ENB Eelam New Bolsheviks

2016 Ten Years of Israeli Illegal Blockade of Gaza

காசாவில் வாழ்வு

2016 Marks Ten Years of Israeli Siege, Illegal Blockade of Gaza
By Days of Palestine
Global Research, January 04, 2016

International organisations have issued warned that life in Gaza on brink of collapse due to effects of the oppressive Israeli siege, which is regarded a collective punishment and illegal in international law.
Experts warn if the siege of Gaza continues, normal life would not be viable in the territory in 2016

Days of Palestine, Gaza Strip –It has been ten years for the strict, harsh and inhumane Israeli, Egyptian and internationally backed blockade on the Gaza Strip.

The blockade started in the wake of the 2006 Palestinian elections, which the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won with an overwhelming majority.

Local and international monitoring organisations described the Palestinian poll as one of the most transparent ever recorded. However, Palestinians remember it with sadness as the elections marked the internal political split and the start of the siege of Gaza.

The Israeli occupation closed all crossings into the territory, keeping only the Erez Crossing open for occasional pedestrian traffic and Kerem Shalom for a few classified and highly-regulated goods. Erez has been used a trap for people trying to cross.

Egypt has been keeping the Rafah Crossing closed for most of the time. In 2015, the crossing was only open for 21 days; just 10,000 Palestinians were allowed through, among them pilgrims, patients and students.

The Israeli authorities imposed severe restrictions on patients and their companions travelling through Erez. Human rights groups have recorded the arrest of several patients or their companions while using the crossing into the occupied Palestine.

Attempts are made by the Israeli occupation intelligence agents to blackmail people into becoming informers in exchange for being allowed to cross.

Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza has since been reporting chronic shortages of medicines and hospital disposables. “Shelves are empty due to the restrictions imposed by the Israelis on people and goods going in and out of the coastal enclave,” MOH spokesman says.

Attempt to break the siege

The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza has aroused widespread popular support across the world and many attempts have been made to break the siege by sea.

Although a few small boats made the trip in the first few years, later and more ambitious attempts were stopped in international waters by the Israeli navy, often violently.

In May, 2010, for example, the Israeli commandos intercepted the Freedom Flotilla. Nine Turkish citizens were killed in the assault and a number of others were wounded; one died in 2014 as a direct result of his wounds. The ships were towed into and Israeli port and everyone on board was arrested.

During the siege, the Israeli occupation has launched four major military offensives against the people of Gaza, in 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014; the latter was the most destructive. It lasted for 51 days and whole areas of Gaza were flattened by Israeli bombs; tens of thousands of people were displaced.

The strict siege and wars have shattered the Palestinian economy in Gaza, economic commentator Maher al-Tabaa told Quds Press. “The unemployment rate in Gaza stands at 42 per cent, with the blockade deepening the economic crisis,” he explained.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the unemployment rate in Gaza is the highest in the world and there are more than 200,000 unemployed people in Gaza.

Al-Tabaa warned that if the siege of Gaza continues, normal life would not be viable in the territory in 2016.

Many international organisations have issued similar warnings due to the effects of the oppressive Israeli measures, which are regarded as collective punishment and are illegal in international law.

வீர வணக்கம் BURHAN WANI

Over 90 civilians have been killed in the uprising, which began a day after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter with government forces in south Kashmir on July 8.

Day 89: Kashmir continues to remain shut

Day 89: Kashmir continues to remain shut

In some parts of Srinagar, especially in civil lines area, an increased movement of private vehicles has been witnessed during past few days after government-imposed restrictions were removed.

GK Web Desk

Srinagar, Publish Date: Oct 5 2016 1:24PM | Updated Date: Oct 5 2016 1:24PM

Life remained affected on Wednesday in Kashmir on the 89th consecutive day of shutdown called by the resistance leadership.

All shops and other business establishments remained shut in Srinagar and other districts of the valley.

Clashes erupted in Bandipora earlier today after youths hurled rocks at an army convoy.

In some parts of Srinagar, especially in civil lines area, an increased movement of private vehicles has been witnessed during past few days after government-imposed restrictions were removed.

Over 90 civilians have been killed in the uprising, which began a day after the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter with government forces in south Kashmir on July 8.

