Global citizen action

Is civil society the driving force of progressive politics? Are global institutions ready to open up to meaningful non-state participation in their deliberations? Can transnational networks of social activists challenge the Washington Consensus that market liberalisation and Western democracy are a one-size-fits-all development model?

Global Citizen Action takes a broad look at the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship. A range of contributors bring together experience from the cutting edge of contemporary thinking about non-state participation in the international system. Analyses of new forms of North-South dialogue in the international financial institutions and global campaigns around such diverse issues as debt, landmines, environmental degradation, children's rights, gender, the rights of the urban poor and promotion of breast-milk substitutes show that civil society is becoming a counterweight to the expanding power of markets. After the civil society demonstrations at the WTO meeting in Seattle in December 1999, non-government voices can no longer be silenced.

The studies show that international institutions will continue to lose legitimacy without stronger public and political constituencies to support them. The challenge for the 20,000 transnational civic networks active on the global stage is to evolve democratic structures of governance and accountability in an increasingly pluralistic world where authority is no longer defined according to territorial sovereignty. For citizens of recalcitrant non-democratic regimes, transnational civil society may provide the only meaningful avenue for voice and participation. Among the many cited instances of successful civil society mobilisation are: the emergence of Shack/Slum Dwellers International, bringing together 650,000 shanty-town dwellers in 11 countries to share experience and develop tactics; the success of NGO research in stimulating an informed understanding of child labour, accepting that children may often be better in work than denied the opportunity to earn; the partnership of local and international NGOs advocating for ratification of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child; women's networking around UN conferences showing the scope for coordinated, but decentralised, non-hierarchical action around common goals; and Jubilee 2000, which has achieved some debt cancellation and brought about a focus on poverty reduction unthinkable in the 1990s.

Civil society and international policy-makers are reminded that:

• Northern NGOs focusing on advocacy with international policy elites must not neglect national and grassroots partners.
  
• The rush to mandated participation seen in the World Bank's new insistence on national contributions to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers runs the risk of obscuring genuine bottom-up participation.
  
• The commercialisation of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) threatens notions of sharing and learning which should underpin participatory development.
  

As they learn to make an operational reality of participatory rhetoric, multilateral development banks need to engage with trade unions and economic interests groups, not just with NGOs, (many of which are vertically linked with governments).

(From the authors)