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NGOs and social movementsMarcelo Lopes de SouzaVersion of record first published: 08 Apr 2013.

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NGOs and social movementsConvergences and divergences

Marcelo Lopes de Souza

Practitioners involved with orworking for non-governmentalorganisations (NGOs) usually

believe their activities are supplementaryto those developed by social movementactivists. Some of them even regard theirorganisation as somehow being part of aspecific movement. In contrast to this pos-ition, activists belonging to emancipatorysocial movements have often (and increas-ingly) made criticisms against NGOs andwhat seems to be the ‘structural role’ ofNGOs under contemporary capitalismand governmentality. In his contributionto this Forum, though he rejects ‘any sim-plistic analysis that presents popular move-ments as automatically emancipatory andNGOs as automatically part of a systemof containment’, Richard Pithouse (SouthAfrican urban activist and philosopher,lecturer at Rhodes University, Grahams-town) nevertheless expresses himself in aclear way, when he says that even if ‘thereare reactionary popular movements andthere can be self-interested, authoritarian,ethnic or gendered currents in generallyemancipatory movements’, and even ifthere are ‘some NGOs that have thoughtdeeply about their praxis and which doextraordinary work’,

‘this should not blind us to the fact thatNGOs cannot substitute themselves formovements in terms of constituting anemancipatory political force becausesignificant progressive change is seldompossible without sustained popularmobilisation. Moreover while movementscan be democratic, and sometimes are,

NGOs are very seldom able to attaindemocratic modes of working given thatthey are overwhelmingly professionalorganisations driven by funders, boards anddirectors rather than members.’

As he then concludes, ‘[f]or these reasons,amongst others, popular movements dohave a political priority over NGOs’. Hespeaks from the standpoint of his very inten-sive experience within popular movements inSouth Africa, where ‘[i]n recent years popularurban movements have often had fractiousrelations with NGOs’. However, the pro-blems to which he refers in his text ‘NGOsand Urban Movements—Notes from SouthAfrica’, are to be found in many othercountries as well, for they seem to be partof the same global ‘logic’ and, despitenational and local particularities, they arehighly influenced by the same internationalfactors. Focusing primarily on the situationin Latin American countries, Petras and Velt-meyer (2005) are among those who have dis-cussed the structural and historical role ofNGOs worldwide in a very critical light.They argue in a consistent way to show thatNGOs are actually part of the same neo-liberal dynamic and agenda.

By the way, to what extent are NGOsreally ‘non-governmental’? . . . Very oftenthey are only seeming-independent, whilede facto strongly connected with (and finan-cially dependent on) state apparatuses andcapitalist firms; at the same time, however,they are often more or less disconnectedfrom national, regional and local require-ments and governmental control in countriesof the ‘global South’. Peter Hallward

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brilliantly discusses some aspects of thisproblem in his book on Haiti, Dammingthe Flood, offering, for instance, the follow-ing wide-range remark:

‘Usually managed by well-connectedmembers of the elite in conjunction withinternational parent companies or partners,much of what they [NGOs] do [in Haiti] iseffectively independent of governmentscrutiny. Most of what they do, moreover, isextremely fragmented. All by itself, thecomplex multiplicity of the NGO sectordiscourages incisive evaluation. The fact thatthere are so many NGOs, each with their ownpriorities and projects (which are often quiteforeign to actual Haitian requirements),makes it almost impossible to develop acoordinated policy in any given field. Thereare some exceptions [. . .]. More often thannot, however, the power and multiplicity ofNGOs serves to undercut if not simplyreplace government initiatives, and in doingso helps reinforce the prejudice that aid ordevelopment money is better funneledthrough “reliable” NGOs than throughcorrupt and inefficient departments of state.’(2008, 178)

It is no accident that NGOs (and their sup-porters in academia) tend to cultivate anunderstanding of ‘civil society’ (as opposedto the state apparatus but often to the‘market’ as well) in a way that is clearly ideo-logical in two interrelated senses: first, ‘civilsociety’ is simplistically understood as comp-lementary to the state apparatus (and privateenterprises) rather than as a source of poten-tially disruptive forces and energies—some-times radical/revolutionary forces andenergies which challenge the status quo,instead of only trying to ‘supplement’ it;second, the presence of the state apparatus(and of private capital!) in ‘civil society’itself is usually minimised in the context ofa naive, apparently altruistic self-imagewhich is the basis of the ‘third sector’ dis-course as a whole. That is the reason whyEsteves, Motta, and Cox (2009), amongothers, have become increasingly discontentwith the concept (or rather notion? . . .) of

‘civil society’, though there are also examplesof emancipatory social movements which donot abdicate this expression in their radicalparlance (the Mexican Zapatistas, forinstance).

In fact, beyond the issue concerning whatRichard calls the ‘political priority’ of socialmovements in his text, there are conceptualaspects which help us to see the question onthe different roles of NGOs and (emancipa-tory) social movements from a relativelyobjective point of view. (That is not to saythat the central issue of worldviews andvalues can be entirely overcome sometime;the preferential commitment to/sympathytowards NGOs or social movements hasvery much to do not only with specificitiesin terms of expertise and personal experience,but also with political–philosophical andethical options and beliefs.)

From a conceptual viewpoint, a non-gov-ernmental organisation is—I must apologisefor this truism—, as the name suggests, anorganisation, while a social movement issomething which can be adequately under-stood only at another ‘scale level’: it refersto a larger or smaller part of an entiresociety, a part which does not accept its‘place’ in the existing ‘social order’ and some-times does not accept the ‘social order’ itself(that is, the ‘system’ as a whole), more orless (and explicitly or tacitly) questioningproblems related to aspects such as exploita-tion, social injustice, power asymmetries,identitary stigmatisation and so on. A socialmovement may contain organisations, whilean NGO is an organisation in itself—there-fore, as I said before, a matter of ‘scale’ or‘magnitude’ (and of complexity as well).

