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A consultancy organization providing a range of support services to NGOs, CBOs, NGO networks and social development agencies. |
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A consultancy organization providing a range of support services to NGOs, CBOs, NGO networks and social development agencies. |
This section focusses on capacities of the organizations to come together and contribute to each others’ strength to achieve shared goals (networking) and utilize such strength to effect changes in public behaviour and governance through propagation of just, humane and equitable processes in planned development (advocacy).
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The present report argues that organizations of the poor formed through the social animation methodology need to come together for shared interests in the development of their members. The act of coming together of people or organizations of the people for the advancement of shared interests is an exercise in networking. Such networking is widespread at the grassroot level in view of the possibility of augmenting development resources, skills and opportunities. However, such networking has so far been weak at the level of the NGOs in a district or a state, or NGOs at the level of the country.
A network could be viewed as a common place or forum for the participating members to achieve a common objective without losing their individual identity or autonomy. It involves such members sitting together, sharing experiences and ideas, developing linkages through working together and/or among them with a shared set of values and ideas. It has also been viewed as a product of "an inevitable and irreversible process of interaction of different development factors surrounding the development agencies".
The basic governing principle - and its original source of strength - lies in democratic decentralization; its members agree to disagree; their differences are taken to a point of consensus through the role played by a responsible leadership. The elements of differences and conflict are minimized through formulation of and adherence to a mutually agreed Code of Ethics. An enabling environment created within the network helps the small and emerging NGOs to attain organization building, acquire programme management skills, and encourage democratic governance at their own and CBO levels.
Factors Influencing Networking
The process of networking is influenced by several factors including the
Networking is most active among CBOs/NGOs at block, district, state and regional levels. In a somewhat informal manner, it could also be noticed at the national level. However, it is probably at its weakest stage at the inter-state (regional) and national levels.
Networking is both an opportunity and a threat to the NGO identity. It is an opportunity insofar NGOs of varying size, skills and resources are enabled to interact with each other. Such interaction leads to learning from each others' experiences, sharing of resources, and active transfer of skills in community participation and organization. The medium- and large-sized NGOs are endowed with a successful activity and community participation base, and, have been visited by NGO functionaries and community members from small and emerging NGOs. Many of these functionaries have even received training from these NGOs.
At the same time, networking is a threat to the identify of small and emerging NGOs insofar the large- and medium-sized NGOs tend to acquire a dominant and self-serving role (in some cases) in such networks. The issue of a Code of Conduct has often been seen as a sword brandished both by the Government and by the large-sized NGOs (sometimes in partnership with the Government itself) aimed at cleansing the so-called corrupt practices among the NGO community. The large-sized NGOs do, in some cases, succumb to the temptation of acting as brokers for the Government or the large-sized donors.
However, there is considerable pressure in support of issue-based participation through a process of shared and rotational leadership role. A large group of Orissa NGOs are networking for environment and for education for all; similarly, a group of Tamil Nadu NGOs have been campaigning for access to drinking water and shelter. A group of NGOs in Andhra Pradesh have been undertaking advocacy work in support of child rights in general and rights of child labour in particular both at the level of the state government and the national government.
Networking appears to be taking place among the NGO partners associated with a particular facilitating agency, often called a national NGO network. It is also taking place among diverse NGO interests largely on issues which commonly concern these organizations.
The issues most frequently shared, and
thus amenable to networking, by the NGO community in
India include the
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The process of networking receives support from both subjective and objective conditions in evidence during the period of NGO growth in any country. The initiative for networking could come from the support organizations which view networking and advocacy as part of their capacity building activities, or, from several isolated and scattered efforts at bringing organizations together, or, from the NGOs themselves as part of the realization of their concern for the people's rights in the process of development.
The support organizations have created for themselves infrastructure to provide services to the NGOs; such services often result in coming together of NGOs. Such fora promote discussion on the need for collective action and the need for a fora to promote such collective action on issues of common concerns.
Such networks are addressing common issues either by linking with existing advocacy groups such as VANI at the national level and numerous groups at regional, state and district levels or by assuming advocacy functions themselves to articulate on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged, apart from voicing organizational issues vis-a-vis- NGO participation policies, laws, rules and regulations.
The Voluntary Action Network India was established in 1988; its mission and programme is based on the need to promote value-based voluntary action and continuous work to expand the political space for civil society in India. It believes that despite "increasing rhetoric to engage voluntary action in mainstream national development, compulsions of survival, feudal mind set and sectarian orientation of political and bureaucratic leadership in the country continue to place enormous burdens and restrictions on voluntary action in the country."
Networking in the Neighbouring Countries
Networking in the neighbouring countries has been spurred by the distinct conceptual understanding developed on issues like social animation, social mobilization, the process through which social movements grew in each country, the history of growth of the NGOs in each country, the extent of hurdles created by the state in each country to weaken civil society, and the responses that the NGO sector evolved through networking and coalition building. These factors have, to a large extent, determined the degree of sustainability of networking activities in the various countries.
The process of social mobilization has generally been understood in Bangladesh as one kind of movement generated by a group of people for their development rights. The movement grew sporadically in its initial stages and is on way to becoming a nationwide and organized effort at lobbying for the development rights of the people.
At the back of the movement is the cumulative concern for the problems faced by the diverse groups of the poor and the disadvantaged - the fishermen's cooperatives, small peasants cooperatives, people working in the agricultural sector, etc. It has also drawn participation from other civil society groups - teachers' associations, associations of journalists, civic forums, grassroot level NGOs, women's network or coalition, coalition of the urban poor, etc.
The origins of the various social movements in Bangladesh could be traced to the following factors:
The content and techniques of the social movements is often influenced by changes taking place in geographically contiguous societies. India, for example, provided a strong experiential base in the non-cooperation movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. The non-cooperation movement represented a networking among the interests of the farmers, interests of the emerging middle class, etc. Similarly, the language-based movement led by the student community grew as a social movement and went on to acquire the character of a national liberation war.
The NGOs' participation in the development rights of the people could be seen in relief and rehabilitation work for the refugees rendered so by the war. It could also be seen in the launching of development programmes aimed at sustaining survival of the poor below the poverty line. The NGOs found their ideological roots in the four principles of the liberation war - nationalism, democracy, secularism, and social justice; these four principles adhered to the basic aspirations of the people and were supportive of people's participation in the national development process.
The NGOs participated in such movements; they sharpened their skills in networking among the various civil society groups and in utilizing advocacy as a weapon to concretize people's rights to participate in all aspects of development planning and implementation. The support organizations rapidly emerged as capacity building organizations for the NGOs and their functionaries. Such organizations supported the institutional capacity of the NGOs to mobilize the poor based on their socioeconomic aspirations through support to development programmes, formation of networks and advocacy fora, etc.
The NGOs, or the Private Voluntary Development Organizations (PVDOs) as these are known, emerged essentially in the mid-1980s; these organizations undertook activities which enabled them to become partners in the process of national development. However, several constraints have created hurdles in a wider political space for the NGOs.
These could be seen in a lack of appreciation among the political parties concerning the role that social animation and social mobilization could play in democratizing the political process. A similar lack of appreciation concerning this point could be noticed even among the state and its functioning bureaucracy; this tendency is further fuelled by an absence of the element of continuity in the functioning of democracy and democratic institutions.
ADAB has rapidly emerged as an apex organizations of NGOs in Bangladesh. It has been performing coordination and support roles for the growth of its members. There are also 36 other NGO networks representing diverse sectoral interests or sometimes several networks within the same development sector. The sectoral networks represent such issues as environment, community-based or occupation-based groups - Forum of Environmental Journalists, Credit and Development Forum, Forum for Regenerative Agriculture Movement, Coalition for Urban Poor, Coalition of Environmental NGOs, Campaign for Popular Education, Disaster Preparedness and Disaster Management, etc.
The process of networking gained support, directly or indirectly, from the following factors:
The failure on the two fronts provided enough space for the social activists to experiment with alternate methodologies of people's participation in the process of development. Such movements were further supported by the Youth Insurgency in 1971, the emergence of Death Donation Societies as savings societies aimed at meeting the sudden needs of death collectively, growth of the Sarvodaya as a harmony model based on a re-interpretation of the Buddhist ethics combined with elements of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of reconciliation as distinct from conflict as a strategy for development, and Sanasa or Thrift and Credit Cooperative Societies.
The change in government in 1977 and the introduction of the change agent programme facilitated the pro-poor social mobilization processes further. The programme supported the training of catalysts to steer social mobilization of the poor. The Participatory Institute for Development Alternatives (PIDA) was instituted as an NGO in 1980; it supports the praxis of training aimed at facilitating social change based on methodologies of social mobilization.
The period 1984-93 witnessed a countrywide process of social mobilization with programmes targetted on urban and rural poor. These included the Million Houses Programme during 1984-89 highlighting the learning process from the efforts of the housebuilders among the poor in the process of meeting their shelter needs. An Action Programme for Poverty Alleviation through People-based Development was introduced in 1987; this was followed by the Jana Saviya National Poverty Alleviation Policy and Programme which proposed to cover one-third of the whole country during 1989-93.
The Janasaviya Programme led to the creation of a Janasaviya Trust Fund in 1993 as a World Bank funded apex bank for the poor with four distinct windows including funds for training, nutrition, public works, and credit fund for productive activities. The Janasaviya 15000 projects programme placed financial resources into community bank accounts to encourage planning and implementation of small productive activities, or micro-enterprises.
The Kumaratunga Government has encouraged the Samurdhi programme (prosperity through organization of Samurdhi banks as community-based savings and credit organizations) as part of its concern for the goal of poverty eradication.
The organization of the poor received support at three distinct levels including
It was based on the principle of a "strong base at the bottom, and a light but qualitatively endowed leadership at the top".
The NGO National Action Front (NNAF) has emerged as a national apex body of small and middle-sized NGOs drawn from 14 district level consortia catalyzed by the Sri Lanka Canada Development Fund (SLCDF), PIDA, and the Human Development Centre. It has drafted and declared a Code of Ethics for NGOs in Social Development.
The Institutional Development Programme was instituted in 1975 under the Small Farmers Development Programme as a semi-government initiative. The programme aimed at developing local level small farmers' organizations, enhancing the financial and managerial capability of grassroot organizations through facilitation of knowledge and skills, and, according legal status to such organizations so as to establish long-term relationship between the Agricultural Development Bank of Nepal and the small farmers. The programme enabled the small farmers to mobilize rural savings through such organizations.
The democracy movement in Nepal culminated in the establishment of a Multi-Party system in 1990. The new Constitution of Nepal placed the Nepalese citizens in the centre of all development activities. It envisaged that "all national aspirations are derived from the citizen who controls factors affecting his present and future well-being." It further implied that the poor and the disadvantaged, being unable at the individual level, could gain greater knowledge and skill as a community group. The organizational process could thus expand both laterally and horizontally based on the capacities of the individual citizens and their groups/organizations.
The political scientists have called such a governance structure as polycentric, distinctly different from the centralized structure of governance. This has meant provision of support to the formation of user groups within a natural resource boundary, e.g., forest or water. "The government in 1993 decided to use these groups extensively as a vehicle for implementing community infrastructure type of projects such as rural road, drinking water supply, irrigation, school construction, etc." The user groups were authorized to directly implement government projects upto Rs. 1 million without hiring any contractors.
There is growing demand for development of common property resources for the benefit of the villages through appropriate changes in the Forestry Act and Water Resources Act. The Credit and Savings Groups also need legislative protection to continue their innovative financial intermediation process alongside establishing linkages with the formal financial institutions. There are similar demands for amendments to the Society Registration Act and laws relating to community resource management to substantial freedom of organization as enunciated in the new Constitution of Nepal.
Several networks have emerged after this period; these include the NGO Federation of Nepal (1991), the NGO Forum - Nepal (1991), the Women's Security and Pressure group (1992), and Gender Watch Professional Interest Group (1994).
The present report argues that advocacy has recently emerged as a significant strategy adopted by the organizations of the poor to assert their right to development in democratic societies. However, unlike networking, advocacy appears to be at its strongest at the national levels, rather than at the state and district levels. The revival of the Panchayat Raj Institutions, or, for that matter, the issue of reservation of seats for women in national and state legislatures, are issues which have evoked more national level, than any significant regional or local level, socio-political action in India.
Any group undertaking advocacy work for
the poor and the disadvantaged needs to assume, among
others, the following minimal functions:
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Any group undertaking advocacy work for the poor and the disadvantaged needs to assume, among others, the following minimal functions:
The process of coalition building has been found extremely useful in undertaking advocacy activities in any given area. The process of partnership with other groups should make it possible to rely on use of tools and methodologies from various knowledge areas including sociology, psychology, communication, political science, and, education. The advocacy support groups are also popularly known as public interest organizations.
