Working with social movements - OECD.org

Working with social movements Priyanthi Fernando, Centre for Poverty Analysis, Sri Lanka*

Social movements have great potential in empowering marginalised people and in reducing poverty. But donors working with social movements need to recognise that social movements have long-term goals that cannot be fitted neatly into project cycles and that “empowerment” through social movements entails a certain degree of politicisation. Although they may wish to maintain neutrality, they need to be willing to take that risk. Donors can facilitate empowerment by supporting institutions and activities including Ombudsman functions that offset attempts by governments, private companies and national elites to weaken, de-legitimise, incorporate or repress social movements advocating the interests of poor people.

* Priyanthi Fernando is the Executive Director at the Centre for Poverty Analysis in Sri Lanka, a developing country participant in DAC Network on Poverty Reduction (POVNET). This Good Practice Note was co-written by its associated Task Team on Empowerment and the work received considerable inputs from Professor Marjorie Mbilinyi, Tanzania Gender Networking Program, also a developing country participant in POVNET. The author acknowledges with thanks the comments made and the resources provided by other members and secretariat of the POVNET.

PROMOTING PRO-POOR GROWTH: THE ROLE OF EMPOWERMENT – © OECD 2012

8. Working with social movements

8. Working with social movements Priyanthi Fernando, Centre for Poverty Analysis, Sri Lanka*

Social movements have great potential in empowering marginalised people and in reducing poverty. But donors working with social movements need to recognise that social movements have long-term goals that cannot be fitted neatly into project cycles and that “empowerment” through social movements entails a certain degree of politicisation. Although they may wish to maintain neutrality, they need to be willing to take that risk. Donors can facilitate empowerment by supporting institutions and activities including Ombudsman functions that offset attempts by governments, private companies and national elites to weaken, de-legitimise, incorporate or repress social movements advocating the interests of poor people.

* Priyanthi Fernando is the Executive Director at the Centre for Poverty Analysis in Sri Lanka, a developing country participant in DAC Network on Poverty Reduction (POVNET). This Good Practice Note was co-written by its associated Task Team on Empowerment and the work received considerable inputs from Professor Marjorie Mbilinyi, Tanzania Gender Networking Program, also a developing country participant in POVNET. The author acknowledges with thanks the comments made and the resources provided by other members and secretariat of the POVNET. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


Key messages 1. Donors working with social movements need to recognise that social movements have long-term goals that cannot be fitted neatly into project cycles. 2. Donors supporting social movements need to realise that “empowerment” entails a certain degree of politicisation and that they need to be willing to take that risk. 3. Donors can facilitate empowerment by supporting institutions and activities including Ombudsman functions that offset attempts by governments, private companies and national elites to weaken, de-legitimise, incorporate or repress social movements advocating the interests of poor people.

Introduction Despite the political nature of working with social movements which makes engage ment difficult for donors who wish to maintain their “neutral” status, a number of DAC donors are supporting and working with social movements on issues such as land and labour rights, indigenous people’s rights and gender equality. The purpose of this Good Practice Note is to provide insights into how donors can best work with social movements, to highlight potential areas where donors need to be careful in their engagement with social movements, and finally to draw attention to the potential of social movements in empowering marginalised people and in reducing poverty. To limit the discussion and to make it relevant for donors seeking to better understand, or support empowerment of people living in poverty, this Good Practice Note defines social movements as a type of group action consisting of informal groupings of individuals and/or organisations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change and as such through civic action generating transformative change. The author is aware that this working definition does not comprise all social movements, a point which we shall return to later in the Good Practice Note. Also, due to the focus on the potential of social movements in bringing about empowerment of people living in poverty the discussion is limited to dealing with social movements that address a number of issues relevant for people living in poverty. The current DAC approach to pro-poor growth defines it as “a pace and pattern of growth that enhances the ability of poor women and men to participate in, contribute to and benefit from growth” (OECD 2006). The DAC Policy Statement on Pro-Poor Growth sees the empowerment of people living in poverty as an essential element of the process. Empowerment has multiple meanings relating to power, participation, autonomy and choice and takes place when people individually or collectively, conceive of, define and pursue better lives for themselves. For pro-poor growth to happen, poor women and men need to change existing power relations and gain and exert influence over political, economic and social processes that determine and, all too often, constrain their livelihood opportunities.1 Social movements can be seen as a manifestation of this empowerment. Social movements most often aim to achieve something better for their constituents who are usually among the excluded and powerless in society. Their goals could be securing more equitable control over resources, greater representation in local politics, fair access to services and markets or decent working conditions. They see the nature and exercise of power in society as the fundamental obstacle to achieving these goals and tend to organise around ideas that give the movements’ constituents new forms of social and Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