A second point speaks to the fact that thoughwe have had different kinds of NGOs (oper-ational organisations that deliver services, cam-paigning organisations, technical assistanceorganisations, etc.), they have in common thecircumstance that they have historically beenmanaged and populated by middle-class pro-fessionals (from social workers to environ-mental experts to urban planners), while adifferent type of organisation has emerged

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from the popular struggles themselves: favelaand neighbourhood associations and networksin many countries (for instance, a shack dwell-ers’ organisation such as Abahlali baseMjon-dolo, mentioned by Richard in his text),asambleas populares and piquetero organis-ations in Argentina, sem-teto organisations inBrazil, etc.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, the organisationwith which Richard Pithouse has cooperatedfor several years, has demanded from themiddle-class left—both in the universities andthe NGOs—‘Talk to us, not about us.’1 Thisslogan has its roots in justified resentments.From the perspective of many grassrootsactivists, and poor people in general, NGOstaff have increasingly become objects of deeppolitical suspicion precisely because of a certainkind of ambiguity, clearly exemplified by thecoinage of acronyms such as ‘GONGO’(‘government-operated NGO’), ‘QUANGO’(‘quasi-autonomous NGO’) and ‘BINGO’(‘business-friendly international NGO’).

Nevertheless, is the possibility of conver-gences and cooperation a mere illusion, or isthere at least some (real or potential) roomfor manoeuvre regarding collaborationbetween NGOs and social movements? It isclear that neither Richard Pithouse nor, forinstance, Peter Hallward deny the existenceof NGOs which are truly (self-)critical and,therefore, deserve to be seen as part of an eman-cipatory process. However, as they explicitlypoint out, we are talking here about exceptions.

Be that as it may, it would be wrong (eithernaive or/and highly ideological) to suggest that‘emancipatory social movements’ are some-thing like the perfect and immaculateexpression of ‘good guys’, while NGOs areonly apparently (regardless of the existenceof exceptions) ‘good guys’. There is a second,probably less evident meaning of the word‘convergence’ that should be mentioned here:convergence in terms of at least some problems.Peter Hallward said (remember the longpassage quoted earlier) that ‘[t]he fact thatthere are so many NGOs, each with theirown priorities and projects [. . .], makes italmost impossible to develop a coordinated

policy in any given field’; in Brazil in 2005, amovie (half a fiction movie, half a documen-tary) brilliantly depicted precisely the tragico-mic situation of disputes between NGOs thattake the form of competing declarations that‘these poor are mine!’2 However, it is fair toadmit that in many situations we can adaptthe sentence to the reality of social movements:

‘[t]he fact that there are so many socialmovement organisations, each claiming to bethe best expression of the movement as suchand each with their own priorities andprojects [. . .], makes it almost impossible todevelop coordinated, truly effective actions inany given field’.

I could mention different examples, from Bra-zilian sem-teto to Argentine piqueteros, toshow that divisions and disputes are a daily-life phenomenon in the realm of social move-ment organisations, too; and the final result isa waste of popular energy and of opportunities,not to mention the cases of authoritarian organ-ising and manipulative ‘leadership’. RichardPithouse is right when he says that not everysocial movement is emancipatory; that is abasic conceptual wisdom, because if we define‘emancipatory’ in a sense that is more or lessinherited from the Enlightenment tradition,we can find several social movements whichwere or are animated by patriarchal, conserva-tive, fundamentalist values and beliefs—forinstance, the Tea Party Movement in contem-porary USA. However, we must go furtherand acknowledge that the content of ‘emanci-pation’/‘emancipatory’ is in itself a contestedterritory as well. There are more differenttypes and styles of organisation (‘horizontal’vs. ‘vertical’), different worldviews and politi-cal–philosophical backgrounds (Marxism,[neo]anarchism, autonomism and so on) . . .

All this is, to some extent, inevitable, and theexistence of divergences is very often a goodthing, not a bad thing; above all, of course,that is not an excuse or an alibi for whatseems to be NGOs’ ‘systemic complicity’.However, in terms of social movements, andeven in terms of emancipatory social move-ments, is it not a matter of fairness and prudence

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to admit that our contemporary politicallandscape is so complex and often confusingthat both Manicheism and one-sided narrativesmust be avoided? . . .

Notes

1 See Pithouse (2007) and Ndabankulu, Nsibande,and Ntseng (2009). A more complete variant of theslogan is: ‘Talk to us, not about us, not for us.’

2 Quanto vale ou e por quilo? (2005, directed bySergio Bianchi).

References

Esteves, A. M., S. Motta, and L. Cox. 2009. “Issue TwoEditorial: ‘Civil Society’ versus Social Movements.”Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements

1 (2): 1–21. Accessed August 1, 2012. http://interface-articles.googlegroups.com/web/editorial2.pdf.

Hallward, P. 2008. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide,and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso.

Ndabankulu, M., Z. Nsibande, and D. Ntseng. 2009.“Abahlali baseMjondolo: Reclaiming our Dignity andVoices” [interview by Sokari Ekine]. Accessed July 8,2010. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/58979

Petras, J., and H. Veltmeyer. 2005. Movimientos sociales ypoder estatal: Argentina, Brasil, Bolivia, Ecuador.Mexico (D.F.): Editorial Lumen.

Pithouse, R. 2007. “The University of Abahlali baseMjon-dolo.” Accessed August 1, 2012. http://abahlali.org/node/2814

Marcelo Lopes de Souza is a professor at theDepartment of Geography of the FederalUniversity of Rio de Janeiro. Email:mlopesdesouza@terra.com.br

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