, our glaciers are melting.

Ramesh’s suggested shift in India’s hard stance has created momentum in climate talks, forcing developed countries to contemplate much deeper cuts than they wanted. A new set of possibilities has thus opened up that might just manage to dispel mutual fears of inaction and mistrust. The Minister no doubt had to publicly step back towards the party-line on India’s climate negotiating position, but he opened a deadlocked debate and let fresh air in.

Interestingly, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and even Indonesia are all considering variations of domestic emissions peaking, national and sectoral caps – not in response to western arm-twisting but in response to increasingly unequivocal climate impact projections, energy security, development and economic competitiveness concerns. Though the uproar over his reformist advice has momentarily slowed his pace, a new political consensus on climate is forming. It has hidden, powerful supporters both within government and the opposition who are poised to occupy the climate spotlight and will have to respond to India’s 670 million farmers and 100 million fisherfolk who are sure to ask: “If you knew about this climate threat, why did you keep it from us and why did you not act in time?”

Meanwhile the science races on. Climate change is occurring faster and deeper than previously thought – while India’s politics remains stuck. Ramesh has let the reform genie out of the bottle. New constituencies are clamouring for change. Hopefully the world will finally get the debate it deserves and India the politicians we deserve.

Yes, it’s only February, but it seems pretty unlikely that anything will top this for sheer pointlessness and banality.

Alas, would that it were so.  With 121 days to go until December’s critical UN climate summit, it’s clear that Jobs, Justice, Climate was merely a prototype, a limbering up for the road to Copenhagen.

And so to ”tcktcktck.org“, who profess themselves to be building “the world’s biggest mandate for change”. They’re determined to “show our leaders people are ready for bold climate action, now”. So you might suppose that with that end in mind, they’d have some kind of idea of what constitutes sufficiently “bold climate action, now”.  But you’d be wrong.  Here’s their full policy platform, in glorious technicolour:

“An ambitious, fair and binding climate change agreement.”

That’s it. I tweeted tcktcktck HQ to ask if there was any more than this, and the reply I got said “Bear with us” – this from a campaign whose entire brand is built on the ”there’s not a second to lose” vibe.

Not that this lack of specificity has stopped tcktcktck from fanning out in pursuit of its fabulously vague objectives – oh no. Thus for example their “adopt a negotiator” platform:

…as we really want all of our countries to agree to a safe and fair Climate Change treaty in December, we decided to do something about it. That’s why we thought we would Adopt a Negotiator, and follow them through the many meetings, conference and events that they will take part in from now to December…

I asked an actual negotiator whether they had been adopted.  The reply: “Oh yes, them! They seem very nice, but I’m not sure what they actually want.”

Sigh. Welcome to NGO campaigning in 2009 - where it doesn’t matter whether you have anything to say, as long as you’re getting the donations, attention, members and airtime.

Update (28 August) – TckTckTck have just emailed to say:

Thanks for your blog post looking at TckTckTck. We’d been waiting for our site to officially launch so that we could point you and your readers to a resource that specifically addresses your questions. The site launched earlier this week, and we’ve put this page together for that purpose:

http://tcktcktck.org/about/the-deal-we-need

Actually, Peter’s right.  I said PPF had a “shockingly weak policy position: just warmed up leftovers from Make Poverty History”, and that there was almost nothing to it other than the traditional calls for more aid and less conditionality.  In fact, as Peter accurately points out, there IS more to PPF’s platform than that: he cites its positions on tax havens, reform of the IMF and World Bank, Green New Deals and investing in public services, for instance.

On the other hand, I don’t think I was exaggerating that much.  On some of these areas, as Peter admits, work is still underway within the PPF coalition to clarify its policy position.  And I stand by my argument that PPF’s position on a post-Kyoto climate deal really is shocking: the 2 degree C temperature limit it advocates has been EU policy since 1998, and says nothing about the much more fundamental issues of (a) what this means in terms of a climate stabilisation target expressed in parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent and (b) how the resulting global emissions budget ought to be shared out.

