If We Were Brave…
Ingrid Srinath, Secretary General - CIVICUS
“NGOs should be involved in renegotiating the social contract, joining with states and markets to redefine what kind of society we want nationally and globally.”NGO leaders in 2010 faced a particularly challenging year with an extreme pushback against civil society almost everywhere in the world. The World Economic Forum (Davos) earlier in 2011 concluded that the world was in no shape to face further major risks.
Two conditions - economic disparity and global governance failures - were highlighted particularly as risks that could cause a domino effect of contagion. Despite traditional religious, tribal, or political divides between people, the main conflict was increasingly between relatively impoverished people anywhere and those who were responsible for the world economic meltdown in the first place.
The ultimate conclusion from Davos was that there wasn’t any global forum or working methodology to resolve global crises. The vacuum would have to be counterbalanced with a well-informed, well-mobilsed global public opinion that shared norms and values of global citizenship.
Where were development NGOs in this process? They were battling the “triple whammy” of a severe resource crunch, increased demand for their services and shifting geopolitics whereby governments were reluctant to “call out” other governments for abuses such as human rights abuses.Self-imposed factors as well limited their influence for change: the idea that rationality would prevail among governments; losing their independence through becoming too embedded in the corridors of power; or organisations become comfortable doing what they’d always done rather than seeking new radical options.
Then 2011 happened and in the space of a few short weeks, the world had changed dramatically. There was the emergence of a new belief that things could change and that this change could only come about with citizen action, led by a re-politicisation of young people in particular. These changes include:
- growing global support for government by consent vs. government by control
- the realisation that civil society enjoys higher trust levels than any other sector of society.
- real change came about about because of human political processes more than traditional technocratic solutions
The international NGO community were too myopic to foresee the effects of this shift in political consciousness and engagement. Now, for the first time ever NGO leaders are in the unique position of being able to define the future rather than just reacting to it. A key question is, what do they want to do with that opportunity?