Kashmir 88 days -Shutdown completes forces foil women rallies, 50 injured

Shutdown completes 88 days: forces foil women rallies, 50 injured
2 auto-rickshaws burnt in old city | Woman injured in pellet firing in Bijbehara; Asiya Andrabi arrested

ABID BASHIR/ KHALID GUL

Srinagar/Anantnag, Publish Date: Oct 5 2016 12:15AM | Updated Date: Oct 5 2016 12:15AM

Photo: Mir Wasim/GK

At least 50 persons were injured, majority of them women, when security forces foiled all-women rallies in various parts of Kashmir on Tuesday. Shutdown was observed across Kashmir on 88th consecutive day.

Joint resistance leadership had called for organising all-women rallies at various district headquarters. In the ongoing unrest, 93 people including two cops have been killed while 13500 people have been injured with nearly 800 hit by pellets in their eyes.

South Kashmir: A 30-year-old lady was injured when forces allegedly fired pellets towards her during night raid, ransacked their house and beat up inmates in Waghama village of Bijbehara in Anantnag district.

Six others also sustained injuries as forces tried to foil a women rally in Tral area of Pulwama district. Police reportedly raided the house of Fayaz Ahmad – General Secretary Tehreek-e-Hurriyat (TeH) for Anantnag district - in Waghama during night at around 2:30 a.m. in order to arrest him. Fayaz, who is evading arrest, was not home.  According to his family, “Police barged into the house and asked for Fayaz. They ransacked the house and broke doors and windows. They also beat up his aged mother Raja Begum, niece Ameer and his father.” They said that they later fired pellets which hit Fayaz’s cousin Shakeela - aged 30- on her back.

On the call of joint resistance leadership, all-women pro-freedom rallies were held at various areas. “A huge women rally was organized in Tral by Dukhtaran-I-Millat (DeM),” reports said. They said that as the procession reached bus stand forces resorted to baton charge and lobbed tear gas canisters. “Later the women again assembled near Batnag but forces again beat them up and resorted to shelling, resulting in injuries to at least 10 women,” witnesses said.

The forces action triggered massive protests and clashes in Tral which were on till last reports came in. Similar women rally was held in Dadasara village of Tral. A huge pro-freedom rally was also organized in Bijbehara town by DeM activists. “Women in large numbers participated in the congregation at Jamia Masjid in Baba Mohalla locality. After the congregation, women carrying Pakistani flags and shouting pro-freedom slogans marched from Baba Mohalla to martyrs graveyard.
Protests erupted in Ruhmoo village of Pulwama district after Tehreek-e-Hurriyat activist Mushtaq Ahmad was arrested when he was accompanying his family member to hospital.

North Kashmir: Clashes broke out between government forces and youth in Qazipora village of North Kashmir’s Bandipora district. Witnesses said that as police arrived in the village to remove road blocks erected by youth, they were attacked with stones. “Police responded by firing dozens of tear smoke shells and pellets to disperse the protesting youth. At least 15 protestors suffered minor pellet injuries during the clashes,” reports and witnesses said.

Witnesses said that a youth was picked up by police during the clashes.  Authorities had imposed strict restrictions in Kaloosa village to prevent any “untoward incident”.

Residents of Putushai village alleged that police and CRPF went berserk and they damaged several residential houses in the morning, triggering brief clashes. Locals said that window panes of several houses were completely damaged by police without any provocation. Mild clashes were also reported from Ashtengoo village when police vehicles were stoned by youth. Witnesses said that police responded by firing dozens of teargas shells and pellets. Reports said that two persons received minor pellet injuries during the brief clashes.

Women carried out a protest rally in Nusoo village and marched from main Chowk Nusoo to martyrs graveyard amid pro-freedom and anti-India slogans.

Reports from Kupwara district said that at least eight people sustained injuries at Trehgam when forces fired pellets and tear gas shells at the protestors. Similar clashes were reported from Panzgam area of the district during evening in which two youth sustained injuries.