political identity. The success of the feminist movement, for instance, does not depend just on various forms of political action, but also on the way in which the ideas associated with the movement led women, and ultimately men, to rethink hitherto accepted and largely unchallenged notions about the roles of women in society. Social movements can also question the dominant economic paradigm and its ability to deliver sustainably, the basic tenets of pro-poor growth as defined above. Movements on land rights for women and for marginalised groups in Africa are beginning to challenge the liberalisation and privatisation policies which lead to increased corporate power, including that of multinational corporations (MNCs), over natural resources, and which have led more recently to a scramble for land for food and energy crop production and speculation, as well as increased competition for access to minerals, petroleum, timber and water (Mbilinyi, 2009; World Bank, 2010).

Value of engagement with social movements It is the value of these social and political changes that social movements can engender on behalf of the excluded and powerless that makes them potentially important allies in achieving the objectives of pro-poor growth, poverty reduction and empowerment. Social movements also play an important role in nation-building and democracy. They imply an organised citizenry motivated and empowered to mobilise behind and carry on a sustained campaign in defence of their interests and rights. They test a state’s practical ability to defend the constitutional rights of all its citizens (Eyben and Ladbury, 2006) and are thus critical to the governance agenda. Engagement with social movements can give donor agencies a more direct relationship with the constituency that development activities are expected to benefit, with representatives of those who are most dramatically affected by global decision making. Indigenous peoples’ movements for example, represent a marginalised and impoverished group of people who are nevertheless custodians of much of the world’s agricultural diversity and its related

ecosystems and its bio-cultural and knowledge diversity; as such they play a vital role in addressing global challenges (McKeon and Kalafatic, 2009). They and other social movements are increasingly influential in national policy making and have a greater presence in a rapidly developing multi-actor global governance system.

Social movements can also be sources of “early warning” on emerging issues since they tend to react to their members on the ground, long before formal development institutions become aware of them. They have access to local knowledge and expertise, the kind that is essential to understanding ecosystems, fighting climate change and biodiversity loss. They can contribute to searches for alternative, more equitable and sustainable paradigms at a time when conventional approaches are being questioned (Mckeon and Kalafatic, 2009). At

the same time, engagement with social movements could also be a source of some tension as they frequently critique the policy options pursued by many national governments, including donor governments and institutions.

Characteristics of social movements In our definition of social movements the issue of transformative change involves changing the underlying assumptions and overt behaviours, processes and structures of a society. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


Civic action implies that the key actors in a social movement are citizens, often from social groups with less political power and on the periphery of economic and social decision making (as well as those working with these groups), and the actions usually constitute a series of demands or challenges to structures of power and the power holders.

Box 8.1. Examples of social movements leading to transformative change The actions of the civil rights movement of the United States, over a period of 12 to 13 years, overthrew existing laws that allowed segregation and other forms of discrimination in the US and established social norms that were against discrimination. The women’s movement in northern Europe and northern America in the 1960s and 1970s reframed existing unequal gender relationships as oppressive and harmful rather than being “just the way things are”. The assumptions that were made about division of labour – not least the unpaid domestic work of women – were made visible, framed differently and challenged in the process. More recent developments in the women’s movement have impacted on global governance and have sought to influence intergovernmental and multilateral processes, urged state compliance with, or adoption of, key international treaties – mainly the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action. In Latin America, the indigenous peoples’ movements have campaigned for and won collective rights and, most recently in Bolivia, have been a strong force in achieving political change.

