Who survived? Ethiopia's regulatory crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs

ABSTRACT

How do public regulations shape the composition and behavior of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Because many NGOs advocate liberal causes, such as human rights, democracy, and gender equality, they upset the political status quo. At the same time, a large number of NGOs operating in the Global South rely on international funding. This sometimes disconnects from local publics and leads to the proliferation of sham or ‘briefcase’ NGOs. Seeking to rein in the politically inconvenient NGO sector, governments exploit the role of international funding and make the case for restricting the influence of NGOs that serve as foreign agents. To pursue this objective, states worldwide are enacting laws to restrict NGOs’ access to foreign funding. We examine this regulatory offensive through an Ethiopian case study, where recent legislation prohibits foreign-funded NGOs from working on politically sensitive issues. We find that most briefcase NGOs and local human rights groups in Ethiopia have disappeared, while survivors have either ‘rebranded’ or switched their work from proscribed areas. This research note highlights how governments can and do shape the population ecology of the non-governmental sector. Because NGOs seek legitimacy via their claims of grassroots support, a reliance on external funding makes them politically vulnerable. Any study of the NGO sector must include governments as the key component of NGOs’ institutional environment.

KEYWORDS:

• NGOs
• regulations
• foreign funding
• human rights
• Ethiopia
• Africa

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research on this project was supported by funds from the Harold E. Stassen Chair at the University of Minnesota. The authors would like to thank the women and men who agreed to be interviewed for this project in Ethiopia, as well as the human rights activists and experts we interviewed elsewhere in the world. We also thank those who commented on the paper at annual meetings of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association, as well as several anonymous reviewers for the Review of International Political Economy.

Notes

1. Numbers are based on data collected by the authors during 2012 on all laws passed worldwide regarding both the operations of foreign NGOs and foreign funding flows to domestic NGOs. These laws impose restrictions in the following activities: whether and how foreign NGOs register with the government; whether foreigners can join or form an association; the issue areas on which foreign NGOs can work on, and the activities that they can carry out; whether and how foreign NGOs can operate, employ foreign workers, enter into partnerships, and report on their activities; whether and how NGOs can receive foreign funding, as well as how much foreign funding they can receive; and on whether foreign NGOs must pay taxes; and finally, on how NGOs can use and must report on the receipt and/or use of foreign funding.

2. In his article on the backlash, Carothers (2006) argues that restrictive civil society legislation is a means for rulers of semi-democratic regimes to thwart any serious challenge to their rule and to thus maintain their grip on power. Howell et al. (2008) argue that the semi-democratic regimes use post-9/11 security concerns to justify clamping down on civil society organizations, often seen as supporters of political opposition.

3. Interview A18, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

4. See Aalen and Tronvoll (2009). These claims likely stemmed from the support offered to opposition parties by the Ethiopian diaspora (see Lyons, 2007), along with election monitoring, voter education, and human rights reporting by local, foreign-funded groups.

5. On ERPDF ideology, see Rahmato (2002, 2010). Although Ethiopia is one of Africa's top economic performers, its political system lags on most indicators of democratic governance.

6. A ruling party (ERPDF) document from 2006 outlines the government's view of NGOs: ‘NGOs are not organizations established by citizens to protect their rights. These organizations are rather established by individuals mainly for personal benefit, accountable to, and advancing the interests of foreign agencies. Their leaders are not accountable to the staff of the organizations and the beneficiaries. As a result, they cannot have a democratic nature and role … Therefore, the government has to confront the rent seeking nature of NGOs, for example, by considering those organizations receiving 15 percent of their income from foreign sources as foreign organizations and denying them recognition as a means of expression of freedom of association as well as democratic forums.’ Quoted in Hailegebriel (2010: 20). See also Yeshanew 2012.

7. The Proclamation does not apply to religious organizations, cultural associations, organizations governed by other laws, or organizations operating in only one region of the country.

8. We recognize that human rights work occurs not only in human rights organizations (those organizations that focus solely on promoting rights), but that human rights work also takes place in a variety of other civil society organizations, to include in development and service-delivery NGOs.

9. In other words, we used a pared down version of the ‘reputational sampling’ method advocated by Farquharson (2005).

10. We obtained written ethics approval from the relevant university ethics board prior to fieldwork.

11. For a discussion of non-probability sampling procedures, see Patton (2001).

12. Data come from USAID (2010); Dagne and Hailegebriel (2011); Rahmato, Bantirgu and Endeshaw (2010); and the Charities and Societies Agency (www.chsa.gov.et). The numbers of organizations in 2009 reflect updated data.

13. Interview A3, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

14. See http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/acp/overview/cotonou-agreement/index_en.htm. See also Rahmato, Bantirgu and Endeshaw (2010).

15. Interview A17, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

16. However, other countries and regions differ from Africa. For instance, Gauri and Galef (2005) find that more than 80% of NGOs in Bangladesh were registered with the government, with 55% of NGOs reporting a visit by local government officials.

17. Interview A8, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

18. Table 3 shows the post-Proclamation status of several rights-focused groups; only seven of these continue to work specifically on human rights issues. (Based on data gathered at the offices of the Charities and Societies Agency in Addis Ababa.)

