The battle of Seattle is only the latest and most visible in a string of recent NGO victories. The watershed was the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when the NGOs roused enough public pressure to push through agreements on controlling greenhouse gases. In 1994, protesters dominated the World Bank's anniversary meeting with a "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign, and forced a rethink of the Bank's goals and methods. In 1998, an ad hoc coalition of consumer-rights activists and environmentalists helped to sink the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a draft treaty to harmonise rules on foreign investment under the aegis of the OECD. In the past couple of years another global coalition of NGOs, Jubilee 2000, has pushed successfully for a dramatic reduction in the debts of the poorest countries.

The NGO agenda is not confined to economic issues. One of the biggest successes of the 1990s was the campaign to outlaw landmines, where hundreds of NGOs, in concert with the Canadian government, pushed through a ban in a year. Nor is it confined to government agendas. Nike has been targeted for poor labour conditions in its overseas factories, Nestl�Efor the sale of powdered baby milk in poor countries, Monsanto for genetically modified food. In a case in 1995 that particularly shocked business, Royal Dutch/Shell, although it was technically in the right, was prevented by Greenpeace, the most media-savvy of all NGOs, from disposing of its Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea.

In short, citizens' groups are increasingly powerful at the corporate, national and international level. How they have become so, and what this means, are questions that urgently need to be addressed. Are citizens' groups, as many of their supporters claim, the first steps towards an "international civil society" (whatever that might be)? Or do they represent a dangerous shift of power to unelected and unaccountable special-interest groups?

Power in numbers

Over the past decade, NGOs and their memberships have grown hugely (see chart). Although organisations like these have existed for generations (in the early 1800s, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society played a powerful part in abolishing slavery laws), the social and economic shifts of this decade have given them new life. The end of communism, the spread of democracy in poor countries, technological change and economic integration-globalisation, in short-have created fertile soil for the rise of NGOs. Globalisation itself has exacerbated a host of worries: over the environment, labour rights, human rights, consumer rights and so on. Democratisation and echnological progress have revolutionised the way in which citizens can unite to express their disquiet.

It is, by definition, hard to estimate the growth of groups that could theoretically include everything from the tiniest neighbourhood association to huge international relief agencies, such as CARE, with annual budgets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. One conservative yardstick of international NGOs (that is, groups with operations in more than one country) is the Yearbook of International Organisations. This puts the number of international NGOs at more than 26,000 today, up from 6,000 in 1990.

Far more groups exist within national borders. A recent article in World Watch, the bi-monthly magazine of the World Watch Institute (itself an NGO), suggested that the United States alone has about 2m NGOs, 70% of which are less than 30 years old. India has about 1m grass-roots groups, while another estimate suggests that more than 100,000 sprang up in Eastern Europe between 1988 and 1995. Membership growth has been impressive across many groups, but particularly the environmental ones. The Worldwide Fund for Nature, for instance, now has around 5m members, up from 570,000 in 1985. The Sierra Club now boasts 572,000 members, up from 181,000 in 1980.

Citizens' groups play roles that go far beyond political activism. Many are important deliverers of services, especially in developing countries. As a group, NGOs now deliver more aid than the whole United Nations system. Some of the biggest NGOs, such as CARE or Médecins Sans Frontières, are primarily aid providers. Others, such as Oxfam, are both aid providers and campaigners. Others still, such as Greenpeace, stick to campaigning. And it is here that technological change is having its biggest impact.

When groups could communicate only by telephone, fax or mail, it was prohibitively expensive to share information or build links between different organisations. Now information can be dispersed quickly, and to great effect, online. The MAI was already in trouble when a draft of the text, posted on the Internet by an NGO, allowed hundreds of hostile watchdog groups to mobilise against it. Similarly, the Seattle trade summit was disrupted by dozens of websites which alerted everyone (except, it seems, the Seattle police), to the protests that were planned.

New coalitions can be built online. Much of the pre-Seattle coalition building between environmental and citizens' groups, for instance, was done by e-mail. About 1,500 NGOs signed an anti-WTO protest declaration set up online by Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group. That, acknowledges Mike Dolan, a leading organiser of the protest, would have been impossible without e-mail. More important, the Internet allows new partnerships between groups in rich and poor countries. Armed with compromising evidence of local labour practices or environmental degradation from southern NGOS, for example, activists in developed countries can attack corporations much more effectively.

This phenomenon-amorphous groups of NGOs, linked online, descending on a target-has been dubbed an "NGO swarm" in a RAND study by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. And such groups are awful for governments to deal with. An NGO swarm, say the RAND researchers, has no "central leadership or command structure; it is multi-headed, impossible to decapitate". And it can sting a victim to death.

Less dramatic, but just as important, is the rise of NGOs that are dubbed by Sylvia Ostry, a trade expert from the University of Toronto, as "technical" groups. These specialise in providing highly sophisticated analysis and information, and they can be crucial to the working of some treaties. In 1997, for instance, the verification system for the Chemical Weapons Treaty was devised by the world's chemical-manufacturing associations. In the campaign to cut third-world debt, a handful of NGOs, including Oxfam, have become as expert in the minutiae of debt-reduction procedures as the bureaucrats at the IMF and World Bank. Increasingly, they have been co-opted into making policy. At the WTO, these technical NGOs (staffed overwhelmingly with lawyers) have concentrated on training and providing information on the arcana of trade law to delegates from poor countries.

Enemies or allies?

If the power of NGOs has increased in a globalised world, who has lost out?A popular view is that national governments have. In an article in Foreign Affairs in 1997, Jessica Mathews, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote that "the steady concentration of power in the hands of states that began in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, is over, at least for a while." Certainly national governments no longer have a monopoly of information, or an unequalled reach, compared to corporations and civil society. But the real losers in this power shift are international organisations.

Inter-governmental institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UN agencies or the WTO have an enormous weakness in an age of NGOs: they lack political leverage. No parliamentarian is going to face direct pressure from the IMF or the WTO; but every policymaker faces pressure from citizens' groups with special interests. Add to this the poor public image that these technocratic, faceless bureaucracies have developed, and it is hardly surprising that they are popular targets for NGO "swarms". The WTO is only the latest to suffer.

Less obvious is whether NGO attacks will democratise, or merely disable, these organisations. At first sight, Seattle suggests a pessimistic conclusion: inter-governmental outfits will become paralysed in the face of concerted opposition. History, however, suggests a different outcome. Take the case of the World Bank. The Fifty Years is Enough campaign of 1994 was a prototype of Seattle (complete with activists invading the meeting halls). Now the NGOs are surprisingly quiet about the World Bank. The reason is that the Bank has made a huge effort to co-opt them.

James Wolfensohn, the Bank's boss, has made "dialogue" with NGOs a central component of the institution's work. More than 70 NGO specialists work in the Bank's field offices. More than half of World Bank projects last year involved NGOs. Mr Wolfensohn has built alliances with everyone, from religious groups to environmentalists. His efforts have diluted the strength of "mobilisation networks" and increased the relative power of technical NGOs (for it is mostly these that the Bank has co-opted). From environmental policy to debt relief, NGOs are at the centre of World Bank policy. Often they determine it. The new World Bank is more transparent, but it is also more beholden to a new set of special interests.

The WTO will not evolve in the same way. As a forum where governments set rules that bind rich as well as poor countries, it is inherently more controversial. Nor does it disburse money for projects, making it harder to co-opt NGOs. But it could still try to weaken the broad coalition that attacked it in Seattle by reaching out to mainstream and technical NGOs. Some will celebrate this as the advent of the age when huge institutions will heed the voice of Everyman. Others will complain that self-appointed advocates have gained too much influence. What is certain is that a new kind of actor is claiming, loudly, a seat at the table.

SOURCE: The Economist: December 11th - 17th 1999

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