Civil Society Advocacy Research Articles

Collective Activism: The Domestic Violence Bill becoming Law in Ghana

AbstractThis article reflects on contemporary struggles for citizenship rights through an examination of civil society's advocacy for the passage of domestic violence legislation in Ghana. The National Coalition on Domestic Violence Legislation, established in 2003 specifically to push for the passage of the legislation, at various times worked closely with, and at other times independently of, or even in conflict with, the state. These processes and engagements point to the vibrancy of civil society and suggest the need for new analyses of social movements, political power and democracy that are rooted in Africa's contemporary realities.

Performance Measurement and Global Governance: The Experience of the World Bank

Performance management and performance measurement have become central topics in public sectors across the globe. Dissatisfaction with the performance of government organizations has become a pervasive element in the world we live in. Increasingly citizens are unwilling to blindly accept the level of work of a range of institutions within their societies. These include not only government institutions but also organizations in the health sector, education, foundations, and other areas. Yet it is not always clear why these concerns occur. There is an array of possible explanations. Some citizens worry about the expenditure of funds and are skeptical about the way that limited fiscal resources are allocated. Other citizens are dissatisfied with the results of the decisions made by various organizations and seek to modify or even eliminate those programs and projects that make up organization agendas. Still others believe that organizations are not responsive to those who are the beneficiaries of their work and, instead, have devised processes that insulate staff of those organizations from those who are supposed to be served by them. And yet others simply want to make sure that institutions are able to adapt to the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century. All of these developments have led to a belief that assessing the outcomes of organizations is a way to improve their activity. Various methods have been adopted to make that assessment; these have been termed performance measurement activities. Some of the methods emerge from an attempt to encourage governments to create market conditions within countries; others focus on the role played by civil society groups within those settings. They occur in national government settings as well as local and regional jurisdictions. It is not surprising that they are also surfacing within the multinational institutions concerned about global governance. Assessment of performance of public sector entities and contractors is linked to concerns about accountability, transparency, decentralization, and good governance. This discussion focuses on such activity within the World Bank but clearly has wider implications for other multinational organizations both within their own management structures and in their expectations for countries that receive their support. The World Bank Context As the concept is applied to developing countries, there is a clear challenge: How can one link the concerns of public sector management reforms with the values of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society advocates. There is increasing attention to the role of NGOs and civil society advocates in addressing development needs. This was the challenge faced by the World Bank as it attempted to support performance activities within the context of its relationships with developing countries. (1) The Bank actually supported two types of activities related to performance. One was called civic engagement and focused on a bottom-up process by which NGOs defined performance outcomes and were involved in assessing the achievement of those outcomes. The other drew from the experience in New Zealand and was a top-down effort that emphasized efficiency outcomes and market-based solutions. This discussion illustrates two faces of the performance movement and uses examples of activities within the World Bank (or recommended by the Bank) that are viewed as part of that movement. The two approaches within the Bank rarely interact with one another. At the same time, the Bank has adopted techniques such as report cards and budget analysis without acknowledging that there are different values that undergird the use of these techniques. For example, when a government agency devises report cards to compare different program settings with one another, that agency focuses on program implementation within the government structure. By contrast, when a civil society group advocates use of report cards, it is often attempting to show how the government does not serve a particular citizen or client group. …

Pledges and pitfalls: Canada's legislation on compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals for export

In May 2004, at the urging of civil society advocates, Canada became the first country to enact detailed legislation implementing the August 2003 decision of the World Trade Organization allowing compulsory licensing of pharmaceutical patents in a WTO Member for the purpose of exporting lower-cost generic products to countries lacking sufficient capacity to manufacture their own pharmaceuticals. The Canadian legislation contains some positive features that should inform law-making elsewhere. However, it also falls short of taking full advantage of flexibilities permitted under WTO law and also contains several unnecessary, 'TRIPS-plus' provisions that should be avoided in other jurisdictions implementing the WTO Decision to promote access to more affordable medicines for all.

Policy entrepreneurship for poverty reduction: bridging research and policy in international development

AbstractBridging research and policy is a topic of growing practical and scholarly interest in both North and South. Contributions by four experienced practitioners and in four papers by researchers illustrate the value of existing frameworks and add four new lessons: the need for donors and research foundations to foster research capacity and to protect it from political interference; the need for researchers to use detailed case material in order to inform high‐level policy debates within and across national boundaries, often by working in cross‐country teams; the importance of presenting research results in such a way that they cannot be over‐simplified; and the value of creating alliances between researchers and civil society advocacy groups. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Civil society and propoor initiatives in rural Bangladesh: finding a workable strategy

This paper focuses on crafting a workable strategy for civil society advocacy in rural Bangladesh that can adequately represent the interests of the poorest groups. It shows how the poor and the poorest rely on patron–client ties, to avoid destitution and to survive, respectively, while arguing that the poor need to move beyond these inherently disempowering relationships. Recent agricultural progress will help such efforts, but elite domination must be expected to continue. Representatives of propoor groups should therefore ally initially with nonpoor groups to press for broader agendas that can gain widespread support, before pursuing more targeted agendas on behalf of their constituents.

Vertically Integrated Policy Monitoring: A Tool for Civil Society Policy Advocacy

Effective independent civil society monitoring of public policy processes requires “vertical integration” to monitor different elite actors simultaneously. Vertical integration refers here to the coordination of policy monitoring and public interest advocacy efforts across different “levels” of the policy process, from the local to the national and transnational arenas. Systematic, coordinated monitoring of the performance of all levels of public decision making can reveal more clearly where the main problems are, permitting more precisely targeted civil society advocacy strategies. Because policy makers’ information about actual institutional performance is very limited, rarely field based, and drawn mainly from interested parties (especially in the case of large-scale, decentralized social programs), the resulting information gap creates opportunities for advocacy groups to use independent monitoring to gain credibility and leverage. This article, written originally for a Mexican activist audience, explores the implications of this approach in the context of civil society efforts to monitor and influence World Bank projects.

The World Bank Inspection Panel: Lessons from the First Five Years

In 1993, the World Bank's board of directors responded to international environmental and human rights critics by creating a precedent-setting public accountability mechanism. Local-global civil society advocacy networks found allies in donor governments, and their message resonated with internal World Bank concerns about the need to improve the effective ness of its investments.1 Through the Inspection Panel, citizens of develop ing countries can now make direct grievances regarding the environmental and social costs of World Bank projects. Among multilateral organizations, the World Bank permits the greatest degree of citizen access. Composed of distinguished, non-World Bank development experts, the panel is a transna tional entity embedded within a multilateral institution. On balance, it has been a remarkably autonomous body, permitting people negatively affected by Bank projects to gain some degree of diplomatic standing, potential transnational public interest allies, media access, and even the possibility of some tangible concessions. In spite of its limits, the World Bank's Inspec tion Panel is one of its most tangible institution-wide policy changes in re sponse to almost two decades of environmental and human rights criticism. As World Bank president James Wolfensohn put it, the Inspection Panel is a bold experiment in transparency and accountability that has worked to the benefit of all concerned.2 The Inspection Panel's experience constitutes an important empirical test of the widely noted influence of nongovernmental actors in interna tional relations. Here is an institution that all parties agree was created in response to sustained advocacy campaigns by coalitions of nongovern mental organizations (NGOs) in the North with NGOs and grassroots groups in the South. By creating the panel, the World Bank board of direc tors recognized the legitimacy of the normative principle that international organizations should be publicly accountable, another powerful indicator of the influence of nongovernmental actors in international affairs. In the pro cess, transnational advocacy networks consistently used combinations of what Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink crisply frame as:

Governance, Patronage Politics, and Democratic Transition in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a poverty stricken, densely populated, aiddependent country that has become a major test case for the World Bank's new global emphasis on good governance as a prerequisite for rapid growth and sustained economic development. Despite large amounts of aid, the World Bank and Western donors argue that poor governance and weak institutions in Bangladesh have acted as significant constraints on development. The donors have, therefore, embarked upon a set of major programs designed to strengthen political institutions in Bangladesh and ensure good governance based on transparency, accountability, and responsibility. These programs include, among other things, improving the performance and effectiveness of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the legislature; strengthening local government; developing public awareness and civil society advocacy; and enhancing the research and policy development capabilities of political parties. The fundamental dilemma faced by the donors, however, is whether foreignfunded institutional and technical fixes can genuinely address problems of governance that are deeply rooted in the country's historical experience and the behavior and values of the Bangladeshi elite. In principle, most Bangladeshis are deeply committed to and have repeatedly fought for the ideal of a British style parliamentary system of government based on the principle of mass franchise. For most of its history, however, this ideal has never been given a fair chance to work due to the country' s repeated periods of authoritarian, military-bureaucratic rule.1 Even