Still, fair’s fair: it was a snippy comment, and I should have reflected PPF more accurately.  But my deeper frustration with NGO coalitions like PPF remains. NGOs are supposed to set agendas; to open up new political space; to dream up big ideas about possible futures. Sure, you can’t pursue big ideas without big coalitions.  But equally, what’s the point of big coalitions without big ideas?

 What we have today is a situation in which civil society always seems to be one step behind the curve.  Back at the time of the Make Poverty History, for instance, it was clear to anyone that wanted to see it that climate change was the coming issue in international development.  Yet it was absent from MPH’s policy position; ironically, DFID’s 2006 White Paper was way ahead of where development NGOs had got to on climate.  (I remember thinking at the time: isn’t this supposed to work the other way round?)

Now, the context has changed again: and again, civil society is lagging.  Look around the international development landscape.  Scarcity issues like energy security, water scarcity and food prices are joining climate change as defining features on the map.  There’s serious cause for concern that the post-Cold War decline in conflict in developing countries may be bottoming out. The real discussion about power-shift in the international economy is finally starting. Security of supply is set to become the biggest issue in international trade (and has already led to the collapse of a developing country government.) Emissions trading holds out the potential to become the most important source of finance for development. And so on.

So where are all of these issues in the PPF policy platform? Nowhere!  Instead of opening up new agendas – at a time when vast tracts of virgin political space are opening up – NGOs are staying right in their comfort zone, articulating the same policy positions as they were five years ago.

Part of what makes this so frustrating is that some of the most exciting thinking on development over the last few years has in fact come out of the civil society domain.  Think of Matthew Lockwood‘s fantastic book on governance in Africa (written while he was at ActionAid), or Duncan Green‘s writing about active citizenship as the necessary concomitant of effective states (written while head of research at Oxfam).  Look at Tearfund‘s pathfinding work on climate change – way ahead of Stop Climate Chaos – or at the Bretton Woods Project’s work on IFI reform. Look at how Avaaz weaves multiple single issues together into a progressive package that’s more than the sum of its parts.

Above all, look at the people who don’t shy away from the question: ‘what would a definitive solution to [insert name of global challenge here] look like?’.  You may agree or disagree with the proposals for global currency reform set out in George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent (now endorsed, six years later, by the People’s Bank of China).  You may or may not accept Aubrey Meyer‘s proposal that convergence to equal per capita emission rights is the most realistic way of sharing out a global emissions budget (now endorsed by Nick Stern, Kemal Dervis, and governments from Africa to India).  But in either case, these are both people who are asking the central questions. 

The same can’t be said of NGO coalitions, alas.  Despite the fact that serious thinking can be found here and there in civil society circles, if you know where to look, the fact remains that NGOs consistently fail to rally behind it.  Instead, they fall into the trap of failing to endorse the big ideas while failing to put forward alternatives of their own – as if confirm their belief, as Monbiot suggests, that “slogans are a substitute for policies”.

So you have to wonder: why doesn’t civil society use its clout to set new agendas, open up new political space?  Why is it that despite the fertile soil for fresh thinking that we now find in front of us, NGOs aren’t out there cultivating it?  Why, for that matter, didn’t they plant seeds in that soil five, ten, fifteen years ago?

It’s now two years since I wrote a post asking ‘where next for NGOs’, which quoted a 2004 study commissioned by British Overseas NGOs for Development (BOND) that argued,

While British NGOs remain central in campaigns around debt relief and trade justice, they somehow seem to have lost touch with the groundswell of radical activism which is mobilising large numbers of people around the same causes as they espouse. There is a danger that NGOs will be squeezed out of their niche, unable to recruit volunteers and experiencing falling donations, and that they will be rejected by a whole new generation of activists as irrelevant, co-opted, or a part of the system which they are fighting.

But as I noted at the start of 2008, it’s not as if the anti-globalisation movement is in much better shape these days (and there was always the difficult question of what it was in favour of). Now, as developed country publics start really feeling the pain, the window of opportunity for far-reaching ideas may start to dwindle unless we get our act together fast; throwing bricks at Fred Goodwin’s windows may seem to many to be a more satisfying form of activism.