Central Kashmir: Three people including a cop sustained minor injuries after clashes broke out between youth and forces at Saloora in Ganderbal district. Witness said that trouble started after a women’s convention of Dukhtaran-e-Millat was going on at Jamia Masjid of the locality which was disrupted by forces. They said a police party including women police reached the spot and asked the locals to get the participants of the convention out from the Masjid. The participants resisted the move and chanted slogans inside the Masjid. Angry over the forces’ intervention, local youth started pelting stones on the forces present outside Masjid triggering clashes which continued till late afternoon. Later police pushed the stone pelting youth towards Bapora, Sofi Mohalla and Patipora of Saloora. Police used dozens of tear smoke shells to disburse the stone pelting youth. Reports said that four youth were detained from the locality.

Restrictions were imposed in Kawoosa area of Budgam district on the Chahrum of local youth Muhammad Muzafar Pandit who died of infection post pellet injuries in his eye.

DeM chief arrested: Chief of Dukhatran-e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi, was arrested by police at Kralkhud area in Srinagar when she was reportedly on way to Ganderbal district to address all-women rally. Police sources said she was arrested along with her close aide Fehmeeda Sofi. Police said that Asiya was lodged in Police Station Kothibagh. Asiya was on the run and evading arrest since July 8. DeM strongly condemned the arrest.

SRINAGAR

Two auto-rickshaws were set ablaze by unknown people at Baba Demb and Saida Kadal areas of old Srinagar. Evening clashes were reported from many areas that included Rainawari, Safa Kadal, Nawakadal and Qamarwari. Reports said that six youth sustained pellet injuries in Batamaloo area of uptown Srinagar during clashes. Evening protests were reported from Nowgam, Lasjan and Soiteng areas of uptown Srinagar.

Police Version: According to a statement issued by Zonal Police Headquarters Kashmir, situation across the valley remained by and large peaceful. “However two incidents of arson were reported from Srinagar and a stray incident of stone pelting was reported from Bandipora,” the statement said. “Normal movement of people and vehicular traffic was observed in Srinagar. Shops in some parts of the city were open besides a large number of vendors were also on the streets. Scores of vehicles were seen plying in the main towns and on the inter-district roads of the valley,” it said. The statement said that during the past 24 hours police arrested 57 individuals involved in various offences of creating disturbances.

(With inputs from Eijaz-ul Haq Bhat and Sheikh Nazir) GK

Article 71 of the Charter of the United Nations

Article 71 of the Charter of the United Nations

This is the only Article of the UN Charter that in any way refers to non-governmental organisations.

Article 71
The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations concerned.

The Influence of NGOs on International Law

The Influence of NGOs on International Law
by C. ALIHUSAIN on NOVEMBER 9, 2010
Peace Palace Blog: NGO's in International Law

 From a traditional point of view, International Public Law has been understood as a set of rules produced by states in order to regulate relations between them. Since the end of the Cold War, the role of NGOs in international law is growing in importance and their activities are reaching the remotest parts of the world.

In this blog, I will briefly discuss how NGOs have transformed international law as well as how they continue to contribute to the development of international law.

NGOs can best be described as ‘groups of persons or of societies, freely created by private initiative, that pursue an interest in matters that occur or transcend national borders and are not profit seeking.[1] 
Since international NGO law does not exist, article 71 of the UN Charter has served as a legal basis for NGO activities. Article 71 of the UN Charter determines that NGOs can be granted consultative status by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). These consultative norms underlying article 71 have influenced institutional developments in many other International Organizations as well. 

For instance, The Organization of American States (OAS) adopted The Guidelines for the participation of Civil Society Organizations in OAS Activities in 1999. In 2001, the Constitutive Act of the African Union (AU) also called for the establishment of an advisory Economic, Social and Cultural Council composed of social and professional groups of the member states. [2] Over the years, such provisions made by International Organizations have caused an enormous rise of NGO participation in the international decision- making process. The practice of consulting NGO quickly became widespread and continues to expand. Even though article 71 of the UN Charter granted NGO consultative status in UN policymaking, the UN Security Council remained off- limits until 1997 when NGOs began to hold briefings with council members. 

In 2004, the UN Security Council engaged in direct consultations with NGOs regarding the role of civil society in post-conflict peace building.[3] International Organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) both provide limited opportunities for NGOs to participate. The WTO, on the other hand, continues to resist to formally adopting a NGO consultation process.