Such advocacy support groups are committed to strengthening the capacity of social and economic justice advocates to influence and change public policy.
| The Advocacy Institute based in Washington, DC, for example, undertakes studies in media advocacy, ways of framing public arguments, and, methods of accessing and persuading decision makers. It also shares these skills through training, couseling, materials and other forms of support. |
The advocacy groups working in the field have usually found that it is critical to understand individual, group, organizational and societal behaviour in order to develop effective strategies for undertaking advocacy work. Such knowledge bases are utilized to support training in advocacy work to facilitate acquisition of planning, analytic and administrative skills.
Many advocacy support groups in India (e.g., the Centre for Science and Environment, the Voluntary Action Network of India) have made extensive use of research to generate development sector-specific information. Such groups support the efforts of policy analysts and policy-makers to understand connections between economic policy and economic choices with a view to developing policy options that promote sustainable livelihoods. Many such groups have also relied on evaluation strategies to assess public education programmes about factors affecting social change. Such studies have been followed by group-specific public education programmes.
Among the skills critical to advocacy work, the most critical one is probably the skills in social impact analysis and skills in negotiation. The individuals and groups attempt to find out how attitudes and behaviours are formed and changed, how information is transmitted in a community which has diverse social and ethnic groups, and, how consensus is evolved in such diverse situations.
Several efforts are currently at work in India highlighting issues including poverty alleviation through pro-poor planning, poverty-watch and its indicators of social mobilization, gender equity, child rights including eradication of child labour, human rights (including food security), environmental conservation and enrichment through locally trained cadres of animators/organizers, training of and coordination with Panchayat Raj institutions, etc.
Enabling Environment for Advocacy Work
There has been growing consensus among the South Asian countries towards according highest priority to the goal of poverty eradication within a given time frame through a bold pro-poor poverty alleviation process. The search for strategies towards this end has progressed from relief to welfare to empowerment to a rights perspective; more and more non-governmental groups are resorting to coalition building among the organizations of the poor to widen the rights framework.
India, for example, has begun to talk about primary education as a fundamental right; its Constitution had initially viewed it as a Directive Principle of State Policy. Similarly, diverse Supreme Court judgements in India have sought to expand the scope of Right to Life with Dignity to cover even the provision of sanitation in places of habitation or the element of opportunity to work to generate life sustaining income. There is now global talk of right to food, work, and full information.
The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution have sought to operationalize the principles of devolution and decentralization to facilitate the practice of participatory planning by the poor from the village level upwards to the district level. The Panchayat Raj Institutions and the Nagarpalikas should gradually come into their own and begin to play active roles in local planning and management of development.
The community participation processes are rapidly expanding with various community groups, organizations, associations and coalitions articulating in support of the right to community participation in the process of planning and management of development initiatives on the one hand and transparency and accountability in public governance on the other. These processes are rapidly acquiring strength with NGOs and other Citizens groups joining hands (though on very selective issues at the moment - fishermen's rights against MNC operations with trawlers, etc.) with various service providing groups including media.
Such advocacy work has resulted in
creation of replicable mechanisms for
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This progress towards a more enabling environment is likely to strengthen through a process of constructive engagement among the various participating groups. As has been pointed out earlier, the most critical activity in this regard relates to documentation of information and experiences through effective and efficient data generation systems. Such information, for example, can relate to diverse forms of poverty, the diverse situations which the poor find themselves in, and, the numerous barriers encountered by the poor in their right to participation in development. It can also relate to policies, programmes, and, rules and regulations guiding the process of development planning and management.
Evolving A Matrix of Advocacy Roles
The lack of an information/experiences data base or large gaps therein relating to diverse forms of poverty, etc. are likely to render advocacy and intervention efforts weak and ineffective on the one hand and act as barriers to formation of wider coalitions of organizations of the poor on the other. The information/experiences data base can be generated and classified in terms of its own diversity; it can be developed in response to a suggested matrix of advocacy roles in support of a pro-poor planning and social mobilization policy.
The following roles, for example, have been assumed by the community participation sector in the recent years:
