Namibia’s donor-driven democracy: Whose agenda?

During the last 30 years or so and since the collapse of communism, expedited by the Gorbachev revolution in the Soviet Union, there has been a great deal of talk by the ‘developed’ Western nations about the need to promote democracy, human rights and good governance (DHRGG) through, inter alia, civil society organisations (CSOs) in the ‘developing’ countries in the global South.

A great deal of financial resources, some say at least US$2.5 billion[1] in official development aid (ODA), has been spent on the DHRGG development agenda since the early 1990s. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that, in trying to enhance national capacity in the global South, the global northern ODA donors have spent between US$14 billion and US$24 billion worth of technical cooperation programmes in 1999 alone.[2]

But whose agenda is it? Because since the 1990s, democracy has continued unabatedly to be lacking; human rights respect is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent, good and transparent governance is a nightmare and income-poverty and corruption are continuously on the increase in many southern states.

Has ODA really been effective or successful in helping to bring about DHRGG in the developing countries of the global South? Have the developing nations of the southern hemisphere become developed, and, if so, what are the indicia of such development? If not, why not?

A great deal of literature has been emerging during the last 15 years or so. That literature strongly suggests that, in fact, very little, if anything, has been achieved in the DHRGG domain in the ‘developing’ nations of the southern hemisphere. This is in spite of huge amounts of taxpayers’ funds having been spent annually by Western governments, presumably on the DHRGG development agenda. What has gone wrong? I will refer to various literatures on this agenda that I have so far read and I what have personally experienced.

Anthony Beddington of the International Institute for Environment and Development and Roger Riddell of the Overseas Development Institute wrote a paper in 1995 entitled ‘Donors, civil society and southern NGOs: New agendas, old problems’.[3] Does this not strongly suggest new wine in an old bottle? Beddington and Riddell argue that the manner in which Western ODA donors channel huge amounts of funds to certain southern NGOs (SNGOs) raises a whole range of questions: How has ODA been and continued to be channelled? What has been or is the ODA impact on SNGOs? What sorts of SNGOs are being supported? What does this mean for the power relationships between the donors, on the one side, and CSOs, on the other? What does this mean for the institutional and operational independence of the southern CSOs?

Those have been and remain precisely my questions also vis-à-vis the donor-driven DHRGG agenda in Namibia. These are important questions because, as Beddington and Riddell argue, they take us to the heart of the critical question as to how effective Western ODA has been in fostering genuine DHRGG in the global South.

Beddington and Riddell warn that increased ODA funding to SNGOs could lead to increased donor instrumentalisation of SNGOs. The two authors charge that Western ODA donors have been more interested in working together with the SNGOs ‘in order to use them to deliver aid than to strengthen them as representative and vibrant civic organizations’. Beddington and Riddell also argue that Western ODA funding to the SNGOs distort the mandates of those SNGOs in such a way that the latter increasingly reflect donor concerns, rather than their own missions.

It’s no wonder that some, not all, folks in the Namibian government and the ruling Swapo (South West Africa People's Organisation) party often claim, maliciously of course, that whatever, for example, Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights (NSHR)[4] does to promote DHRGG in the country, it is just in order to ‘please donors’. This, at least by implication, means then that NSHR is merely a marionette of Western ODA donor nations in the northern hemisphere. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth!

Echoing the same sentiments as Beddington and Riddell above, another writer, Sara Rich Dorman, richly wrote in 2004 that Western ODA donor nations have committed much time and resources to the DHRGG question in Africa. ‘Yet it is not clear how this concept of “democratization” has helped us to understand African politics, or if donor support for “democratization” has been successful.’ Through her paper, entitled ‘Democrats and donors: Studying democratization in Africa’,[5] Dorman firstly argues that ODA donors have done a disservice to democratisation in Africa because their views of such a democratisation process ‘are ahistorical or decontextualized from the historical and cultural situations’. Secondly, Dorman argues that ‘African NGOs are poorly understood and little studied.’ Hence, Dorman says, ‘assumptions, rather than empirical evidence dominate the donors’ agenda on democratization’. Dorman warns that a partial understanding of both the beneficiary societies and SNGOs leads to inappropriate policy responses by those bilateral and multilateral donors eager to support genuine democratisation in the global South.

