Christopher L. Pallas

Donor withdrawal and local civil society organizations: An analysis of the HIV/AIDS sector in Vietnam

The impact of international donor arrival on local civil society organizations (CSOs) is well researched. Less well understood is how local CSOs react and adapt to donor withdrawal. This article explores this phenomenon in the context of the HIV/AIDS sector in Vietnam. Using data from government, donor and CSO sources in Vietnam, it examines how current and planned cuts in donor funding, including donor exit, impact local CSO agency and effectiveness. It finds that while donor withdrawal may reduce CSO capacity and independence, it can also prompt local innovations that—if successful—may improve CSOs’ responsiveness to local stakeholders.

Transnational Advocacy Without Northern NGO Partners: Vietnamese NGOs in the HIV/AIDS Sector

Existing scholarship on transnational advocacy can give the impression that low- and middle-income country (“Southern”) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) require high-income country (“Northern”) NGO partners to effectively engage actors outside their own state. However, Vietnamese NGOs (VNGOs) have had significant success in their efforts to change the policies and practices of bilateral and multilateral actors toward Vietnam without significant Northern NGO partnership. This article asks how VNGOs have achieved such influence and whether their advocacy effectiveness is likely to be mirrored elsewhere. Drawing on a novel case study of VNGOs in the HIV/AIDS sector, it finds that expertise, credibility, and high organizational capacity have allowed VNGOs to successfully adopt Northern NGOs’ insider lobbying strategies and implement them independently. While the development of VNGO capacity has been accelerated by the unusual legal environment in Vietnam, we predict that as Southern NGO capacity increases elsewhere, reliance on Northern partners will decrease.

Mechanisms of Influence and the Distribution of Authority

This book has thus far identified the TCSOs involved in the IDA-10, determined their impacts, and explored their agenda setting and their interactions with one another. This chapter explores their mechanisms of influence. TCS advocacy has limited the Bank’s technocratic independence and forced it to consider certain stakeholder demands in its decision-making. Yet in the IDA-10 engagement, certain TCSOs were noticeably more successful than others in achieving their desired impacts on the World Bank.

Transnational Civil Society and the Democratization of Global Governance

The introduction of this book outlined two schools of thought regarding TCS. One suggested that TCS would remedy the democratic deficits present in global governance institutions like the World Bank. The other challenged the capacity of TCS to democratize global governance and even suggested that TCS might worsen existing imbalances in power between the citizens of poor and rich nations. Data on TCS engagement with the World Bank support and challenge some of the contentions of each school. The data present a new picture of TCS and its role in global governance and suggest new directions for further research. This chapter begins with a discussion of this book’s findings and directions for future research, analyzes the consequences of these findings for our understanding of TCS’s potential to democratize global governance, and then explores ways in which TCS’s influence can be shaped and channeled to enhance its democratizing effects.

Beating the Bank: Transnational Civil Society and the 10 th IDA

The World Bank has a large policy footprint. Lending billions of dollars annually to scores to countries, its work has implications for everything from global environmental policy to human rights. As a result, numerous TCSOs have sought to influence the Bank in areas where its policies impact their activities or objectives. During the IDA-10, the attention of many of these groups converged to focus on a single issue of funding.

Beyond the 10th IDA

Based on the events of the IDA-10, this hook identifies a number of key dynamics governing TCS’s influence on World Bank policy, individual TCSOs appear to work to advance their ideological goals without consulting many of the stakeholders impacted by their actions, particularly borrowing country populations. Financial interests play a key role in determining which organizations participate in a particular campaign or policymaking dialogue, giving flinders disproportionate influence over the make-up of the campaign or the chorus of voices participating in the dialogue. Moreover, TCSOs often make use of the influence of powerful states in advancing their international agendas. Such assistance, in turn, is prompted by domestic political pressure or national concerns. The result of these dynamics is that TCSOs with good connections in powerful states tend to have disproportionate influence. Such elite organizations have little incentive to conduct meaningful policy dialogue with other civil society actors, particularly when conflicting financial incentives between organizations make compromise unlikely. Partnerships between elite organiza Lions in the global North and partners based in the South also seem to have limited impact on the behavior of the more powerful actors or on the representivity of a larger group or coalition.

Transnational Civil Society and Local Representation

At this point in the discussion it is necessary to consider in more detail the impact of TCS on the role and influence of state governments in Bank policymaking. There are several reasons for this. As noted in the previous chapter, the data demonstrate that states continue to play an important role in Bank policymaking. Also, the preceding chapters indicate that TCS as a whole is not a democratic representative of many of its stakeholders due to the unequal distribution of authority among TCSOs. Lastly, many TCSOs are unaccountable to their claimed stakeholders and likely to pursue agendas defined by their own preexisting mission and interests.

Waiting on Democracy

At their best, global governance institutions reflect a certain form of optimism. Many of the most prominent institutions, including the United Nations. World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, were created at the close of World War II to preserve peace and enhance global economic prosperity. International institutions and regimes founded in subsequent decades help regulate everything from the trade n endangered species to transnational aviation, and facilitate global responses to epidemics, climate change, and criminal activity. Taken together, global governance institutions can seem to reflect a world trying to work together toward some common good.

Principles and Paychecks: Positions and Participation in the IDA-10

Although a large number of actors had begun to develop a common policy agenda during the early days of the 10th IDA, this loose coalition quickly fractured during the post-Narmada controversy over whether to attack the Bank’s funding. Nearly every civil society organization staff member interviewed for this research affirmed the presence of significant tensions and disagreements among TCSOs both during and after the IDA-10. One respondent described organizations as constantly ‘competing for … funding and publicity’. Another, from an NGO with a strong anti-Bank agenda, described the staff of more moderate NGOs as being plagued by an intellectual inferiority complex. A former staff member with one development organization recalled being excluded from meetings with colleagues from other TGSOs after he publicly disagreed with their position on the Narmada Dam. Instead of the consensual processes scholars often predict among civil society actors, divisiveness became common.

Context, Role, and Legitimacy

Although TCS is frequently heralded as a key component of more democratic global governance, a noticeable gap has been observed between the hoped-for impacts of TCS as a normative construct and the real-world impacts of the organizations of which it is composed. A number of researchers have called into question civil society organizations’ motivations, representivity, and democratic credentials (Bowden 2006; Cooley and Ron 2002; Foley and Edwards 1996; Nelson 1997b). Even among those authors that hold that civil society can contribute positively towards global governance, one finds a variety of competing and sometimes contradictory prescriptions for judging the democratic contributions of individual TCSOs or TCS as a whole.