The focus of the actions and the issues around which social movements mobilise people, can vary. In terms of relevance to pro-poor growth and empowerment, a typology of issues that social movements mobilise around include, but are not limited to: • movements that mobilise around issues of access to and control of productive assets. Examples include movements relating to rural or urban land (e.g. pastoralists movements) or indigenous communities access to forest resources. • movements that mobilise against perceived economic exploitation and inequality of access to markets, labour markets in particular. They comprise people and organisations in specific trades or industries as well as networks of social and environmental justice activists. Movements related to extractive industries such as mining, or movements that challenge trade liberalisation and their impact are some examples. • movements that challenge discrimination, social exclusion and systemic and structural forms of racism, patriarchy and sexism e.g. gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation. Movements such as the human rights movement or the women’s movement from its suffragist origins would fall into this category. • movements that advocate for overall economic, social or political change, the construction of a new world order. An example of this is the World Social Forum. Social movements also have a tendency to be unstructured and non-institutional and are characterised by “more nebulous, uncoordinated and cyclical forms of collective action, popular protest and networks that serve to link both organised and dispersed actors in processes of social mobilisation” (Mitlin and Bebbington, 2006). Mobilisation and/or disruption are often seen as defining characteristics of a social movement; a movement’s capacity to disrupt or threaten an existing social order are seen as linked to its ability to bring about change, and a way of introducing new thinking into the political agenda.

Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


However, the ability of social movements to challenge and transform existing structures of power and domination can be offset by internal divisions or could vary with the context and determine the length and nature of their engagement with the core issue. For example, the South Africa anti-apartheid movement took more than 25 years to have any effect in promoting social inequality because of the repressive nature of the apartheid state that it was trying to engage with. However the Treatment Action Campaign has been able to influence the government of South Africa to develop an antiretroviral treatment plan after four years of advocacy (Stackpool-Moore, 2006). The objectives of social movements may change over time. For instance, what were deemed “peasant movements” concerned with defending a way of life and type of rural production from intrusions and demands of large corporations and the state, have now been replaced in with social movements that are contesting economic control in markets, demanding the right to determine prices and returns to labour, challenging institutional constraints to restraining economic opportunities for the poor (Webster, 2004). Box 8.2. Conseil national de concertation et de coopération des ruraux (CNCR) Conseil national de concertation et de coopération des ruraux (CNCR) in Senegal, grew out of the failure of state-organised producer cooperatives and a state-controlled, commodityoriented model of agrarian development which was dismantled by, among other things, the market liberalisation reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. These measures rapidly dismantled the state marketing system in the expectation that its role would be taken by private market actors. When this did not happen, rural markets collapsed, leaving rural producers to face new, different and arguably worse, market failures. The CNCR’s starting point was a critique of the economic model by the peasant farmers, who were suffering from its effects, and a demand for the right to have a say in designing policies and programmes under structural adjustment Source: Mckeon et al. (2004), Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme, Paper No 8, May 2004.

Partial achievement of a movement’s objectives however, could rob a movement of its dynamic energy or the movement may be overtaken by shifts in social and political attitudes. At another level, social movements may become institutionalised, as in the case of the British “Labour movement”, which remains a useful umbrella term for the Labour Party, trade unions, co-operatives, and socialist organisations, but no longer conveys a sense of a dynamic force seeking radical change. Social movements can be national or (increasingly) transnational. National movements have grown from mobilising against a particular local issue to become a national movement (e.g. peasant movements that have grown to focus on agrarian reform and the democratisation of agriculture). International/transnational movements have proliferated from the 1970s onwards, and relate to issues of peace, nuclear disarmament, environment, human rights, feminist rights, gay rights and more recently, anti-globalisation (e.g. the World Social Forum). The 1970s and 1980s also witnessed a rapid expansion of the indigenous peoples’ rights movement worldwide – in the US, Canada, Greenland, Colombia, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand. In recent times, social movements have emerged as an important force in international politics influencing global norms and practices. They resist globalisation, and challenge the authority of the countries and the international institutions that shape international relations and international development assistance. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


Box 8.3. Movement against large dams The movement against large dams on the Narmada River in India, not only stalled the construction of such dams, but also pressured the World Bank to alter lending policies and priorities to take social and environmental concerns into account. It also led to the establishment of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), that recognised that large dams in many cases led to avoidable impoverishment and suffering of a large number of poor people and established firm standards and guidelines for future dams, including consultation with tribal people and others affected by their construction. The enthusiasm for large dams is resurfacing as a “green energy” response to climate change. China is now the single biggest funder of large dams and Chinese corporations and banks are set to build new dams in Sarawak and Ethiopia (Survival International, 2010) Social movements will continue to have a critical role in demanding adherence to WCD principles.

In the developing world, social movements, like member-based organisations are often seen as empowering the disempowered and creating positive social, economic and political change through citizen action. There is a danger however, of over-rating the potential of social movements to engender change. The process of empowerment of a movement’s constituents, for example, can be limited to increased self-confidence, the development of organisational skills and practical knowledge but not result in actually gaining and exercising economic or political power. The democratising potential of social movements has also not been uniform (Hellman, 1997). Recent history has also shown the possibility of very destructive and reactionary identity-based movements in countries like India and Rwanda (Sogge and Dutting, 2010), and the far right Christian movement in the US.

Controversies The problem of definition As with most social phenomena there are controversies around the definition of a social movement, and what qualifies as a social movement and what does not. The line between social movements and trade unions, political parties, NGOs and other civil society institutions is finely drawn. Trade unions like social movements engage in collective action, but are more structured, are often affiliated to political parties and tend to focus on negotiating changes in economic relationships (usually between workers and employers) rather than attempting to transform the whole economic and social system. In many developing countries, members of most trade unions tend to be predominantly male, full-time, permanent workers in the “organised” sector of large-scale public sector enterprises and public sector services. The majority of the work force working in the precarious “informal sector” is usually excluded from union membership. SEWA, the self-employed women’s association of Ahmedebad, India, is a trade union that is organised differently and comprising of women workers in the informal sector. Political parties are political organisations that seek to control government through the capture of public office and the organisation of government. Social movements can develop into political parties e.g. the Labour Party or the Communist Party but the interest of political parties in capturing office distinguishes them from social movements. The situation in Latin America however suggests that this distinction between party and social Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


movement leaders can be extremely tenuous, with Bolivian President Evo Morales deriving his support from the social movement he spearheaded, and President Lula of Brazil being a product of the labour movement which had its own party, the Workers Party. NGOs can be defined very broadly “as all organisations that are not central governments and that were not created by inter-government decision” but the term is more usually used to describe public benefit NGOs – a type of civil society organisation that is formally constituted to provide a benefit to the general public or the world at large, through advocacy or the provision of services. They include organisations devoted to environment, development, human rights, peace and their international networks. They may or may not be membershipbased.” (United Nations, 2004). According to the Human Development Report, (UNDP, 2000), nearly one-fifth of the world’s 37 000 NGOs were formed in the 1990s (Bendana, 2006). While NGOs are often part of social movements and work within them to effect transformative change, there are also a large number of NGOs that work closely with (and sometimes are funded by) state institutions or corporate entities. For example, NGOs delivering humanitarian aid for the US Government, or health related NGOs supported by multinational corporations (Bendana, 2006). Also NGOs, by filling gaps in public service delivery, can be seen as facilitating the retreating state and, albeit with good intentions, supporting the very policies and social structures they would oppose through advocacy. NGOs also differ from social movements in the sense that they are bureaucratically structured organisations, not loose associations of citizens engaged in civic action. Inasmuch as social movements can metamorphose into political parties, they can also become “NGO-ised” which suggests a more structured organisation that can (and does) process significant external funding, creating also different accountabilities (i.e. to the donor) and requiring different skills. Social movements then are by definition a distinct form of civil society organisation, different from trade unions, political parties or NGOs though the differences are sometimes blurred. Dealing with social movements should pose very different challenges to donors, especially since social movements themselves are not homogenous and vary in how far they incorporate the characteristics of other civil society institutions.

Reformist or radical? Another related controversy is between the reforming and radical approaches within social movements, the latter seeking rights and benefits within existing systems and structures and the former challenging the system and proposing alternatives. The issue of reforming or radical is also related to the notion of transformative change. Not all change is necessarily transformative. Transformative change occurs when cultures and institutions are altered through changes to underlying assumptions and overt institutional behaviours, processes and structures. This is what happened when the feminist movement forced women and men to rethink what had been the unchallenged notions about women’s roles. Transformative change is also deep, pervasive and intentional. Transformations can take place gradually over time or can be a more immediate result of radical fissures within the status quo. Reform refers to change, but to change that does not immediately challenge underlying assumptions and overall structures, but seeks instead to improve conditions within an existing overall framework. While a radical approach is more “revolutionary” – altering social structures and challenging values and basic assumptions are goals from the onset – reform can, over time, also be transformative, but the immediate goal is to improve. Empowerment is of course central to, and instrumental in, both types of change. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


Box 8.4. Examples of reform versus radical agendas: Jubilee2000 and Jubilee South and Bello’s challenge to Oxfam GB The difference between Jubilee 2000 and Jubilee South is that Jubilee 2000 called for the cancellation of developing country debt, whereas Jubilee South took a much more radical position. It challenged the assumptions that debt cancellation would have any effect on reducing poverty and turned the whole Jubilee 2000 debate on its head by referring to the “real historical debt’” as that owed by the North to the South, as a result of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation. Their slogan was “don’t owe, won’t pay” and they demanded not “debt cancellation” in the narrow sense nor aid, charity or private philanthropy but reparations, restitutions, compensations, payment of the ecological debt by the North to the people and environments of the South (Bendana, 2006). In early 2002, Oxfam Great Britain launched a market-access campaign geared to lowering protectionist barriers in the North to key exports from the South. Walden Bello, Director of Focus on the Global South and a leading global activist, presented a more radical idea, namely that the issue was not about export agriculture or market access but about halting or reverting the WTO-mandated liberalisation in trade and trade-related areas Source: Bendana, A. (2006), NGOs and Social Movements: A North/South divide?, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 22.

The difference between reformist and radical perspectives is also strongly reflected in the discourse on globalisation. However, there is another perspective on the reformist versus radical nature of social movements that questions the effectiveness of social movements. The argument is that, given the nature of the context within which social movements operate, because movements by definition voice the concerns of groups whose interests are not met by the established political and economic settlement, and because their demands compete with the interests and ideologies of the corporate, administrative and other groups that control decision making, their ability to effect radical change is limited. There is also a threat of violence that makes the work of movements and social mobilisation more difficult, but also connotes the latent power of social movements, given their mass base and the “outrage” factor.

Representativeness, legitimacy and accountability The credibility of social movements is linked to three concepts – representativeness, legitimacy and accountability. The link between the formal organisation that represents the movement and its constituency i.e. the people it works for, is not always clear-cut. Many people in the constituency, whether they are farmers or indigenous people, can belong to one or another of the movements’ components (where a movement has mobilised at different levels and in different geographical areas) or be outside formal membership of the movement completely. A movement’s leaders will, almost by definition, be drawn from an elite group within the movement and this could well be necessary for the movement to achieve its advocacy objectives. Some movements may initiate more transparent representative processes, others may not consider it necessary. The legitimacy of a movement is derived from whether it consistently acts in the interests of its constituency, and whether it is recognised by that constituency as acting in its interests. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


It is less likely that movements can derive legitimacy from more formal criteria, such as feepaying membership of constituent members, partly because constituent members are drawn from disempowered and possibly impoverished groups. Given that social movements generally comprise a number of groups, it is likely that representativeness and legitimacy may not be uniform across all constituents. The question then arises as to whether the movement bypasses the poor and those with least voice. Box 8.5. Concerned people against asbestos The litigation that led Cape Plc., a British company mining asbestos in South Africa to pay compensation to 7 500 former employees with asbestos-related diseases has been seen as a success story of a transnational movement that grew from the work of a small community group, the Concerned People Against Asbestos (CPAA) and comprised local activists working alongside international lawyers and environmental campaigners. However, the different experiences of people in two towns in the Northern Cape in South Africa, namely Prieska (where CPAA had its roots) and Griquatown, led to very different perceptions of the legitimacy and representativeness of the movement, as well as the interpretation of its success. The Griquatown residents were relatively distant from the networking and mobilisation process taking place in Prieska, and this undermined their ability to see the asbestos disease litigation as an international victory and as a case of justice being done. Source: When social movements bypass the poor: asbestos pollution, international litigation and Griqua cultural identity, IDS Working Paper 246, Institute of Development Studies, UK.

The main accountability of social movements should be to their constituent members, and in reality they often have multiple accountabilities. One of the dangers of direct donor support to social movements is that it can result in subverting the main accountability to constituent members, to those who provide its funding.

Should aid agencies work directly with social movements? The main controversy that should be at the centre of this Good Practice Note is the issue of whether aid agencies should work with social movements directly or not. Where direct assistance involves social movements as direct recipients of donor money a number of issues arise. On the one hand there is the very real possibility that many social movements do not have the institutional structures to receive such funding, while also the formal funding relationship with donors could affect social movements in ways that might compromise their autonomy, legitimacy and ability to act by: • Projectising their activities and creating an adherence to a specific project cycle that is at odds with the more fluid processes that movements engage in and the pressure to achieve “targets” that is an inevitable condition of donor assistance. • Creating accountability to the donor rather than to their constituency i.e. the people whose cause they are espousing. This can lead to the inevitable disillusionment, alienation and defection of a movement’s members. • Depoliticising the movement in different ways such as engaging in “safe” projects such as constructing schools or shifting leadership from people with a political orientation to professionals who push the work forward in a manner required by the donors. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


• Co-opting the movement’s agenda into the donor’s agenda and discourse, blurring its distinctiveness without empowering the movement or its members. An example is the movement on indigenous knowledge which was co-opted into international institutions such as the World Bank (the Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program), UNESCO (Best Practice of Indigenous Knowledge) or UNDP (Indigenous Knowledge Programme) and shared through transnational networks (Laurie, N. et al., 2002). Of course, this type of risk is inherent in many of the activities and engagements in which social movements will be involved. In a broader sense, any social movement will engage with the state and other interest groups and social actors in pursuit of its objectives. In this engagement with the “establishment”, social movements maybe de-radicalised, and adopt a more reformist (rather than transforming) agenda and as such lose some their popular support (Ghimire, 2005).

Examples of good practice It does not seem to be common practice for donors to work with social movements, and, given the perceived risks to a social movement’s autonomy and dynamism, this may be as it should be. The overtly political nature of social movements makes engagement difficult for donors who wish to maintain their “neutral” status. However, not supporting the right to organised action by citizens who are marginalised or disadvantaged by nonresponsive and unaccountable governments, private sector corporations, or international institutions can in itself be construed as taking a political position. Some examples of support to social movements by bilateral donors are GTZ’s support to indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America, Danida’s support to the pastoralist movement in Tanzania, DFID’s support in collaboration with Norad and Sida, to the land right activities of Samat in Bangladesh. External funding for social movements also comes through international NGOs like OXFAM who have been supporting Tanzanian pastoralist movements for many years, or Survival International that supports indigenous peoples’ movements around the world. The women’s movement has also been supported by a range of donors partly because of the perception of it as apolitical and “safe”, but here too the support has been largely for gender mainstreaming or gender budgeting, and less for activism. For more information on these and other stories of empowerment, please see www.oecd.org/dac/poverty/empowerment The literature also indicates that when social movements are aware of the risk of co-option they can (and do) negotiate with different funding agencies and make strategic decisions on building alliances. COMARU (Consejo Machiguenga del Rio Urubamba, Machiguenga Council of the Urubamba River), which represents 30 communities of predominantly Machiguenga people in the Peruvian Amazon, were able to negotiate support from a range of donors, including the energy companies against whom they were campaigning (Earle, 2007). Donor support has also worked when it has been given to legal teams that can help different movements fight for their rights: in Botswana, Survival International covered a majority of the San’s legal expenses when they fought a legal battle against the government contesting their removal from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and in Nicaragua, the World Wildlife Fund funded the legal team that represented the Mayagna (Sumu) Indians in their successful case against the government which had granted a Korean Logging Company rights to Mayanga land (McKie, 2007).



IFAD has a history of supporting farmers’ organisations and has facilitated the partici pation of farmers’ organisations in international forums and also in reviews of economic partnership agreements of EU and ACP countries (IFAD, 2009; IFAD, 2007). However, it is not clear from the documentation how far this participation has contributed to “transformative change” in the way international development agencies and partner governments have viewed their support to the farming sector in general, and to small scale farmers in particular.

Box 8.6. Donor support to the peasant movement in Senegal: A story of positive engagement The highly state-centric programme for agricultural development initiated in Senegal shortly after independence was in crisis by the 1970s due to a number of factors including decline in export commodity prices on the world market, the weight of the state structures, the progressive indebtedness of the farmers and the severe droughts that ravaged the Sahel in 1973–1974. The first autonomous peasant associations began to be formed as a reaction to the incapacity of the state to deal with this situation. By the end of the 1970s, these associations had formed and obtained legal status for a national federation called the Fédération des ONG sénégalaises (FONGS – Federation of Senegalese NGOs). FONGS initially focused on operating training and exchange programmes for its members, but the onset of structural adjustment programmes led it to take on a more ambitious agenda that eventually led to the formation of the Conseil national de concertation et de coopération des ruraux (CNCR). CNCR had some remarkable achievements. It was able to bring together disparate rural federations into a national platform. It won recognition for peasant farmers from government and development partners. It secured a position for peasant farmers at the policy negotiation table and used this position to impact on rural development policies and programmes. It also spearheaded the construction of a regional peasant movement, and made its presence felt globally. At its start, FONGS was supported by the international NGO Six-S, established in the mid 1970s with support from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation and designed specifically to support emerging village-based groups in West Africa and encourage them to federate. Six-S’s support came in terms of flexible and renewable funding and discreet and respectful technical assistance. Because it was funding groups and federations in several countries, its general assemblies also offered an important occasion for farmer leaders in the sub-region to meet and strategise. A more mature FONGS, and the CNCR that it spawned, were able to establish a consortium of donors that funded the overall package of activities. They were also able to negotiate with FAO to acquire technical support that enabled FONGS to translate the language of structural adjustment into terms comprehensible to farmers and to carry out a reflection of peasant reactions to Senegal’s national agricultural programme. In this new relationship with donors, the movement was able to count on medium-term support for a global strategy. Mutual respect, long-term funding and a clear understanding of the nature of social movements characterised donor support to these initiatives. Source: McKeon et al., (2004), Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme, Paper No 8, May 2004.

Many of the lessons of good practice will tend to emerge more in the breach than in practice. Donors working with social movements need to recognise that social movements have long-term goals that cannot be fitted neatly into project cycles, that their leaders are representatives and advocates/activists and not administrators, that there could be tension between the international agenda (e.g. promoting the green discourse) and the immediate social development goals of a localised movement, and that strategies for activism within Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


the social movement need to match their capacities and traditional repertoire if they are to be successful. Most importantly, donors supporting social movements need to realise that “empowerment” entails a certain degree of politicisation and that they need to be willing to take that risk.

Implications: so what should donors do? The main recommendation for donors is that they should facilitate the “enabling environment” for social movements, rather than provide direct support. This means: • supporting institutions and activities that offset the attempts by governments, corpora tions and national elites to weaken, de-legitimise, incorporate or repress social movements; providing support to Ombudsmans’ offices for the protection of human and civil rights; • supporting movements’ attempts to put their arguments into the public space at all levels through the media, workshops, research activity, communications and publications etc.; • advocating within the donor countries and governments, and in the decisionmaking bodies of the international donor community (including the international institutions as well as the emerging donors) for respect for the agenda of social movements, and making the space to listen and be informed by them; • supporting social movements through trust funds or other mechanisms specifically established so as to be independent of donors, led and controlled by local and national organisations and networks and able to use funding modalities appropriate to the capacities and nature of the organisations they seek to support; • refraining from weakening the state – because while many social movements emerge precisely because of failures in democracy, governance and service delivery, democratic states that are accountable to their citizens are required if the objectives of social movements are to be achieved. Aid modalities must support the capacity of the state to make and implement policy, to regulate, to finance and deliver public services and to deliver justice and the rule of law; • Supporting the regulation of private companies and multinationals so that they cannot encroach on the rights of poor people;