The one spot of hope in all this, perhaps, is the potential for social network technologies to move into the gap.  Obama’s election campaign offered real signs of progress on that front; and though we’re taking baby steps at applying the same principles to global level organising, initiatives like We20 could yet prove to be the start of something really significant if they manage to fuse aggregation with content generation.

But in the meantime, NGOs remain probably our last best hope. Their membership numbers remain much higher than political parties; although they’re having a horrendous time on the fundraising front, they still have powerful resources; and their positioning gives them a platform to engage with the right issues.

But this will only work if their policy positions stop being so lowest common denominator – and start asking the biggest questions, tackling the most political global issues head-on, and above all taking some risks. Come on, NGOs: get your act together.  We need you.

On one hand, funding departments argue that members want to see them campaigning on the issues they’re known for. Too much scope creep, they say, could lead to falling subscriptions, legacies and income. (Sometimes, members are in fact surpisingly open-minded and ready to understand interconnections between issues, and it’s actually conservatively minded staff members, rather than grassroots members, who want to keep things ‘as they’ve always been’.)

On the other hand, the brighter NGO policy departments understand very well that as issues like environment, conflict, development and human rights become increasingly intertwined, it makes less and less sense to focus resolutely on just one piece of the puzzle. Will the Oxfam / Greenpeace / Amnesty generation of NGOs be able to make the shift? Or are we heading towards a new – and perhaps less ‘vertically integrated’ – model of NGO campaigning?

Take Amnesty International, which has been more open than most to broadening its interpretation of its mission. It has championed the message that protecting human rights implies addressing root causes of abuses, including – for example – the international arms trade, where Amnesty is campaigning together with Oxfam.

Yet as a recent Economist article showed, plenty of people are ready to criticise the new approach: “current and former Amnesty insiders worry that an increasingly grandstanding and unfocused approach makes it ineffective”, opines Edward Lucas, the magazine’s central and east European correspondent. Oxfam has experienced similar muttering from some internal quarters about its increasing focus on conflict, which – bizarrely – not a few in the aid world still see as a separate issue from development.

But on the other hand, NGOs that have remained focused on the core areas for which they’re best known often find that they simply lack the platform needed to set out credible positions on global issues. No sector demonstrates this better than the major environment NGOs like Greenpeace, WWF or Friends of the Earth, who have failed either to move beyond sounding the alarm bell and towards describing comprehensive solutions, or to get to grips with the wider political economy dimensions of the issues they campaign on.

Take the Stop Climate Chaos campaign, a coalition of environment NGOs (and some development ones too, though firmly in the back seat) designed to ‘do a Make Poverty History’ on global warming. A great idea in principle; yet the coalition’s policy positions are completely incoherent on what it actually wants internationally. In particular, despite all the rhetoric about global fairness, the agencies running SCC have not managed e to set out any answer to the central question of how to share out a future ‘global emissions budget’. (This has been the subject of a massive internal row in the coalition – but that’s for another post.)

These sort of fudges – that duck the interconnections between issues, and value a neatly branded campaign over a well worked-up and comprehensive policy proposition – can have the effect of alienating grassroots members who are, inevitably, less professionalised or jaded than full-time staff at headquarters. A 2004 study for British Overseas NGOs for Development (BOND), an umbrella organisation, argued that

While British NGOs remain central in campaigns around debt relief and trade justice, they somehow seem to have lost touch with the groundswell of radical activism which is mobilising large numbers of people around the same causes as they espouse. There is a danger that NGOs will be squeezed out of their niche, unable to recruit volunteers and experiencing falling donations, and that they will be rejected by a whole new generation of activists as irrelevant, co-opted, or a part of the system which they are fighting.

So with traditional single issue NGOs caught between the devil and the deep blue sea as far as complex global issues – which don’t respect neat sectoral boundaries – are concerned, are there any examples of more deft and nimble civil society campaigning?