In his 2008 paper entitled ‘How to improve NGO effectiveness in development: A discussion on lessons learned’,[6] writer Esra Guler also notes that a great majority of SNGOs largely depend on Western donor funding and that they often face the risk of collapse once these funds cease. Even when funding from such sources continues, Guler warns that the greater dependence on ODA donor nations may also threaten the performance, distort the autonomy and weaken the legitimacy of SNGOs. Therefore, Guler proposes that when mobilising funds, NGO managers need to find an optimum mix of quantity and quality funds in relation to their organisations’ missions and strategies. Guler defines quality funds for NGOs as those which are free from stringent conditions, allocated on programmes rather than projects, not constrained by bureaucratic requirements, predictable and reliable in terms of flow, disbursed timely and based on demonstrated performance.

In what he terms ‘insecurity for SNGOs’,[7] Joel Blackwell explains how Western security agendas have shifted ODA donor priorities, thereby forcing SNGOs to rethink their own agendas in Indonesia. Blackwell warns that, because SNGOs are more reliant on external funding – the majority of which comes from Western ODA governments – ‘this can cause major problems because the foreign aid budgets of those nations are tied to their national interests that rarely coincide with the needs of the Indonesian people’.

Referring to what he describes as ‘unrealistic demands’, Blackwell argues further that ‘the current process for providing developmental assistance lacks long-term sustainability because funding priorities are not always in accord with local needs and programming cycles’. He also says that the insecurity brought about by shifting foreign donor agendas ‘is just one more challenge for NGOs in Indonesia’ and is ‘one more barrier preventing those NGOs from improving the standard of living for all the Indonesian people’.

According to Blackwell,[8] foreign governments are not about to fund ODA programmes that operate contrary to their national interests, and, further, that ‘imperialist notions of telling poorer countries what is best for them, without direct consultation, is no longer a tenable approach to foreign policy’. He therefore proposes that greater dialogue and cooperation between SNGOs and their ODA donors is essential, allowing the Indonesian NGOs to play a more holistic, autonomous and ongoing role in the decision-making process.

In her paper entitled ‘NGOs, foreign donors, and organizational processes: Passive NGO recipients or strategic actors’,[9] Karen Rauh of McGill University also notes that over the past two decades there has been a proliferation of increasingly ‘donor-imposed quantitative, paper-based planning, reporting and accountability procedures’. Rauh says that, despite wide critiques of the inefficiency of these practices, they have been widely adopted by SNGOs. She says that, although these donor-imposed procedures are presumably designed to increase accountability and transparency and guard against the misappropriation of funds, in many cases they have shifted SNGO focus away from their most meaningful work. She warns that this state of affairs leads to the SNGOs increasingly adopting ‘northern’ or ‘corporate’ style practices and agendas and that those procedures have not necessarily resulted in improved efficiency.

Furthermore, Rauh notes that the increasing emphasis on paper-based management tools rewards those SNGOs that produce good documentation, while those SNGOs that lack these skills, but who are, nonetheless, making positive change on the ground, may not be as highly valued by donors. She also notes that, although it is reasonable to expect recipient organisations to have appropriate accountability and transparency measures, ‘current practices have been widely criticized for being extremely time-consuming, difficult to use and for taking time away from important work on the ground’. She, however, also writes that, to a certain extent, a few SNGOs are able to actively resist donor agendas. Quoting from a Zimbabwean activist, Everjoice Win, Rauh says:

‘Development is not about words and procedures. It is about changing the realities of people’s lives. We need procedures, concepts and methods, but only as tools to help us do the work that needs to be done. When development is reduced to fitting things on blue squares, then we create more problems than we claim to solve. When these tools begin to imprison and consume all of our energies, where will we get the extra energy to do real work?’

Referring to ‘power relations’ between donors and SNGOs and citing the works of, among others, Wallace, Bornstein and Chapman (2006), Rauh argues that ‘coercion and compliance’ are important concepts in understanding the relationship between SNGOs and their foreign donors. Donors are in a position of power and they often put conditions, not only on how their aid must be used, but also how SNGO programmes must be implemented. Thus donors not only have control over their funding to SNGOs, but also over the agenda. Hence, coercion and compliance may be considered as direct or indirect use of force.

Rauh also notes that ODA funders often impose their own norms and values on SNGOs, and that their priorities often fluctuate towards those development areas that are currently popular to them domestically. She says that these frequent fluctuations in donor priorities result in increased environmental uncertainty and the implementation of programs that are not addressing the problem. These aspects of power and dependency have resulted in some NGOs shifting their focus from important areas for their beneficiaries towards areas of donor interest that will attract large amounts of funding.

Indian writer R. Upadhayay – with whom I fully agree, albeit for a different reason – writes that SNGOs must be accountable to their beneficiaries and that their activities must be beneficiary-centric and not donor-centric. He also notes that, with huge amounts of donor funding at their disposal, some SNGOs have emerged as powerful lobbyists doing spadework for the donors, rather than their intended beneficiaries.

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI)[10] also argues that as ODA donors continued to apply conditions to funds channelled to SNGOs, a rise in donor funding would increasingly compromise the integrity of the SNGO approaches to development. ODI warns that using SNGOs to help achieve donors' own aid objectives only heightened these concerns.

Furthermore, UNDP’s Mark Malloch Brown brilliantly notes that the asymmetric donor-recipient relationship has profound consequences for success and failure in developing lasting indigenous capacity in the global South.[11] Brown argues that technical cooperation had proven effective in getting the job done, but less effective at developing local institutions or strengthening local capacities, and that it was ‘expensive, donor-driven and often served to heighten dependence on foreign expert and distorted priorities’.

The donor-driven development agenda situation decried above has never been different right here in Namibia. In addition to such a donor attitude, Namibia’s DHRGG agenda is even more hamstrung by the political, historical, cultural and racial character of the country’s population. While the presumed beneficiary of Namibia’s DHRGG agenda is the country’s impoverished population, which is predominantly black, there is deep-rooted feeling among black and indigenous people that most of the ODA funding per capita goes to the white-led and white-controlled CSOs. For example, with a staff complement of no more than seven and which is based in Windhoek, the Namibia Institute of Democracy (NID)[12] nets up to N$4 million annually in core donor funding.[13] NSHR – which is black-led and indigenous and hence more culturally and historically representative of the presumed beneficiaries of the ODA funding and, furthermore, which has a staff complement of slightly over 30 and which runs seven offices countrywide – gets less than N$4 million annually from predominantly Western donor nations.

Firstly, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with being white-led or white-controlled CSOs in a predominantly black population, as long as such CSOs display fearlessness and vigilance and as long as they are institutionally and operationally independent. However, the inherent weakness and vulnerability of white-led or white-controlled CSOs in Namibia’s politically polarised and racially charged society lie in legitimacy and being representative. While they may have huge sums of donor funds at their disposal, they severely lack the historical, cultural and even political legitimacy and representative-ness with respect to the presumed ultimate beneficiaries of such funding: predominantly black Namibians. This state of affairs is as ridiculous as putting a man in charge of a women’s rights organisation!

Secondly, there appears to be a tendency on the part of some, not all, of the Western ODA donors to liberally fund those Namibian CSOs which are less critical or are seen to be ingratiating with the government or the ruling Swapo party. For example, Sister Namibia – an indigenous-led women’s rights organisation which does not, in my view, ingratiate itself with the powers that be – is ever struggling to secure appropriate funding from the ODA donors active in the country. By contrast, the elitist Women Action for Development (WAD), which is a mixed-race-led women’s rights organisation, which, in my view, actively seeks or is widely perceived as seeking to be seen to be working closely with the government or the ruling Swapo party, receives huge amounts of money annually from donors. But is WAD more effective than Sister Namibia? Evidence at my disposal seems to suggest that the contrary is true! The campaigns of Sister Namibia, such as its 50–50 zebra representation in the decision-making processes of the country, have had an enormous impact on government policies.

