Transnational Civil Society Networks

March 14, 2000

Ann Florini, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Dr. Ann Florini?s presentation was based upon her forthcoming book on transnational civil society networks. The book, to be published in the fall of 2000, examines six case studies in which transnational civil society networks were active participants in the management of various global issues, including landmines, environmental degradation, and human rights. Dr. Florini?s presentation, posted below, is a summary of her main findings and conclusions.

Dr. Ann Florini, March 14, 2000:

I?m going to start by telling you six very short anecdotes that are based upon the case studies of my forthcoming book.

1) In December 1997, 122 countries signed an international treaty to ban landmines, despite the vehement objections of the world?s most powerful governments. Standing beside the government delegates were representatives of some 300 non-governmental organizations, members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), without whom the treaty would not exist.

2) When an obscure guerrilla movement known as the Zapatistas took over four towns in the southern province of Chiapas in 1994, the Mexican government started to respond with force. When non-governmental activists elsewhere (particularly in the United States) protested, Mexico put its troops on hold.

3) Every year, an international non-governmental organization called Transparency International (TI) releases a Corruption Perceptions Index ranking the world?s countries on how corrupt they are perceived to be. Although TI only came into existence in 1993, it has galvanized a global movement against corruption.

4) For much of this century, countries around the world have constructed large dams on their rivers to create water supplies and electrical power. But in the past decade would-be dam builders have found themselves in the cross-hairs of a transnational movement protesting the environmental and human costs of these massive projects. Now, governments, the private sector and transnational civil society have come together to create a World Commission on Dams, potentially setting a precedent for a new style of global problem-solving.

5) Almost since the dawn of the nuclear age, scores of activist groups have campaigned vigorously for a ban on nuclear testing. They argued that a test ban, more than any other measure, could bring nuclear arms races and the spread of nuclear weapons to a screeching halt. In 1996, they got their way, with the signing by 136 countries of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

6) At the end of the 1990s, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet found himself up against international legal charges based on his alleged violations of human rights within Chile. Nike found its bottom line suffered dramatically when it was accused of violating the rights of its workers in poor countries. The new standards by which heads of governments and corporations alike are being judged originated and spread due to the determined efforts of a broad network of non-governmental groups around the world.

In all these, and many other areas, global problem-solving more and more is being left to a loose agglomeration of unelected, often unaccountable transnational civil society networks. Estimates of the number of these networks vary wildly. The most solid estimation I?ve seen identifies more than 15,000 formally constituted transnational groups, playing all sorts of roles. They participate in treaty negotiations and monitor how well governments comply. They are creating broad new expectations about what responsibilities states and corporations bear. They are altering, sometimes quite specifically, how countries can pursue goals or corporations can seek profits. All this raises some deep questions about whether transnational civil society will become a permanent and powerful contributor to solving the world?s problems ? and whether it should.

For the past two years, I?ve been running a project that has investigated these questions. I undertook the project because even though there was already a huge literature on civil society, there wasn?t nearly so much on transnational civil society, and there was almost nothing that looked systematically at the roles transnational civil society networks do and should play. So I set out to answer three questions. First is: How powerful are the transnational networks? Second, will the trends that hold them together and provide them with power continue? Are the successes of transnational civil society in recent years just a fluke, or is the nature of international power truly changing? And third, and most important, what role should transnational civil society play as the world struggles to cope with the new global agenda?

Before I give you the answer, let?s define the subject. This transnational civil society is a pretty amorphous thing. Here?s another story. In December 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and its coordinator Jody Williams jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to establish an international convention that bans antipersonnel landmines. Half the prize money went directly to Williams, but the other half had to wait nearly a year to reach the ICBL. Why? Because the ICBL did not legally exist. It was an amorphous network of NGOs, not itself registered anywhere in the world. In fact, all of civil society is identified mostly by what it is not: it includes only groups that are not governments or profit-seeking private entities. Second, it is transnational?that is, it involves linkage across national borders. Beyond that, let me stress that I?m not talking about all kinds of transnational civil society. That 15,000 figure includes a vast array of cross-border professional and business associations, which pursue the interests of their members, and these are not the focus of my study. I?m looking at the advocacy groups that coalesce around common values, rather than around personal interest.

Growing Power

If the case studies make any one thing clear, it is this: the growing attention to transnational civil society is not mere hoopla. It reflects a real, and considerable, increase in the number and effectiveness of transnational non-governmental networks. The networks are particularly good at getting otherwise-neglected issues onto the agendas of national governments, inter-governmental organizations and, increasingly, corporations. International corruption was not high on anyone?s list of concerns until Peter Eigen created Transparency International. No one was seriously considering a ban on anti-personnel land mines prior to the creation of the International Coalition to Ban Landmines. The World Bank had not seen fit to evaluate whether its huge investments in dams were paying off until intense pressure from transnational coalitions made concerns over dams a high priority for the institution. The Zapatistas would be one more minor footnote to history instead of an international cause celebre were it not for the transnational network that mobilized in their defense.

And once those issues are on the agenda, transnational coalitions can influence those discussions, shape the agreements that result, and monitor whether and how well parties are complying with the terms. The landmines campaign?s effect has gone beyond bringing the Treaty into existence. Even mine-producing countries that are not party to the treaty have imposed moratoria on exports of mines. Around the world, fewer mines are being laid, and more are being cleared, than was the case before the ICBL. And monitoring of compliance with the Landmines Treaty is in the hands of an offshoot of the ICBL.

And businesses, which are increasingly the direct target of transnational civil society activities, find it even harder than do governments to keep civil society at arm?s length. One recent study shows that BurmaNet and other Internet-based networks have induced Western multinationals to stop doing business in Burma. Groups like Greenpeace have had much to do with the European public?s reaction against genetically-modified foods. Oil, gas, and mining companies operating in developing countries have found themselves under intense pressure from human rights and environmental groups.

Limits to Power

But there are limits to this power. For one thing, it is not enough to accomplish the relatively straightforward goal of getting governmental negotiators to sign a treaty. The Comprehensive Test Ban treaty is a bust.

More broadly, there are limits inherent in the nature of the power of transnational civil society. It works indirectly, by persuading governments or corporate leaders or citizens or consumers. The networks remain powerful only so long as they retain their credibility. And sometimes civil society gets it very wrong indeed. Humanitarian relief organizations found their credibility badly damaged in 1996 by what turned out to be their exaggerated reports of suffering and death among refugees from Rwanda. To the extent that transnational civil society networks provide inaccurate or misleading information (whether deliberately or inadvertently), they undermine their effectiveness.

When transnational civil society forgets that its power is soft, not hard, it not only fails to achieve its immediate objectives but undermines the moral authority that is its real claim to influence. There?s a striking illustration of this in the nuclear arms control case. Greenpeace has a long and successful track record of using its boats to spotlight and harass nuclear testers, particularly at the French test site. Every time the French government used force against the boats, Greenpeace?s public approval ratings soared. But at some point, Greenpeace seems to have begun believing that it could physically prevent a nuclear test from taking place by putting enough boats around the island. In other words, it tried to take on the French navy. Not only did it fail, which was no surprise, it then publicly blamed the woman in charge of the campaign for the failure. And its public internal recriminations over the fiasco frittered away some of its high public standing.

And finally, governments and corporations retain considerable power to fight back. Here?s one example: At the UN, what was in the early 1990s a movement toward expanding the role of civil society groups had by 1998 degenerated into a full scale movement to roll back NGO access. This was partly a general backlash by governments, but it was triggered by several nasty incidents. In one, an accredited civil society group included in its numbers at the UN Commission on Human Rights a large block of unaffiliated people, many of whom turned out to be anti-Castro Cuban emigrés who sharply criticized the Cuban government. Cuba took exception and proposed limits on the NGO accreditation process. In another, an Indian delegate happened to run into an NGO representative in the delegates? lounge in UN headquarters in Geneva, and recognized him as the head of an Indian separatist group that had recently taken credit for kidnapping her nephew. Now, NGOs are running into more and more restrictions on their access to the UN.

To what degree this governmental backlash against NGO access matters remains unclear. For Transparency International and the coalitions around big dams, the ability to be heard in IGOs like the World Bank is a significant element of their influence. For many others, however, such access is irrelevant. The Ottawa Process negotiations on landmines took place outside of traditional arms control venues. While the human rights network uses UN channels extensively, it also has other instruments available. Many campaigns, like the pro-democracy networks, do not need access to IGOs at all.

So the answer to the first question, about the power of transnational civil society, is that it is real, significant, and growing. It has limits, of course, but the main point is that that power is substantial.

Accounting for the Power Shift

The second question is: will this go on? Are we just living through an "inter-war period" between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of some new great-power conflict that will inevitably dominate global affairs? Or is an enduring change in the pattern of global politics underway?

It is certainly true that the end of the Cold War loosened the international system and offered non-governmental more space in which to speak out and be heard. Transparency International was able to create an anti-corruption movement in part because corrupt officials could no longer count on automatic external support from their superpower patrons.

But there?s more at work here than the end of the Cold War and the lack of great-power rivalries. Several trends seem likely to foster a strong role of transnational civil society. Those trends are:

Domestic Nodes

Transnational civil society cannot float free in a global ether. It must be firmly connected to local reality. The transnational network that opposed big dam construction had notable successes in countries with strong and engaged civil societies, but failed in countries like Lesotho and China. With the notable exception of Japan, governments were far more influenced by domestic civil society campaigns in favor of a landmine treaty than by anything the ICBL per se did.

In most regions of the world, increasingly vigorous domestic civil societies provide the nodes for transnational networks. Partly, this reflects the wave of democratization which swept through Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa in the 1990s, opening the way for strengthened domestic civil societies that could participate in transnational networks. But civil society needs more than democracy to flourish. It needs laws that allow NGOs to register legally, so they can do things like open bank accounts and sign leases. It particularly needs laws that encourage donations. Until recently, few countries had such laws, but that is beginning to change. Japan, for example, passed a law in 1998 easing what had been onerous financial requirements for the registration of non-governmental organizations. And there are major changes in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

Technology

In the book, I spend a lot of time talking about technology. Today, let me just make one point to indicate why technological change is going to strongly support the continued development of transnational civil society. As information technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, what are rapidly becoming the basic tools of e-mails and Net access will enable transnational civil society to incorporate a vastly greater range of people than has ever before been possible. As of 1998, the Internet became a truly global network, with virtually every country in the world having some sort of connection. There are now 43 million Internet host computers in 214 countries. While only 44 million people were on line weekly in 1995, that will jump in a decade to 765 million, over 200 million each in North America and Western Europe, nearly 200 million in the Asia-Pacific Region (where usage is growing the fastest of any region), and some 30-60 million each in the remaining regions of the world. Given that the numbers of active participants in most transnational civil society networks are counted in the mere thousands, the potential for growth through the new information media seems clear.

Now, of course, some governments are fighting back against this kind of technological empowerment. 45 countries restrict their citizens? access to the Internet, usually by requiring them to subscribe to a state-run Internet Service Provider, and 20 of those countries heavily filter that access. The Chinese government has been trying particularly hard, with a new law saying all content going onto the Web from China is to be approved by the state. This includes operators of chat rooms, personal websites, and email. Is this going to work? Not likely. Anyone could register and set up overseas websites with Chinese content and email their friends in China to read those sites. Blocking sites can take months, while sites can change their addresses in a day. And if the government does succeed, it will be at such cost to the Chinese economy that pressures for reform will quickly arise.

In short, technology will go one making it easier to exchange information and plan logistics with counterparts thousands of miles away, and the opportunities for vigorous coalition activities will grow.

Focal Points

Whole premise of MGI is that world is integrating, now we have growing number of global rather than national problems. Those problems, and the efforts of governments to deal with them, create handy focal points around which transnational civil society can coalesce. The book is full of examples. Let me just describe one.

Starting in the 1970s, the United Nations held a series of mega-conferences on global issues. NGOs appeared in force at the first one, the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, with accredited NGOs outnumbering governmental delegations two to one. And their participation rates kept growing through conference after conference. Some served on official delegations, thousands took part in the informal "parallel" non-governmental conferences that became a feature of all the conference. By the time of the Beijing conference on women, this enormously expanded role for NGO?s had come to seem so normal that an uproar ensued when the Chinese government exiled the parallel non-governmental forum to a site far from the official conference.

The heyday of UN mega-conferences is over, done in by budget constraints, general exhaustion, and, not least, the feeling on the part of some governments that civil society?s role in them was getting out of hand, as discussed above. But the transnational networking made possible by the conferences has created or reinforced non-governmental linkages involving all sorts of groups in a very wide range of countries.

And there are plenty of alternative focal points. In late 1999, tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Seattle in one of the most visible manifestations of civil society in recent decades. They had gathered to show their opposition to the World Trade Organization and the broader forces of economic integration that it represents. The WTO, which was meeting to set an agenda for a proposed new round of global trade negotiations, found itself under scrutiny as never before. Although media reports portrayed the protestors as a combination of American labor unionists wanting to protect their jobs at the expense of Third World workers and hippies left over from the 1960s, in fact the protestors represented a broad, and to some degree transnational, coalition of concerns. As long as economic integration continues, there will be no shortage of targets around which transnational civil society can coalesce. These will include not only the specific international organizations charged with fostering and overseeing such integration, like the WTO and the IMF, but also the whole vast complex of corporations and national government agencies involved in economic activity.

Funding

Transnational civil society is relatively low-cost, often relying heavily on the labor of committed volunteers, but its activities still cost money. We?re still working a bit on putting together the funding picture, but it seems pretty clear that there?s a lot of money out there that transnational civil society can tap.

Learning from Experience

Success is breeding success. Two years after the signing of the Landmines treaty, some of the same NGOs that participated in the ICBL created an International Action Network on Small Arms to push for strong international controls on the light weapons (machine guns, rifles, grenades, mortars) that are responsible for the vast majority of deaths in the civil wars plaguing much of the world. This network consciously models itself on the ICBL.

All these factors amount to trends, not inevitabilities. Information and communications technologies seem sure to continue their dizzying advance, but whether they will truly become widely accessible in the poorer parts of the world is unclear. The powerful growth in domestic civil societies may prove an unstoppable juggernaut ? or we may be in for a period of harsh clampdowns. The power of example may continue to inspire, unless some network embroils itself in a major fiasco that discredits the whole sector. People will be able to form networks across borders with ever-greater ease, but nothing will compel them to do so. Some issues will draw effective networks around them, but others will not. Some governments and corporations will change under the influence of or deliberately choose to work with various transnational civil society coalitions. Other governments and corporations will fight tooth and nail, and at least some of the time will win. This does not make for a smooth and orderly process. To the extent that the world relies on transnational civil society for its global governance, it will get a series of ad-hoc muddlings through.

Desirability

That leads us to the hardest of the three questions. If transnational civil society is both strong and sustainable, is this good or bad? Or, to render the question more properly nuanced, what is good and bad about its emerging role, and what can be done to encourage the good and alleviate the bad?

Transnational civil society networks are often quite effective at portraying themselves as doers of good. By and large, advocacy networks espouse broad goals that are hard to object to: protecting the environment, raising the living standards of the poor, promoting democracy and governmental accountability, reducing the threat of catastrophic war.

But there is nothing inherent in the nature of civil society, local or transnational, that ensures representation of a broad public interest. The neo-Nazi hate groups that exchange repugnant rhetoric over the Internet are just as much transnational civil society networks as are the human rights coalitions. Moreover, once coalitions move from broad goals to specific campaigns with specific strategies and tactics, it can become much less clear what interest is actually being represented. P.J. Simmons, director of the Managing Global Issues Project at the Carnegie Endowment, has written about the coalition of agriculture and trade groups torpedoed America?s imminent ratification of the Biodiversity Treaty agreed at UNCED in 1992, claiming that the treaty could destroy U.S. agriculture. It later turned out that much of their opposition grew out of a misinformation campaign conducted by a far-right fringe group. Greenpeace came under heavy criticism in 1995 for its successful campaign to prevent the Royal Dutch/Shell Group from disposing of the Brent Spar oil rig by sinking it in the North Sea - a campaign Greenpeace continued even after independent analyses showed that the environmental consequences of the sinking would be inconsequential.

In a sense, there is no objective answer to the question of whether these networks are desirable. To victims of landmines, to villagers threatened with displacement and pauperization by massive dam projects, to business executives tired of being shaken down for bribes, to people struggling for democracy and equity within their countries, transnational civil society may appear a very good thing indeed. Without networks like the ICBL, the coalition around big dams, Transparency International, or the Haitian and Zapatista networks, few of these people would have redress for their complaints. But to governments trying to protect national security through weapons programs they deem proper, to owners of dam-building firms who believe they are providing a major public benefit through the development of needed infrastructure, to societies trying to reform themselves from the inside, transnational civil society can seem disruptive, narrow-minded, and above all unaccountable.

The more answerable questions are about legitimacy and accountability. Transnational civil society networks by definition operate at least in part beyond the reach of the specific governments, businesses, and individuals whom they most affect. They often consist of people in one place claiming to speak on behalf of people in another. There are no easy means of imposing accountability ? by its very nature, transnational civil society is not subject either to elections or to market tests.

There are several bases on which transnational civil society claims the right to do what it does. The most common is superior knowledge. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International, which spent decades carefully checking out reports of specific abuses in all regions of the world, have acquired a global reputation for accuracy and political neutrality. Those opposed to large-dam construction claim superior knowledge about the true costs and benefits of the projects. On-the-ground experience in mine-infested countries gave organizations within the landmines campaign credibility in arguing for a ban on landmines.

Others base their claim to legitimacy on representativeness. This gets tricky. This is, after all, the basis of legitimacy of elected governments, who are expected to comply with what have been widely recognized standards for holding free, fair, and regular elections to ensure that government officials who fail to represent the wishes of their constituents can be removed by those constituents. For transnational civil society coalitions, even defining who the constituents are can be difficult, and those "constituents" don?t democratically elect the spokespeople of civil society. We?ve all heard the allegations that the coalitions that claim to be representing the poor and downtrodden of the world are made up primarily of the relatively wealthy and educated.

Although this has been a valid criticism, it is also increasingly outdated. Civil society is getting stronger in most parts of the world and northern groups are learning from experience about the importance of treating southerners as partners, not victims. The anti-multilateral development bank campaign of the 1980s and 1990s is a good example. It started as an effort to force the World Bank to pay attention to environmental issues as they were seen from the North ? like conservation, biodiversity, protection of species. But the campaign quickly hooked up with groups in the south and its agenda broadened to include the rights of indigenous peoples, poverty, the villagers who were being displaced by big Bank-funded infrastructure projects.

The big remaining problem is the lack of any obvious means for holding transnational civil society accountable. Governments who fail to represent their citizens can be voted out of office in democracies, or overturned. Corporations who fail to serve their employees, customers, or shareholders can suffer high turnover, declining sales, or stockholder revolts. But when Transparency International publishes a survey indicating that some countries are hopelessly corrupt, and aid to those countries is then slashed on the basis of their corruption, what is their redress?

This is a real problem, but also one that is easily, and frequently, exaggerated. All civil society advocacy stands or falls on the persuasiveness of the information it provides. Over time, groups whose facts and arguments prove unfounded discredit themselves. The deliberately dishonest and the merely incompetent can certainly do short-term damage, but they are unlikely to have significant, long-lasting influence.

As transnational civil society grows, it is evolving some of the self-correcting mechanisms that have arisen in democracies with flourishing domestic civil societies. Groups begin to hold one another accountable for the accuracy of their arguments. Government agencies and corporations learn how to respond to attacks they consider unjustified ? and they also learn how to fend off attacks that may be very well justified. For all the accomplishments of civil society coalitions, the balance of power still favors governments and corporations, whose resources will always vastly outweigh those available to the advocacy element of the third sector.

Let me conclude with looking at where we go from here. There are two big changes underway that make the whole question of legitimacy even more pressing. First, networks are increasingly bypassing governments altogether and targeting, or partnering with, the private sector. This is happening in the human rights field but it is particularly evident in the environmental field. A lot of environmentalists seem to feel that governments have failed them. Not only are environmental problems not being solved, things are getting worse. As a result, more and more are turning their attention to a more direct approach. They are no longer just trying to persuade governments to adopt laws and negotiate treaties that will regulate the environmental practices of their citizens (including corporations). Instead, they are doing things like engaging in collaborations with businesses, helping them find ways to make a profit at lower environmental costs. They are promulgating codes of conduct to which they ask businesses to adhere. They are mounting protest campaigns against particular practices by specific multinationals. And they are buying stock in the companies they wish to target, enabling them to use shareholders? meetings to put pressure on managers. In short, they?re trying to set the rules for, and sometimes with, businesses, with no involvement from governments at all.

Second, civil society?s role in global governance is changing from that of gadfly to that of direct participant in the management of global issues. Transparency International works closely with the World Bank in the anti-corruption campaign, as the ICBL did with the Canadian government. The dams case provides a potentially useful model for managing other transnational issues. The World Commission on Dams has brought together transnational civil society, governments, and the private sector in a common effort to achieve a consensus assessment of big dams and their alternatives, along with criteria for the making and decommissioning of dams. This is no easy task. The Commission includes both people who see big dams as essential providers of irrigation water and electrical power for poor countries that desperately need them, and people who see big dams as gigantic despoilers of the environment and destroyers of local livelihoods. If the Commission succeeds, it could provide a powerful model for new approaches to global governance.

So it is more desirable than ever to find means to deal with the drawbacks of transnational civil society without unduly hampering its strength. Because there is no easy, one-size-fits-all measure for determining which of the thousands of clamoring voices are pursuing noble goals (or even which goals are truly noble), those means should not constrain the sector?s vaunted flexibility. No one model serves for all of transnational civil society, just as no one model serves for all of the private sector.

The one very broad means that transnational civil society should adopt is the same one that governments and businesses are increasingly being pressured to adopt in the name of good governance: transparency. Civil society organizations are by and large quite poor at providing information about their personnel, operations, funding sources, expenditures, and even, sometimes, their purposes. Sometimes that opacity is a deliberate effort to conceal nefarious misdeeds. More often, it merely reflects the natural human tendency to see getting on with the job as more important than reporting on one?s activities. But if transnational civil society networks are to flourish as significant contributors to the management and resolution of global problems, they will have to do better. There is a role for governments here to require reporting on funding sources and expenditures. But it is up to civil society itself to make the case for itself, by being as open and honest about its own purposes and activities as time and resources will permit.

Prepared by Jonathan Blavin and Cara Carter, Junior Fellows.