Civil Society in the Age of Crisis

Abstract

Three crises dominate today's globalized political landscape: trans-national terrorism, financial crisis, and climate change. Collectively, these crises have hurt civil society organizations and constricted their political space. Rights of association and to state information (the foundations of civic engagement) have been eroded in the name of ‘state security’; and their support base and financial viability have declined. While not a death knell for civil society, it is important to understand how these new threats arose, how they relate to and synergize with each other, and how they balance new opportunities. Whereas the diversity of views found in the ‘anti-globalization movement’ appeared to have advantages at the turn of the millennium (caricatured by the slogan that the movement espoused ‘One big “NO!” and many small “YESSES”’), today this appears more as a weakness—suggesting a lack of clarity, focus, and credibility. Yet, thanks to new technology and the growing confidence of civil society leadership in poorer countries, we are seeing the emergence of a new energy in civil society that focuses more on the processes of government than on its substance and which shows signs of transforming civic engagement and enhancing state accountability to citizens.

Keywords:

• Civil society
• NGOs
• globalization
• terrorism
• climate change
• financial crisis

Notes

A modified version of this essay is appearing as a chapter in a forthcoming book: Civil Society in the Age of WikiLeaks: Challenges to Monitory Democracy, edited by Lars Trägårdh and Nina Witoszek with Bron Taylor, Berghahn Books, New York, USA. The first draft was presented as a paper at the September 2009 workshop in the CERES21 (Creative Responses to Sustainability) series, organized by the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, and held at Instituto Europeo in Florence.

A global survey of citizens' concerns confirms these to be the three highest public concerns. The 2005 GlobeSpan ‘Global Issues Monitor’ survey in 22 countries asked respondents to rank what they regard as ‘the most important problem facing the world today’. Thirty percent of respondents ranked economic crisis, poverty, and unemployment as their top concern; 24% selected war, conflict, or terrorism; 8% opted for environment or climate change, while the remainder were scattered thinly over a number of other concerns such as HIV/AIDS, moral/spiritual decay, corruption, crime, and the gap between rich and poor.

Chief development officer for the American Red Cross, quoted in McCoy and Dorell (2008). He commented that ‘this is the worst fundraising environment I've ever worked in.’

Charities Aid Foundation news release: http://www.cafonline.org/default.aspx?page=16118

John Shaw, director of finance at Oxfam GB, stated that Oxfam reduced its 2009–2010 forecasted growth from 5–6% to zero (personal communication).

Foundations are trusts financed by corporate philanthropy or endowed by donations or legacies from wealthy individuals, the proceeds from investing which are used to finance philanthropic activities. Some foundations support civil society activities at home or in poorer countries. Many developing countries (such as India, Philippines, and Brazil) have their own foundations, but these tend to be dwarfed by the large US and European foundations.

Also, a survey of some of the largest US foundations, described in Barton and Wilhelm (2009), showed that endowments had declined by a median of 29% from 2007 to 2008 (i.e. before the worst impact of the crisis) and that two-thirds of foundations plan to reduce their giving as a result.

A survey conducted for the UK Charity Commission showed that most had experienced a small fall in income since September 2008 but intended to hold funding levels steady for as long as possible due to the increased social needs (Charity Commission, 2009).

This is shorthand for the anti-neo-liberal activists who variously describe themselves as the anti-globalization, ‘alter-globalization’, anti-corporate-globalization, or the global social justice movement.

Civil society campaigns related to the World Bank are described in Clark (2002); there is a broader discussion of CSO activities related to governance in Clark (2003).

Examples include campaigns on environmental damage caused by oil, mining, or logging companies, injustices related to the trade in specific commodities exported by developing countries, and the excesses of pharmaceutical or pesticide manufacturers.

There are numerous civil society activities that address corporate governance (e.g. Global Reporting Initiative, the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, Transparency International, Publish What You Pay, and Global Justice), but these have little relevance to the current economic crisis. They mostly concern transparency in firms' relations with governments, and few address the banking sector.

A number of CSOs have, however, campaigned for a ‘Tobin Tax’ on international financial transactions, which would both dampen speculation and mobilize considerable resources for international social and environmental needs. Most notable have been the campaigns of ATTAC (see www.attac.org) and Jubilee Debt Campaign and Jubilee Research (see http://www.jubileeresearch.org/).

For data on participation by region, see www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_01.php?cd

Culminating in the 2005 Porto Alegre, when the Forum had 200,000 participants and 2500 workshops.

Clark and Themudo (2006) discuss both the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the Movement.

Guinness Book of Records, 2004.

For a description of the project's intentions, see http://www.cordobainitiative.org

In contrast, there were no objections to Roman Catholic centres or National Rifle Association offices in Oklahoma stemming from the faith and political pursuit of that city's bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11076846

The author most famously associated with this position is Sam Huntington (1996), whose book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was extremely popular, especially with US conservatives. However, the first to write on the ‘clash of civilizations’ was Bernard Lewis (1990), whose article The Roots of Muslim Rage is a well-argued and prophetic analysis of growing Muslim–Christian resentment.

Pew Research Center poll of the US public quoted in Grim and Finke (2005).

Ipsos MORI survey for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), 20 January 2009, cited by the on-line journal of religious affairs, Ekklesia: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8761

See the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) website: www.fatfgafi.org/pages/0,3417,en_32250379_32236846_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

See FATF website. The eight Special Recommendations were expanded to nine in October 2004 with the addition of one concerning ‘cash couriers’

FATF Interpretative Note to Special Recommendation VIII: Non-Profit Organisations; see http://www.fatf-gafi.org/dataoecd/43/5/38816530.pdf

Idem.