When it comes to exerting influence in the international law-making process, NGO typically initiate action by first encouraging states to codify international norms. Very often, this results in what legal scholars consider soft law which mainly consists of declarations and resolutions devoid of any legal force. [4] Since soft law is mostly declarative, not legally binding and therefore flexible, it enables NGO to easily interfere and gain influence. States are more willing to comply with international legal norms when the legal scope of their responsibility is small.[5]As a result, many NGOs strongly believe that these declarations of principle may serve as a legal basis for future ‘ hard law’ norms.[6] This has led many legal scholars to believe that NGOs played an important role in helping to make international law more responsive to the needs of the international community. [7] In a lecture, Rosalyn Higgins, former President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pointed to NGO demands as a “one phenomenon in the reformation in international law”. [8] “An aspect of that reformation is a change in the concept of international law, and in particular, in our notions of the identity of the users and beneficiaries of international law”. [9]

For many NGOs as well as intergovernmental organizations, obtaining even as little as informal political declarations is already a lot since these ‘ given words and statements’ may then be used and publicized in order to bring it in to more formal arenas and to eventually turn them into legally binding instruments. Once international norms have legal effect, NGOs continue to have a watchdog and monitoring role to play in order to ensure that these norms are applied in accordance with the spirit in which they were negotiated, or that they are interpreted in a way that is favorable to the enforcement of legal rights. [10] In this way, NGO’s help foster a universal legal conscience, a loyalty to and compliance with a certain set values. In the early 21st century, NGOs have become unavoidable participants in the emergence, drafting and monitoring of international norms. In addition, as the voice of international civil society, they have had a hand in humanizing international law to the general public.
*******************************************
 Footnotes

[1] S. Charnovitz , Nongovernmental Organizations and International Law, in Non State Actors and International Law (A. Bianchi Ed., p.350 (A. Bianchi Ed.,2009)
[2] S. Charnovitz , Nongovernmental Organizations and International Law, in Non State Actors and International Law (A. Bianchi Ed., p.350 (A. Bianchi Ed.,2009)

[3] http://www.globalpolicy.blog/; R.Wedgwood, Legal Personality and the Role of Non-Governmental Oraganizations in Non- State Actors as New Subjects of International Law, p. 27 (R.Hofmann Ed)

[4] M. Törnquist-Chesnier, NGO and International Law, Journal of Human Rights, Vol 3, No 2 (2004), p. 254
[5] M. Törnquist-Chesnier, NGO and International Law, Journal of Human Rights, Vol 3, No 2 (2004), p. 254
[6] M. Törnquist-Chesnier, NGO and International Law, Journal of Human Rights, Vol 3, No 2 (2004), p. 254

[7] Rosalyn Higgins, The Reformation in International Law, in Law, Society and Economy 207,211-215 (R. Rawlings Ed.,1997)

[8] Rosalyn Higgins, The Reformation in International Law, in Law, Society and Economy207,211-215 (R. Rawlings Ed.,1997)
[9] Rosalyn Higgins, The Reformation in International Law, in Law, Society and Economy207,211-215 (R. Rawlings Ed.,1997)
 [10] M. Törnquist-Chesnier, NGO and International Law, Journal of Human Rights, Vol 3, No 2 (2004), p. 258

Image: http://www.zunia.org/

சமஸ்டி நுளம்பு குத்தி சாகாது ஈழத் தமிழ் உடம்பு!

ஆகாவென்றெழுந்து முள்ளிவாய்க்காலுக்கு முந்திய பிணங்களுக்கெல்லாம் சமஸ்டி புது இரத்தம் பாச்சியது எழுக தமிழ்!   

 சமஸ்டி நுளம்பு குத்தி சாகாது ஈழத் தமிழ் உடம்பு! 

NGOs Do they Help?

NGOs - do they help?

Long read: 10 minutes 2 8 DECEMBER 2014

NGOs are no longer seen as the blameless agents of benevolence. Dinyar Godrej inspects the charge-sheet against them.

Witness the growth spurt in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and you would be forgiven for thinking the world becomes a more caring place every day.

