[Reader-list] The NGO-Industrial Complex (Builders, Develpers and now Green)

[Syed Yunus]

Thanks Kshmendra for sharing this thought provoking paper.

I agree that the CSR & NGO collaboration are creating hell lot of changes in
the way voluntary organizations used to work.  Recognizing the potential of
'awareness' the corporates want to exploit the 'social sphere' for image
building as they are using the green terminology to clean their marks of
pollution or to get rebate.

If we look at the  construction industry per say, it hampers the
biodiversity by  expanding the web of concrete. ground water depletion is
the first indicator which might be noticed by those who have recently deepen
their bore wells.

however during last three decades  the industry has successfully exploited
various terms i.e. builders, developers, garden and now green to boost its
image in the social sphere. And to attract socially 'aware' consumers.

regards

Yunus



On 5/13/09, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "The NGO-Industrial Complex (Another non-Communist manifesto?)"
> by RA
>
> A new spectre is haunting the world.  Picking up where the colonial
> projects left off, it aims to complete their transnational projects and
> crystallise the dominant world order once and for all. It can be seen as the
> newest stage and mutation of both capitalism and colonialism, with aid
> workers as the new missionaries.  Yet this avatar breaks with previous
> projects in that it commodifies not just goods or people, but emotion
> itself. It equally seeks to neuter dissent and reproduce itself not through
> the politicised discrimination and particularization of colonialism, but
> instead, through a generalized depoliticisation.  And although it may
> operate with a similarly well intentioned ‘help us help them’ ethos, its
> realized effects are slightly less admirable.  This is the Non Governmental
> Organisation Industrial complex.
>
> Yet what does it mean to liken NGOs – generally viewed as altruistic
> non-profit vehicles for social change – to the prison and military
> industrial complexes? To begin with, the label ‘industrial complex’ can be
> defined as a system of relations between the State and certain institutions
> and organizations in a particular industry - in this case foundations,
> intergovernmentals and nonprofits - often with an associated ulterior agenda
> or motive.  It may be noted that NGOs differ from the military and prison
> industries in that they are external to, and thus ostensibly independent
> from the state.  It can however be argued that the tax-exempt status which
> these philanthropic and charitable organizations enjoy vastly changes their
> relationship with the State.  This is to say, that while taxes may pit
> corporations in opposition to the State, the NGOs’ exemption results in them
> functioning as a part, and the international arm of said State.
>
> And indeed, globalizing forces have today redrawn us into a world that is
> increasingly interdependent and borderless, at least on paper. It is in this
> international aspect where Rostow’s Five Stages of Growth theory, which
> takes the nation state as the basic unit of economic analysis, falls
> short.  Past his fifth stage of mass consumption, he poses the question of
> where a nation, having attained technological maturity and having “at its
> command a modernized and differentiated industrial machine”.  Options range
> from the expansion of the welfare state to the increasing of “the nation’s
> stature and power on the world scene” to “the creation of new inner, human
> frontiers in substitution for the imperatives of scarcity” (1971:16).
>
> It may then be possible to posit a sixth stage of growth to add on to
> Rostow’s original five: that of globalisation and transnationalism.  This
> stage too possesses an “inner logic and continuity … (and) and analytic bone
> structure, rooted in a dynamic theory of production” (1971:13-14). It is
> well characterized by the body of philanthropic NGO organizations, which
> achieve a tripartite synthesis of Rostow’s posited options
> above.  Structured not by an individual state, but instead the world
> government, it can be viewed as an expansion of the welfare state on a
> global scale. The body’s collective aim is thus stated as the alleviation of
> poverty and human suffering through government initiatives that transcend
> national borders.  It can however be argued that this philanthropic mission
> belies an underlying, perhaps more insidious aim: the global promotion of
> the nation with regards to both stature and power.
>
> The pattern of Buddenbrooks dynamics that Rostow cites (1971:11) is also
> relevant in considering the creation of the aforementioned ‘creation of new
> inner, human frontiers in substitution for the imperatives of
> scarcity’.  Denizens of a society in this proposed sixth stage are
> characterized by their relatively higher levels of economic comfort and
> standard of living, replete with all the accoutrements of hypercapitalism.
> This affluence leads them to behave “as if, having been born into a system
> that provided economic security and high mass-consumption, they placed a
> lower valuation on acquiring increments of real income in the conventional
> form”.  Included among these ‘new’ aspirations is the drive for charity and
> philanthropic social change, as facilitated and enabled through the
> collective body of NGOs. In previous stages of economic growth, this
> commitment to philanthropy has tended to be the province of only the rich
> elite in any
> given society.  This division does not change in this sixth stage, except
> to be mapped onto the global scale of the ‘world society’.  So it is that
> the ‘richer’ countries do the developing, while those seen as being less
> economically advantaged in the hegemonic globalisation paradigm are the
> countries that are being ‘developed’.
>
> At this conjecture it is important to quickly emphasise that there should
> be no inevitability or universality ascribed to these stages.  Rather, a
> conscious effort at delinking and self-extricating from this process may
> prove far more effective for those countries targeted through this
> NGO-industrial complex.  Even in the countries that are doing the
> ‘developing’, it is worth noting how this complex reproduces itself in its
> ‘home’ societies.  This is an age where corporations too function as
> consumers, and are often subject to the same mores as their human
> counterparts.  It thus becomes no longer adequate for these firms to simply
> function by the ‘imperatives of scarcity’ or the turning of
> profits.  Rather, these entities are almost expected to display a
> conscience, with a ‘green’ environmentally commitment, and careful
> investments.  The twin pillars of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and
> ‘Socially Responsible Investing’,
> along with the phenomenon of ethical consumerism, thus force corporations
> to accumulate an entirely new kind of brand-related capital.  This new maxim
> answers not directly to profit, but instead to the maximization of PR.
>
> While CSR and SRI do certainly have a plethora of positive effects, they do
> serve to both fuel and reinforce the NGO-industrial complex.  Perhaps not
> unlike the electoral political system, it self-sustains by presenting itself
> as the only viable and effective avenue for a certain kind of social
> change.  Individuals are equally affected by this construction, which can be
> said to appropriate, commodify and redistribute these philanthropic
> aspirations.  This can equally be said to result in a simultaneous statizing
> and depoliticizing of local social justice movements, where activist
> energies are redirected into NGO careerism, and certain institutionalized
> modes of organizing which have very different outcomes to those approached
> with a mass community-rooted ideology.  Especially fascinating is its
> appropriation not only of emotion, but also of grassroots-based strategies
> and aesthetics.  This is not limited to just the NGO complex, but goes on to
> be
> picked up and institutionalized by other State institutions, as clearly
> evidenced by the Obama Campaign’s recent fundraising and mobilizing tactics.
>
>
> So it is that even emotion – in the form of liberal guilt – gets modulated
> and monitored, almost replete with a barcode and price tag attached.  If,
> following Bataille (1949), a society can be characterized not by what it
> produces so much as by that which it wastes, then this commodification of
> emotion must surely represent the most efficient form of capitalism
> yet.  Like the development project , it is “efficient in its inefficiency”
> (Ferguson 1994:268), managing to in a way commodify the uncommodifiable, and
> integrate into discourse that which previously resisted
> definitions.  Thinking of the commodification of emotion in terms of excess
> is especially interesting in that it retains the idea of philanthropy as a
> luxury, albeit one with catastrophic potentials.
>
> In terms of Amin’s four-sector economic model (1974), a ‘developed’ society
> can be defined in terms of its production of capital goods and mass
> consumption, while its ‘less developed’ counterpart largely produces
> exports, and  paradoxically, luxury goods.  It is thus possible to see LDCs
> like Ferguson’s example of Lesotho as exporting labour, and producing
> philanthropy and the absolution of liberal guilt.  A ‘developed’ country on
> the other hand would mass consume said philanthropism, and direct its
> production towards capital investments in the LDCs.  Yet just how does this
> collective body of NGOs function?
>
> To return to the initial anthropomorphisation as spectre, the body can be
> seen as held together by a skeleton of intergovernmental organizations like
> the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.   This is further
> fleshed out with a constellation of NGOs and imbued with a common
> development ideology. In analyzing the development project, Ferguson has
> volunteered that “one can only aim to be, in Nietzsche’s terms, a good
> physiologist”.  And indeed, it could be interesting to further map this
> project medically – with its addressing of symptoms not causes, reliance on
> capital injections, the one-cure-fits-all approach – and perhaps even
> consider foundations in terms of phallic endowment.   Yet even as these
> intergovernmentals provide an economic framework for the NGOs, they delimit
> these smaller organizations into a specific ideological project, with its
> own momentum.  It is then both unsurprising, if a little sinister, that the
> IMF
> acknowledges that “the Bank and the IMF are twin intergovernmental pillars
> supporting the structure of the world’s economic and financial order” (IMF
> [i]).
>
> Exactly what is this economic and financial order? It may be useful to
> refer to George Orwell’s famous statement of "he who controls the present,
> controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future"
> (1949).  Yet who controls the present now?  It is here tempting to
> immediately vilify an amorphous “System” that somehow represents the world
> economic elite.  However, it is certainly possible to point to the “G8”
> group of nations to answer the question of who controls the
> intergovernmentals in question.  It is perhaps best seen in the old boys’
> club-type agreement in which the United States and Europe pick the President
> and Managing Director of the World Bank and IMF, respectively.  And although
> these picks are subject to approval from other member states, both
> institutions’ weighted systems of voting ensure that the interests of its
> largest shareholders are not only maintained but also furthered. In the
> World Bank, for
> example,  each the five members holding the largest number of shares –
> currently Germany, France, the United States, United Kingdom and Japan –
> have the privilege of appointing an Executive Director each.  The remaining
> (currently 19) Executive Directors are meanwhile rather tellingly elected by
> the other 166 nations currently in the World Bank.
>
> Development discourse thus works to reimagine a society it in order
> maintain its specific assigned place in the world’s economic and financial
> order.  Following Ferguson, it can be seen as an institutionalised discourse
> generated by certain development intergovernmentals that simultaneously
> constructs an entire country “as a particular kind of object of knowledge,
> and creates a structure of knowledge around the object.  Interventions are
> then organized on the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while
> failing” on their own terms, nonetheless have regular effects” (1994: xiv).
> Despite Amin’s protestations that “a society cannot be reduced to a mode of
> production” (1972:605),  the discourse does just that.  The society in
> question is slotted into a hierarchy of ‘development’, whether as a
> ‘less-developed’ country, or a card carrying member of the Third and Fourth
> worlds.  The civilizing mission is thus reincarnated in a
> rather more innocuous guise, replete with the sentiment of an economic
> ‘noblesse oblige’.
>
> The approach of the development discourse is fourfold and works to
> reimagine the target society by assigning four characteristics.  As defined
> by Ferguson, these are as being ‘aboriginal’ and agriculture based, with a
> single national economy, and adherent to the principle of governmentality.
> More important than the perhaps inevitable degree of failure for him are the
> instrumental side effects, especially the increase in and reinforcement of
> bureaucratic state power, and the depoliticizing effects, which function by
> reimagining social realities that may be structural or political as purely
> technical and apolitical.
>
> Ferguson goes on to argue that development functions by framing the stage
> for, and launching interventions that in reality have no effect (and
> possibly even intention) of eradicating poverty. Not unlike the recent usage
> of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to launch a war in Iraq, poverty thus
> serves not as an end goal, but instead a point of entry.  As a result, the
> development project proves perversely ‘successful’ in its failures and in
> the resulting reproduction of a certain mode of power relations, both within
> the target state and on a global scale. Like the reinvented 19th-century
> Islam, it too functions as a “powerful means of integrating the new
> periphery and subordinating it to the design of the centre” (Amin 1972:517).
>
> In a sense this development ideology can even be compared to an overly
> technicalised colour-by-numbers approach to photography, involving a limited
> amount of preselected filters.  The ‘developing solution’ is applied in the
> dark, before the photo is essentially hung out to dry while the technician
> waits for the results.  Yet like negatives on a film strip, the developer
> begins with choosing exactly which scenes (and scenarios) are to be
> developed, and comes armed with a fair understanding of how the developed
> product will turn out.  This analogy is however admittedly a very crude
> oversimplification.  It must also be acknowledged that even though they
> function within the development machine, and may be carried by its momentum,
> the majority of individuals and firms operating –albeit as cogs- within it
> come to the project with the best of intentions.
>
> Further research look the labour dynamics within these smaller NGOs, many
> of whom underpay, and perhaps even exploit their employees and
> volunteers.  It would also be interesting to compare the modes and effects
> of development discourse – dubbed as ‘devspeak’ and ‘devthink’ – to the
> Orwellian ‘Newspeak’. And although entirely unaddressed here, it would also
> be fascinating to examine the alternatives to participation in the current
> hegemonic globalisation-through-development discourse, whether through
> Amin’s delinking, some form of protectionism, or otherwise. To paraphrase an
> anti-globalisation slogan, now more than ever, another world is possible,
> and another Africa is necessary.
>
>
>
>
>
> WORKS CITED:
>
> Amin, Samir – Underdevelopment and Democracy in Black Africa: Origins and
> Contemporary Forms, Journal of Modern African Studies 10 – (1972
> Amin, Samir - Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model, Review of
> African Political Economy Vol.1, No.1, (1974)
> Bataille, Georges  - The Accursed Share (1949)
> Ferguson, Jim – The Anti-Politics Machine (1994)
> Orwell, George – 1984 (1949)
> Rostow, W.W. – Stages of Growth (1971)
>
>
> IMF [i] The IMF and the World Bank: How do they differ?
> http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/exrp/differ/differ.htm
>
>
>
>
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