Civil Society Campaigns Research Articles

Correcting the democratic deficit in the CETA negotiations: Civil society engagement in the provinces, municipalities, and Europe

The federal government claims that the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations have been the most transparent and participatory in Canadian history. Labour, environmental, social justice, and other civil society groups that are critical of the proposed agreement for various reasons would argue that their perspectives have been excluded from the official federal dialogue. This article looks at some of the efforts of non-governmental (civil society) actors, and in particular the Trade Justice Network and its member organizations, to affect the CETA negotiations in other ways, with an emphasis on contact with provincial governments, municipalities, European decision makers, and other non-governmental groups in Canada and Europe. It is argued that the exclusion of critical views shows an inherent democratic deficit in the CETA negotiations that privileges corporate insiders at the expense of civil society, the public, and even elected officials. Notwithstanding this deficit, the success of the civil society campaigns can be seen in the problem areas delaying a successful conclusion of negotiations, including new public procurement restrictions for Canadian municipalities and pharmaceutical patent term extensions. For the Trade Justice Network, these areas also help explain how the agreement narrows the fields of economic, environmental, and social governance in Canada.

India travels and transitioning Luxembourg Appropriate thresholds and scales of change

This is a new year’s letter written by the founder of the Centre for Ecological Learning Luxembourg (CELL) to the executive board on the occasion of a journey to India. CELL is an independent, volunteer-led grassroots nonprofit organization founded in 2010 and based in Beckerich. CELL’s scope of action is the Greater Region of Luxembourg, hence its mode of operating through decentralized action groups in order to establish and maintain community gardens, food co-ops, and other social-ecological projects in different parts of Luxembourg. CELL also develops and organizes various courses, provides consultancy services for ecological living, participates in relevant civil society campaigns, and does some practical research on low-impact living. The broad objective of CELL is to provide an experimental space for thinking, researching, disseminating, and practicing lifestyles with a low impact on the environment, and learning the skills for creating resilient post-carbon communities. CELL is inspired by the work of the permaculture and Transition Towns social movements in its aims to relocalize culture and economy and, in that creative process, improve resilience to the consequences of peak oil and climate change.

Contesting public accountability: A dialogical exploration of accountability and social housing

This paper analyses the interaction between neoliberal inspired reforms of public services and the mechanisms for achieving public accountability. Where once accountability was exercised through the ballot box, now in the neoliberal age managerial and market based forms of accountability predominate. The analysis identifies resistance from civil society campaigns to the neoliberal restructuring of public services which leads to public accountability (PA) becoming a contested arena. To develop this analysis a re-theorisation of PA, as a relationship where civil society seeks to control the state, is explored in the context of social housing in England over the past thirty years. Central to this analysis is a dialogical analysis of key documents from a social housing regulator and civil society campaign. The analysis shows that the current PA practices are an outcome of both reforms from the government and resistance from civil society (in the shape of tenants’ campaigns). The outcome of which is to tell the story of the changes in PA (and accountability) centring on an analysis of discourse. Thus, the paper moves towards answering the question – what has happened to PA during the neoliberal age?

“This is a Montreal Issue”: Negotiating responsibility in global production and investment networks

While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected.

Research, development and scaling-up the adoption of fodder shrub innovations in East Africa

Smallholder farmers in developing countries face numerous limitations that hinder them from embracing improved agricultural practices and innovations with great potential for meaningful transformations of livelihoods. Consequently, farmers continue living in vicious cycles of poverty despite decades of government and donor expenditures on poverty alleviation. In the last two decades, research and development organizations collaborated in testing and validating selected fodder shrub species as reliable sources of less expensive and easily available protein feeds. With minimal interventions, the research findings have great potential to improve productivity for many smallholder farmers. Tested species include Calliandra calothyrsus, Leucaena spp., Chamaecytisus palmensis, Sesbania sesban, Morus alba and Gliricidia sepium. Dissemination and adoption surveys estimated that 205,000 smallholder farmers (40–50 per cent being women) had planted fodder shrubs by 2005. Currently, fodder shrubs contribute US$3.8 million annually to farmers' incomes and estimated potential annual income is US$81 million. Factors associated with success in fodder scaling-up include deliberate involvement of fodder technology champions, collective action in community mobilization and project implementation, pluralistic extension approaches, sustainable germplasm supply systems, broader partnerships and civil society campaigns. Constraints and challenges include: ineffective delivery of extension and research services, inhibitive policies, political interferences, frequent droughts and inadequate monitoring and evaluation systems.

Policy networks and social resistance to water privatization in Latin America

The paper looks at civil society campaigns against water privatisation in six Latin American countries, resulting in both success and failure. Our inquiry aims at contributing to the understanding of the determinants of social movement outcomes. We explain variations in outcome as a result of interrelations between: a) agency; b) mobilisation tactics; c) political opportunity structures; and, d) network composition (i.e. the composition of coalitions promoting the campaigns). Our findings indicate that the strengthening of coalitions is a significant determinant of successful outcome. The combined effect of network size and heterogeneity of the coalition contributes to the representativeness, cohesion and effectiveness of the campaigns.