19. Interviews A20 and A21, Addis Ababa, 2011.

20. Interview A4, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

21. Interview A16, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

22. Government-aligned organizations seem to have largely survived the Proclamation unchanged. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper pointed out, these organizations are important tools for mobilizing ERPDF support, making it clear why the Proclamation favors mass-based local organizations but restricts independent organizations that support alternative political forces. We are grateful to the reviewer for this observation.

23. The CSO Taskforce is housed at the CCRDA and is partially funded by the Donor Assistance Group for Ethiopia (DAG). This survey was designed to assess the implementation of the Proclamation and its impact on the work of civil society organizations in Ethiopia. Questionnaires were distributed to 70 organizations, which included a broad range of NGOs as well as government organizations, media, donors, and UN agencies. Thirty-two of the 70 solicited organizations responded to the survey.

24. See Dagne and Hailegebriel (2011). Not all NGOs have been forced to completely abandon their rights-based work, as there are two exceptions in the Proclamation for foreign funding of rights-based work. First, the bilateral clause in Article 3 of the Proclamation allows international and foreign organizations to enter into bilateral agreements with the government in order to continue activities that NGOs are otherwise not permitted to engage in with foreign funding. Prison Fellowship International (a pro-government NGO that works in prisons to promote human rights) and the National Coalition of Women Against HIV/AIDS (a local NGO that the former First Lady, Azeb Mesfin, chairs) are two of the very few organizations that have received a bilateral exemption. Second, there are some exceptions for rights-based work within the structure of donor funding, in that money allocated to the multi-donor Democratic Institutions Program (DIP) as well as funding from the European Commission's Civil Society Fund can be used for rights work. Under the DIP program, donor funding has been channeled to the government's Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, which then provides funds to local NGOs. The European Commission Civil Society Fund (CSF) is a joint initiative with the Government of Ethiopia, and money from the CSF is considered to be local funding by the government. (Information based on the websites of these funding entities and from interviews conducted with civil society experts and foreign donors in Addis Ababa in August 2011.)

25. Interviews A6 and A9, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

26. Interview A12, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

27. Interview A11, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

28. Interview A 10, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

29. Interviews A3, A4, A5, A13, A16, A19, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

30. Interview A6, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

31. Interview A19, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

32. Interview A18, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

33. Interview A11, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

34. Interviews A18 and A18, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

35. See http://osdethiopia.org/. Along with the former head of policy at Action Aid (Daniel Bekele), the then-director of OSJ (Netsanet Demissie) was imprisoned and charged with treason and using their organizations as covers for pursuing political motives after the 2005 elections.

36. Interview A20, Addis Ababa, August 2011. See also Amnesty International (2012b).

37. Interview A21, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

38. Taken from www.thereporterethiopia.com/Interview/it-is-rather-commendable-to-every-citizen-to-come-out-and-confront-any-difficulty.html (accessed 1 October 2012). One of the anonymous reviewers for this paper pointed out that while the decision to continue operating unchanged was rare for rights groups in Ethiopia, the opposite has occurred in other contexts. For example, groups labeled by the Russian government as ‘foreign agents’ have refused on principled grounds to do so, despite the material incentives to do so. Future research should address this important question of the conditions under which activists do not do the materially rational thing and adjust their operations in the aftermath of a regulatory change in order to ensure their survival. We are grateful to the reviewer for this observation.

39. Interview A14, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

40. Interview A18, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

41. Interview A7, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

42. Interview A1, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

43. Interview A12, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

44. According to the 2012 Gallup Worldview Poll, available on www.worldview.gallup.com

45. Interview A19, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

46. On August 17, 2012, we searched the LexisNexis database with: ‘Ethiopia AND NGOs AND civil society AND law,’ ‘Ethiopia AND Charities and Societies Proclamation,’ and ‘Ethiopian Human Rights Council.’

47. Interview A26, via telephone, September 2012.

48. Interview A14, Addis Ababa, August 2011.

49. Interview A25, via telephone, September 2012.

50. The 2012 Mexican survey was a nationally representative poll of 2400 adults. The 2012 Mumbai survey was a representative poll of 1680 adults living in Mumbai and its rural environs, with rural and religious oversamples. The 2012 Moroccan survey was a poll of 1100 adults living in Casablanca, Rabat, and their rural environs, with a rural oversample. Further details can be provided by the authors upon request; see Ron and Crow (forthcoming).

51. Only 0.3% of the Moroccan population reported donating to ‘religious associations,’ but this figure likely does not include the Islamic zakat, or religious tithe.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kendra E Dupuy

Kendra Dupuy is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington (Seattle) Department of Political Science, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (Norway), and an advisor at Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen (Norway). She studies the political economy of natural resource extraction, corporate social responsibility, corruption and transparency, NGOs, and African politics.

James Ron

James Ron is the Stassen Chair of International Affairs at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science, and is an affiliated professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City. He studies human rights, public opinion, NGOs, and international assistance, and edits an online forum for human rights activists, openGlobalRights.

Aseem Prakash

Aseem Prakash is Professor of Political Science and the Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington (Seattle). He is the founding, General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Business and Public Policy, and the co-editor of Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He studies international political economy, environmental issues, and NGO politics.