Where donors wish to directly engage with social movements, they will need to be prepared to: • take the risk of being seen as politically aligned on the side of the social movement and of marginalised people; • adapt grant giving and reporting practices and to ensure that the financial relation ship does not distort the social movement’s relationship with its constituency, limit its capacity for action or impose unrealistic management practices; • be open to the challenges that social movements will pose to dominant paradigms, particularly market liberalisation, globalisation and patriarchy.



Note 1. DAC POVNET Empowerment and Pro-poor Growth: Policy Guidance Note.

References Bendana, A. (2006), “NGOs and Social Movements: A North/South divide?”, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 22, UNRISD, New York. Earle, L. (2007), “International NGOs and Indigenous Social Movements”, INTRAC Policy Briefing Paper No. 15, International NGO Training and Research Centre, Oxford www.intrac.org/data/files/resources/303/Briefing%20Paper%2015%20-%20INGOs%20 and%20indigenous%20social%20movements.pdf. Eyben, R. and S. Ladbury (2006), Building effective states: taking a citizen’s perspective, Development Research Centre, IDS, Brighton, www.drc-citizenship.org. Ghimire, Kléber B. (2005), The Contemporary Global Social Movements, SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi. Hellman, J.A. (1997), “Social Movements: Revolution, Reform and Reaction, Thirtieth Anniversary Essay”, NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XXX, No 6 May/June 1997. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) (2009) Support to Farmers Organisations in Africa Programme, 2009-2012, IFAD, Rome. IFAD (2007) “Economic Partnership Agreements between EU and ACP countries: the support of IFAD, FAO and NGOs to involve farmers’ organisations in the negotiations”, IFAD Policy Division Occasional Paper, IFAD, Rome. Laurie, N. et al. (2002), “Ethnodevelopment: Social Movements, Creating Experts and Professionalising Indigenous Knowledge in Ecuador”, Antipode, Vol. 37, 3: 470-496. Mbilinyi, M. (2009), “Land, Global Crisis and Marginalised Women”, Commonwealth Association of Surveying and Land Economy (CASLE), Conference on Equitable access to land in Africa – the rights of women, orphans and marginalised communities, 29 June, Dar es Salaam. McKie, K. (2007), “The Process of Donor Funding as the Cause of Social Movement Decline: A Case Study of the Barabaig Land Rights Movement in Tanzania”, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 12 April, Chicago. Mckeon, N., M. Watts and W. Wolford (2004), “Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice”, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme, Paper No 8, May 2004, UNRISD, New York. McKeon, N. and C. Kalafatic (2009), Strengthening Dialogue: UN Experience with Small Farmer Organizations and Indigenous Peoples, UN Non-governmental Liaison Service, New York. Poverty Reduction and Pro-Poor Growth: The Role of Empowerment – © OECD 2012


Sogge, D. and G. Dutting (2010), “Moving targets: notes on social movements”, Working Paper 2, HIVOS Civil Society Building Knowledge Programme, The Hague. Stackpool-Moore, L. (2006), We are one but we are many, PANOS, London. Survival International (2010), Serious Damage. Tribal peoples and large dams, Survival International, London.

Further Reading United Nations (2004), “Glossary” in “We the Peoples: Civil Society, the United Nations and Global Governance. Report of the Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations– Civil Society Relations. A/58/817”, United Nations General Assembly, 58th session, Agenda item 59, Strengthening of the United Nations System, 11 June, United Nations, New York. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2000), Human Development Report. Human Rights and Human Development, UNDP, New York. Waldman, L. (2005), “When social movements bypass the poor: asbestos pollution, international litigation and Griqua cultural identity”, IDS Working Paper 246, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. Webster, N. (2004), “Understanding the Evolving Diversities and Originalities in Rural Social Movements in the Age of Globalization”, UNRISD Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 7, UNRISD, New York. World Bank (2010), Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?, World Bank, Washington, DC.