These legions of not-for-profit groupings that fan out across the world, intent on ‘capacity building’, ‘reducing poverty’ and ensuring that the ‘voices of the most marginalized’ are heard, surely reflect an acceptance that too many have suffered for too long, and the tide can turn with the right kind of wind behind it.

History, however, teaches us that the exact opposite may be true.

Whereas organized charities go back over 100 years, the term non-governmental organization is more recent, dating to the formation of the United Nations in 1945, when a select club of international non-state agencies were awarded observer status to some of its meetings. The common factor uniting this group, apart from the fact that they were neither government agencies nor businesses in the traditional sense, is that they would have an avowed mission to work for a social good – whether it was as torchbearers for human rights, the environment or just old-fashioned ‘development’ (a new-fangled idea back then).

Fast forward a few decades and we witness an explosion of NGOs. The spur was the rise of neoliberal ideology, eventually enshrined in the Reagan-Thatcher years. Predatory capitalism and the so-called free market were the answer; government needed to be hands-off with regard to all notions of public provision (healthcare, education, the lot).

Increasingly, governments began looking to NGOs to provide cheap services, a role that continues to grow with austerity policies. However, rarely does government funding to NGOs match the scale of the cuts. Aid to ‘developing’ nations also began increasingly to be funnelled via NGOs rather than through government organs – between 1975 and 1985 the amount of aid taking this NGO route shot up by 1,400 per cent.1

With the fragmentation of the Left under the neoliberal attack, much of the energy that could have gone into fighting the power went into forming the NGO – they became repositories of a residual idealism still reeling from the onslaught. Arundhati Roy describes the transformation achieved: ‘Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation.’2 Today, 30 new ones are formed every day in Britain; and there are 1.5 million in the US alone.3 Fully 90 per cent of currently existing NGOs have been launched since 1975.4 Roy
calls them ‘an indicator species’, saying: ‘It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs.’5Partnership or challenge?

Along with governments and corporations, the two torrents of power in the global landscape, NGOs are seen as a third force. Indeed, the big international ones – the BINGOs – with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars are pretty powerful. But are they a countervailing force, striving tirelessly for social justice and the underdog? Poverty alleviation may be the rhetoric, critics argue, but in practice little that is lasting has been achieved on this front by NGO activism.

There is the compromising nature of their funding to consider – today contributions from governmental and intergovernmental aid agencies and from corporate donors often form the
largest chunks of their income. Although some BINGOs will still deny it, this influences their outlook, making them increasingly accommodated to the wishes of their donors. Their language becomes all about forming partnerships with these interests, rather than challenging them. Work within the system, and business will transform the lives of the poor – it’s the Bono school of development, but with taxes.

In a recent article Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, the secretary-general of Civicus, a global network of civil society organizations and activists, wrote: ‘We have become a part of the problem rather than the solution. Our corporatization has steered us towards activism-lite, a version of our work rendered palatable to big business and capitalist states. Not only does this approach threaten no-one in power, but it stifles grassroots activism with its weighty monoculturalism.’6‘It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs’

In a short educational film called ‘Does aid work?’ made by Oxfam (‘produced with the financial assistance of the European Union’) the argument is that increased aid by rich countries will help people lift themselves out of poverty and make it a thing of the past.7 How exactly? By providing health interventions (anti-retroviral drugs for 1.4 million people in the last few years) and education (40 million children being educated). These are excellent things, no doubt about it. But Oxfam fails to mention how a poor, educated person on anti-retrovirals manages to magic themselves out of poverty in a system that is only interested in extracting their labour at the cheapest possible price.

On the other hand its latest report, ‘Even it Up: time to end extreme inequality’, is more to the point, informing us that the world’s richest 85 people have grabbed wealth equivalent to the poorest half of the world’s population.8 It makes an urgent case for progressive taxation, action on tax evasion and for governments to invest in public services. It details some of the violence inequality does, cautiously praises some countries (Brazil, China – but oddly not the more revolutionary Venezuela) for achieving higher wages for workers, and is a model of reasonableness. It makes a series of excellent recommendations – including telling governments to govern in the public interest – but stops short of calling full out for a redistribution of this obscene wealth. Instead it suggests a cap on the income of the richest 10 per cent equivalent to that of the poorest 40 per cent. A fine advocacy document no doubt, but the coalface is elsewhere.