These prescriptions comprise ‘Voluntary Guidelines’, rather than international law, but each FATF member government must report on its actions with respect to them, and they hence carry considerable weight. Some commentators are worried that they may be used as the basis for future legal requirements.

These new US requirements for NGOs and foundations were set out by the US Treasury in late 2002 in Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines: Voluntary Best Practices for U.S.-Based Charities. These guidelines were revised and released in September 2006. The most recent version is available at http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit-finance/Documents/guidelines_charities.pdf

When ICNL and other NGOs pointed out that an earlier 990 requirement to name all foreign grantees jeopardized the safety of individuals associated with some organizations, the Internal Revenue Service agreed that names of organizations could be withheld if disclosure would likely result in bodily injury. 

President Obama touched on this issue in his Cairo speech on 4 June 2009. He said ‘Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That's why I'm committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.’

Personal Communication with ICNL's President, Doug Rutzen. See also ICNL's series, Global Trends in NGO Law reports.

The contribution of man-made emissions to a greenhouse effect is not a new subject; it was first described by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1895.

IPCC comprises 194 governments, each of which appoints representatives to the panel and its affiliate bodies (usually top national scientists).

James McCarthy, President-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, informed the US Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, House Science Committee on 28 March 2007 that Exxon-Mobil alone provided almost $16 million to a network of 43 such groups between 1998 and 2005. The UK's Royal Society expressed concern (in a letter from Bob Ward to the company on 4 September 2005) that in 2005 alone, Exxon had financed 39 US organizations that ‘misinformed the public’ and ‘misrepresented the science of climate change’ to the tune of at least $2.9 million. http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/09/19/LettertoNick.pdf

In 2005, the oil and gas industry were at the 11th position in the league of lobbying expenditures in Washington, DC; by 2009, they had risen to the 2nd place, after the pharmaceutical industry, spending $168 million in that year, see http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2009&indexType=i. In the USA, the industry devoted $168 million to lobbying in 2009 compared with $22 million by the environment lobby on all their causes (see: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php)

A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of scientists belonging to the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society (the two US societies whose members are most likely to be involved in climate research) demonstrates scientists' confidence about anthropogenic climate change. Ninety-seven percent agreed that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years; 84% say that they believe human-induced warming is occurring; and 74% agree that ‘currently available scientific evidence’ substantiates its occurrence. Only 5% believe that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; and 84% believe that global climate change poses a moderate to very great danger (Lichter, 2008).

Sources: http://www.desmogblog.com/500-scientists-with-documented-doubts-about-the-heartland-institute, and a semi-retraction from Heartland Institute at http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/23207/Controversy_Arises_Over_Lists_of_Scientists_Whose_Research_Contradicts_ManMade_Global_Warming_Scares.html.

For example, the American Enterprise Institute wrote to climate scientists in 2006 offering large ‘honoraria’ for ‘reviews and policy critiques’ of a forthcoming IPCC report. Some recipients saw this as a crude attempt to fish for criticisms. See http://sciencepoliticsclimatechange.blogspot.com/2006/07/aei-and-ar4.html. The full AEI letter is available at http://www.aei.org/article/25586.

The most prominent such climate scientist is Professor Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist and former member of the IPCC. Lindzen's arguments largely emphasize the complexity of factors making for climate change, and while recognizing that the average temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution began, he argues that it is not possible to assign all this to man-made emissions, that it is not possible to predict future trends and, therefore, that the confidence of predictions of catastrophic climate change is unwarranted.

For example, they disseminate graphs showing average global temperatures for a few carefully selected recent years to suggest that there is cooling rather than warming and omitting to recognize that climate scientists are looking at trends over decades and centuries, rather than at short-term patterns.

These emails dating from 1991 to 2009 were largely between Jones and fellow IPCC members. They were obtained by hacking into the CRU email system and first posted on a small web-server in the Siberian city of Tomsk (see Schiermeier, 2009.). By taking sentences out of context, the leaks were used to promote a false impression that Jones' work deliberately cut out data that muddied the systemic rise in global temperatures and that he sought to remove from IPCC's literature database articles that ran counter to the field's orthodoxy. Furthermore, by inference, they promoted the idea that everyone involved in the IPCC is similarly biased and complicit in a grand deception.

Surveys by the Pew Research Center (2009) show that there has been a sharp decline in the percentage of Americans who believe that there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising—from 77% in August 2006 to 57% in October 2009—while those recognizing global warming as a very serious problem has fallen from 44% in April 2008 to 35% in October 2009.

All these statements come from the pages on climate change from the NGOs' respective websites.

The error was in IPCC's Working Group II report, 2007, Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability, http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch10s10-6-2.html. It derived from an annex to the report from WWF Nepal, dated 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. Three other errors have been detected in the same report. Given the damage even one or two errors do to IPCC's credibility, it is under pressure to strengthen its review processes, see http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2245&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YaleEnvironment360+(Yale+Environment+360).

One measure that is supported by some CSOs but criticized by others is the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries scheme (REDD), in which carbon taxes and other resources from rich countries finance measures designed to increase CO₂ capture in poorer countries.

See ‘We the peoples: civil society, the United Nations and global governance’, UN General Assembly document, A/58/817, 11 June 2004 report; see also Trägårdh (2007).