The politics of ‘civil society’

The website of the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA) has this to say about its work in Sri Lanka:

‘Sri Lanka lacks a broad and firmly established plan to combat poverty. The development plan that does exist, Mahinda Chinthana, has been produced without consultation with the civil society and does not therefore form the basis of Sweden’s development co-operation.’

Hence, SIDA does not agree with how the democratically elected government of Sri Lanka sets about developing its economy and society, but requires the government to base its plans on what it is told to do by ‘civil society’.

What is this nebulous, much talked about entity? One definition is ‘a public space between the state, the market and the ordinary household, in which people can debate and take action'. In Sri Lanka, this space is occupied by various non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which have no popular basis of representation and which have no responsibility to anybody but their funders - invariably foreign funding bodies. And therein lies the crux of the problem regarding ‘civil society’.

Religious institutions

NGOs have been a part of the socio-economic set-up of Sri Lanka for over a century. In the colonial era, ‘development policy’ was tied to imperialist aims, and various societies and associations were formed for the cultural, economic and social regeneration of the ordinary people - many of them associated with religious institutions.

More modern institutions of ‘civil society’ were formed in the 1950s and ‘60s; the archetypical NGO was Sarvodaya, which began as a work camp in 1958. Marga, founded in 1972, was the prototype for a different branch of ‘civil society’, the social research NGO. However, ‘civil society’ really began taking off after 1977 - NGOs began to proliferate, along with a bewildering number of acronyms.

This had partly to do with the collapse of the old Left, which had occupied the ‘civil society’ of its day. Financially starved, the socialist parties articulated social needs and carried out volunteer work, a tradition which began with the crucial relief work done by the Suriya Mal movement in the villages during the mid-1930s malaria epidemic.

The culture of the Left encouraged co-operation at every stage: from neighbourhood support for strikers to Shramadanas for building village schools. The intelligentsia has played a very important part in this culture. Leftist thought was hegemonic in intellectual circles; every major cultural figure, from Martin Wickremasinghe to Esmond Wickremasinghe had been linked to the Left at some time or other.

Seminars and conferences

In the late 1970s, young intellectuals, seeing no prospects for the Left, began joining NGOs. It was exciting to actually be paid for doing what one wanted to do - which had hitherto been purely voluntary. And where, earlier the outlook for foreign travel was extremely bleak, now there was a pleasing vista of endless, sponsored trips to exotic locations for seminars and conferences. The cream of the intellectual elite was drawn into the maws of ‘civil society’.

An entirely new lexicon came into general use, replacing the previously dominant language of the Left. Old words took on entirely new meaning - for example, a ‘workshop’ had been something in which workers worked, while now it meant ‘seminar’. This can’t even begin filtering into everyday usage, so that it became possible rapidly to identify civil-society personages through conversation.

Gradually, an entire cohort of well-meaning intellectuals and activists was weaned away from their Left-leaning ideology, their ideals corrupted by mammon and by the pressure of their peers. This was done by foreign funders steering funding into specified areas.

Commercial needs

Foreign intelligence communities involved themselves quite early, but disguised themselves. For example, from 1982 funds which had earlier been channelled through the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to be disbursed through a variety of new organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the Centre for Private Enterprise and the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity.

It has long been axiomatic that funds were available for social-science research, but that none would be granted in natural sciences or technology - in which fields the companies of the countries of the donors might feel competition. However, funding has much deeper implications and targets are very specific.

It is used to steer society towards the commercial needs of multi-national companies; e.g. massive funds are available for programmes for distributing title for previously communally held land; very little for combining uneconomically-sized privately held blocks of land into production co-operatives.

Monies are also used to subvert governments: for instance, abundant funds are available for studying discrimination and impunity in government; however, none is forthcoming for examining the same phenomena in the corporate sector, the private mass media or indeed ‘civil society’.

Development activities

The corrupting influence of funding is all the greater because of the very manner in which it is administered. A rule of the thumb is that a given organization will keep 60 percent of the funding that passes through it for its own purposes.

For instance, if a person in, say, Canada gives a charity 100 dollars it will pass on 40 cents to the NGO in the target country; which in turn will pass on 40 cents to the community based organization (CBO) in the target community; which will spend 16 cents on the project being funded.

The corruption of ‘civil society’ has had a knock-on corrupting effect on development activities in society as a whole. Corruption and embezzlement has become a fact of life in CBOs. Even worse, core values are contaminated: where voluntary ‘Shramadana’ activities used to be part and parcel of community life, now no labour contribution free of payment can be expected.

Rather than ‘development co-operation’, funders such as SIDA have supported ‘development non-co-operation’. ‘Civil society’ has played no small part in destroying the very ethos of community-based development that early NGOs such as Sarvodaya were established to promote.