And we have heard such noises before. Indeed, many a campaign to hold transnationals to account has petered out into ‘working with business’ and corporate social responsibility projects. We are at such a pass that some BINGOS actively seek corporate ‘partners’ with the promise to make the latter look good by association (see ‘The company they keep’).

Funding dependency and a hierarchical, corporate culture – many heads of BINGOs come from the business world – are a large part of the problem. According to Sriskandarajah: ‘Our conception of what is possible has narrowed dramatically. Since demonstrating bang for your buck has become all-important, we divide our work into neat projects, taking on only those endeavours that can produce easily quantifiable outcomes. Reliant on funding to service our own sizeable organizations, we avoid approaches or issues that might threaten our brand or upset our donors. We trade in incremental change.’6 Doing it for the donors

NGOs, not just the giants, face huge, entrenched, complex problems; due to donor pressure they are increasingly forced to respond with a discrete project with x number of deliverable outcomes. They reach out to us, too, in this way – ‘your $50 will buy mosquito nets for a family of four’. Social change doesn’t work like that, yet, increasingly, NGOs striving for it are forced to.

On assignment to cover the human cost of the military dictatorship in Burma in 2008, I came into contact with a number of NGOs run by Burmese people operating just across the border in Thailand. I was a bit taken aback by the number of reports thrust into my hands; obviously the funding of reports was popular among donors.

One particular feminist grouping impressed me with the breadth of their concerns. The usual report writing, educational and income-generation activities, were just the tip. Below the radar they were in dialogue with Burmese opposition political groupings, building up everyday feminist values, promoting co-operative social organization within the refugee camps,acting as big sisters to children orphaned by the military, doing their best to shelter other refugees who were in hiding as ‘illegals’ in Thailand. The group was reaching out,undercover, to communities back in Burma and above all keeping alive the flame of active resistance to the military regime, when it would have been all too easy to give up hope.

NGOs come in all stripes:

INGO – International NGO

BINGO – Big international NGO

TANGO – Technical assistance NGO

RINGO – Religious NGO

CONGO – Corporate-organized NGO

DONGO – Donor-organized NGO

GONGO – Government-organized NGO (not really an NGO)

PANGO – Party NGO (set up by a political party, not really an NGO)

Briefcase NGO – NGO set up only to draw donor funds

CBO – Community-based organization

These women seemed able constantly to adapt to new challenges and were respected by the people they worked with. Little of this was fundable. So they also did the conferences and presentations in hotels and labyrinthine project applications that foreign funders required. I couldn’t help thinking that their real achievements were despite what was expected of them.

Most media scrutiny of NGO accountability is of how they use funds, their accountability to donors. But what of their accountability towards the recipients of their interventions?

A common complaint is that the linkages of aid which NGOs deliver set a predetermined agenda on the kind of services they offer. Historian Diana Jeater writes of her experience:

‘When I first started working in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, I was impressed by how all the NGO workers I met emphasized the need to listen to rural women. I was quickly disillusioned
when I realised that “listening” meant “finding out how to present what we want to deliver in ways that make them acceptable to rural women”.’9 More serious are the charges that they NGOize popular resistance movements, acting as unelected spokespersons, deflecting energy away from confrontation with self-help projects and the like, and dividing communities struggling against dispossession. ‘They take sections of people into their fold,’ said one Indian activist, ‘and restrict their concern for these people, while others do not exist. They breed small hopes, solve small issues and take small actions while the movement process is attempting to address the larger issues of
displacement facing all our people, NGO beneficiary or not.’10 Indeed, many of the most radical popular movements today refuse any funding from NGOs, only forming alliances when the NGO could help spread their message.

Do they help?

So, to turn to the question posed at the beginning: do they help?

We could start with Bangladesh, which has the world’s largest national NGOs, effectively operating as a parallel government – they put more money into development activities than the government does. Most of their beneficiaries remain firmly below the poverty line. There is criticism, too, of the market model of development they have followed. This has been over-reliant on microcredit, which produces ‘rational profit-seeking individuals’ rather than community efforts – to say nothing of the debt traps many have found themselves in.