Thirdly, there appears to be a tendency on the part of certain, not all, donors to publicly shun or not to fund those Namibian CSOs and NGOs in the DHRGG sector, which often deals with so-called politically sensitive or controversial DHRGG issues such as the issue of ‘missing’ persons and the marathon Caprivi High Treason Trial, as well as the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2009, NSHR had to tell an ODA donor to ‘take your money’ after the particular donor started patronisingly and arrogantly ‘advising’ NSHR not to criticise both the ruling Swapo party and the former Namibian President Dr Sam Nujoma.

Moreover, all in all, those Namibian CSOs working in the DHRGG domain receive per capita far less from, for example, the US government, than those Namibian CSOs which are active in other domains, such as the HIV/AIDS sector.

Northern donor nations and non-indigenous CSOs in the global South may have the money. However, this does not necessarily mean that they also have the requisite historical, cultural and political vision, mission or strategies to bring about genuine DHRGG in the global South in general or in Namibia in particular. One wonders as to what really motivates the northern donor nations’ agenda regarding the need to promote DHRGG in the South. One is therefore prompted to ask the question as to whether ODA and similar other northern funding of Southern development activities is motivated by diplomacy, philanthropy or reparations for, inter alia, the guilt of colonisation and the slave trade.

So, what is the solution to this quagmire? In his paper entitled ‘NGOs, democracy and sustainable development in Africa’,[14] James Buturo concludes that democracy and sustainable development are two sides of the same coin. The two concepts are underpinned by equality of access to resources, improvement in living conditions and commitment to democratic decision making, and, furthermore, the notion that democracy and sustainable development should promote empowered, self-reliant and free communities which are very much in charge of their own destiny, in partnership with others.

Hence, UNDP’s Mark Malloch Brown strongly advocates for the development of locally owned capacity and a genuinely new vision of capacity development that is firmly founded on genuine ownership by the ultimate beneficiaries of foreign development efforts.[15] Brown says that, because of a growing concern that a lack of local ownership is an important element that undermines the effectiveness of technical cooperation, there is a need to develop better relationships between northern donors and the southern recipients.

As referred to above, ODI welcomes the fact that there has lately been a growing role played by SNGOs called the ‘reverse agenda’.[16]This is a process whereby SNGOs are now increasingly influencing the perceptions of donors and other ODA programmes.

There are a number of ways through which the reverse agenda has manifested itself. For instance, some of the characteristics of the 'NGO approach' to development have gradually been incorporated into mainstream ODA donor architecture.

One manifestation of a growing SNGO reverse agenda is the fact that most donors are now broadening their major aid objectives to include poverty alleviation, environmental protection and democratic participation, as well as strengthening marginal groups such as women and minorities.

Here in Namibia, progressive donors such as the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) have taken up ‘strengthening civil society’ and ‘partner driven cooperation’ as their specific development objectives. The European Delegation in Namibia has also started a highly commendable process of consulting local NGOs and CSOs before designing its Namibia-specific calls for proposal.

The reverse agenda would certainly be doubly beneficial for the ultimate beneficiaries because, inter alia, one of the core objectives of SNGOs has been to empower poor and marginalised people, especially by strengthening the organisations to which poor people belong.

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* Phil ya Nangoloh is the executive director of Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights (NSHR). However, the views expressed in this article are exclusively his own.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] http://bit.ly/aYLVsJ
[2] ‘Overview’, http://bit.ly/axxI25
[3] http://bit.ly/ay0Pzc
[4] http://bit.ly/bKsv6O
[5] http://bit.ly/biZRx7
[6] http://bit.ly/aw9tjA
[7] http://bit.ly/9aKAWR
[8] Joel Backwell ([email protected]) is an Arts/Law student at Monash University, who has recently returned from a year in Indonesia studying and working with local NGOs.
[9] http://bit.ly/9zA5qs
[10] http://bit.ly/aYLVsJ
[11] http://bit.ly/axxI25
[12] http://bit.ly/amZ1pY
[13] ‘Civil Society: Practice what you preach’, Insight Magazine, May 2009, p.22-23
[14] http://bit.ly/9POPoA
[15] http://bit.ly/axxI25
[16] http://bit.ly/aYLVsJ