The Rise of Non-Governmental Organizations and the Civilization of Neoliberalism?

Abstract

Major changes are currently underway in global development. While some World Bank officials celebrate state collapse in parts of Africa as enabling the creation of genuine market economies de novo (Bayart et al., 1999) as juridical sovereignty was threatened in parts of the continent, ‘underdevelopment turned dangerous’ (Duffield, 2001). This created negative externalities for the international system in terms of crime, unwanted migration, the spread of AIDS, terrorism and a variety of other ‘public bads’; and this, combined with the global economic crisis in the late 1990s (Brenner, 1998) and transnational activism, necessitated a new approach to development and a widening of the concept of security. Consequently at the end of the last millennium there were significant, but evolutionary, changes in both the global discourse of development and in the global aid architecture and regimes. This new architecture is comprised of five elements. According to Simon Maxwell (2003, pp. 5–6) these are:

• (i) the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), with poverty reduction at their heart;

• (ii) international consensus on how to reduce poverty, best summarized in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty;

• (iii) a mechanism for operationalizing the strategy at country level, in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs);

• (iv) technologies for delivering aid in support of PRSPs, notably Medium-Term Expenditure Frameworks, Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAPs) and Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSC), all associated with budget support rather than project funding; and

• (v) underpinning the other four, a commitment to Results-Based Management.

Enter civil society. But precisely what has ventured upon the stage? Is this truly an actor, organically constituted? Is its corporeal being only an illusion of distant perception, dissolving as one approaches? Is it merely a metaphor masquerading as a player? Is it yet another child of the anthropomorphic fertility of the social scientific imagination? Or do we spy a redemptive spirit, providentially dispatched to right a political world gone awry?

(Young, 1994, p. 43)