Or we could look at the Philippines, where I had the opportunity to observe first-hand how joined up small radical NGOs were, both with each other and the communities they were reaching out to, unafraid of supporting people’s resistance. Successive governments have actively encouraged NGO participation in government departments and on all kinds of local boards. Has this co-opted them? The successes they have achieved remain localized. They have been able to make no dent in the fundamental problem that has plagued the country –the concentration of wealth and land in just a few hands and continued élite governance. The 25 richest Filipinos continue to grow richer, with assets almost equal to the annual income of the country’s 55 million poorest citizens.11

It is perhaps unrealistic to expect such large structural changes to be delivered by NGOs when governments don’t tackle them either.

When it comes to emergency humanitarian assistance, certain specialist NGOs are the first port of call. Criticism often follows later about duplication of efforts, mishandling of the situation or of not being consultative enough in reconstruction efforts. But no assistance is the worse option in this instance.

Work within the system, and business will transform the lives of the poor – it’s the Bono school of development, but with taxes

On the environmental front we have some of the most activist large NGOs, whose members are unafraid to put their bodies on the line, as well as some of the most corporate friendly and compromised (read about the latter on page 20).

NGOs have achieved much in single-issue campaigning, ranging from the abolition of slavery to the landmines ban and access to HIV medication.

When it comes to defending human rights, whether it be espousing the causes of political prisoners or mounting challenges to the persecution of sexual minorities, they have often invited the ire of governments. It is this kind of work that governments want to shut down when they seek to ban NGOs or to stop them receiving foreign funds.

Sadly, this is not a disinterested field with universal values. Western NGOs can be quicker to condemn human rights abuses in the Majority World than in their own. Human Rights

Watch has come under fire for its revolving door with the US government: in 2009 its advocacy director Tom Malinowski, who had previously served as special assistant to Bill Clinton and speechwriter to Madeleine Albright, even justified CIA renditions ‘under limited circumstances’.12 It has also shown bias in its reporting of war crimes committed by Israel and Palestine.13

Even the clumsy, lumbering BINGOs achieve much in material terms, but will they really put their shoulders to the wheel behind the greatest liberation struggle of our times, the struggle of the 99 per cent for greater equality? If the largest appropriators of the planet’s wealth want to pose as grand philanthropists, should NGOs really line up to take their cash?

Can they please get beyond donor benevolence – and being delivery vehicles for highly politicized and often harmful aid – to reconnect with people’s struggles for justice?

NGOs are expected to be non-political, but everything they do, operating within highly skewed systems of power, cannot but be political. They might as well get their hands truly dirty.
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Ji Giles Ungpakorn, ‘NGOs: enemies or allies?’, International Socialism, October 2004; nin.tl/1xAbhWD. ↩

In ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’, Outlook, 26 March 2012; nin.tl/1sztS0w ↩

Paul Vallely, ‘Giving to charity: Are we getting as good as we give?’, The Independent, 10 September 2014; and Wikipedia. ↩

Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, ‘NGOs losing the war against poverty and climate change, says Civicus head’, The Guardian, 11 August 2014. ↩

In ‘Help that hinders’, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2004. ↩

‘NGOs losing the war against poverty and climate change, says Civicus head’, The Guardian, 11 August 2014. ↩

Oxfam website, film posted on 28 April 2010; nin.tl/1rz9A7r ↩

Posted 29 October 2014; nin.tl/1zNoTTT ↩

In ‘Zimbabwe: International NGOs and aid agencies – Parasites of the Poor?’, 5 August 2011, African Arguments; nin.tl/1u76L4U ↩

Dip Kapoor, ‘Social action and NGOization in contexts of development dispossession in rural India: Explorations into the un-civility of civil society’, in NGOization: Complicity,

contradictions and prospects, edited by Aziz Choudhry and Dip Kapoor, Zed Books, 2013. ↩

Sonny Africa, ‘Philippine NGOs: defusing dissent, spurring change’, in NGOization, see 10 above. ↩

Open letter by Nobel Peace Laureates among others, 12 May 2014, AlterNet; nin.tl/1tDiXIr ↩

Jonathan Cook, ‘Shock and awe in Gaza’, Counterpunch, vol 21 no 7, 2014. ