Salvaging the third sector

Social development has been reduced to a set of project management techniques with an incremental approach that denies the very logic of social transformation.

Development agencies have become the contractors that implement output-based, short-term assignments to deliver a set of predefined activities. Most of the NGOs have become the contractors to donors without being accountable to the people that they claim to serve.

The most important factors that determine the success of a development project are the cost-efficiency and the rate of funds utilisation and disbursement while the socioeconomic outcomes are the least important aspects. One of the key development issues for countries like Pakistan is the environment and climate change that are causing damages worth billions of rupees each year. Despite having an environment and climate change ministry and an enhanced focus of donors, we have not been able to develop and operationalise a well-defined climate change adaptation policy framework.

Issues involving the environment and climate change are being framed as donor-driven projects that lack planning, community adaptation and resilience mechanisms. The biggest actor – the local government – lacks the will and capacity to devise a contextual environment and a climate change planning policy. The locals have been made the recipients of exotic frameworks.

The governance structure at the local level is not compatible with an overarching framework of the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In practice, the CDM becomes a technical project for many NGOs and is treated more like an enterprise than a political question.

The local government will be content with these self-propelling initiatives taken by NGOs if they do not raise political questions of accountability. At times, these projects become the key factors for depoliticisation because they tend to shift the burden of development from the inept political leaders to common citizens. The idea that government is anti-development, bureaucratic and slow may be true in most of the instances. But this very logic also absolves the government of its responsibilities towards the people. There is no viable alternative that is more effective than to make governments accountable to deliver on promises and towards long-term and sustainable social development. Alternatives that are based on short-term projects do not provide viable solutions to poverty, environmental degradation and political instability.

Most developing countries, including Pakistan, face structural problems. These include the decaying democratic institutions and a lack of governance, accountability and transparency. These problems can be addressed through a long-term civic engagement to transform governmentality into a system of good governance, inclusion and accountability.

The government has the resources, scale, mandate and legal instruments to deliver and citizens should have the power of collective bargaining with the government. The people must make the governments accountable instead of allowing them to consume public resources in an unaccountable fashion.

The project-based development philosophy of NGOs has been anathematic to the transformative potential of engaging the government. There has been much hue and cry in recent times about public-private partnerships. However, these are ineffective because such partnerships are only confined to a preconceived project execution formula. There is no participatory planning, resource-sharing and common vision to transform the lives of the poor who are the targets of development.

One of the key challenges of public-private partnerships is the intractability between profitability and social welfare and the stark variance of the long-term goals of such partnerships. In a public-private partnership discourse, the idea of a third sector gets neutralised. As a result, the very idea of the civil society has been reduced to a private sector venture.

Contrary to this neoliberal theoretical onslaught, the third sector is not equal to the private sector. The notion of public-private partnership, therefore, leaves out the third sector or the civil society. This approach is disastrous as it tends to overlook the potential of the civil society to link development with empowerment and accountability: the very raison d’être of the civil society. 

Strangely enough, some of the leading proponents of civil society activism in Pakistan have now become ardent advocates of public-private partnerships as an instrument of development. For them, the civil society is a space of incubation for workable business ideas that are then adopted by a business venture company. In this framework of development, citizens merely become the agents that provide supply change support as well as consumers. This has debilitating effects on the political notion of citizenship, which is intrinsically linked to a social contract with the state.

In a typical business value chain, the primary producers are the ones for whom it becomes a bread-and-butter issue to be associated with a high-end business. Meanwhile, for the private business, it becomes more of a profitable economic proposition. This relationship remains intact if it is a source of bread and butter for the poor and a profitable option for the rich. The producer and consumer relationship is determined by the margin of profits acquired by the private business.

The producer in a value chain is the most vulnerable player because his or her role of what and when to produce hinges upon two factors: the will of a business owner to purchase the produce and the vagaries of the market. Neither the will of the business owner nor the vagaries of the market are determined by the producer. This unequal and, at times, exploitative relationship is mediated through a sophisticated process in that value chain professionals or middlemen thrive.

Value-chain specialists claim to dislodge the traditional exploitative role of the middleman in a business cycle from production to profit realisation. But these specialists assume the role of middlemen themselves in that they charge for services as sophisticated as market linkage buildings, business feasibility and diversification. In this mediated relationship, a value-chain specialist plays a key role to create a business proposition and hence improves the rate of return on investments.

The poor producer or the supplier of raw material has a limited flexibility of diversification for improved gains. For the bigger capitalists or the purchasers of the produce or raw materials, it multiplies the profits because of the scale and ability to influence the market. Poor coffee growers in Africa have little or no gains from the diversification or the sophisticated branding of Starbucks Coffee in a Western capital. The relationship between the poor coffee growers and owners of Starbucks is exploitative in nature. The poor coffee grower gets peanuts for all his or her toil while the Starbucks owners would relish the cheap source of supplies and innovations to multiply their profits.

The private sector and the third sector are worlds apart. The former strives to maximise profits irrespective of rights and duties while the latter protects the rights of citizens. The civil society cannot be reduced to a private sector initiative as the notion of public-private partnership tends to imply. Public-private partnership is an oxymoron that could be mutually destructive if the private sector is equated to the civil society. 

Neoliberalism as an economic and political ideology has been destructive and has caused poverty, underdevelopment, disparity, conflicts and protracted wars in the world. It has penetrated deep into the social development arena in recent times and must be resisted to protect the civil society from falling into the trap of profiteering. 

The civil society can only play its transformative role if it can make the public and private sectors accountable to the people. It is always good to learn about new terminologies and discourses. But one must be aware of the genesis of new terminologies and their political intent. 

The notion of a public-private partnership is a political concept that tends to promote the neoliberal ideology of reducing the civil society into a private business venture. In this world of ideologies, there is nothing that can be termed as neutral – quite contrary to the claims of the so-called postmodernists.

 

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com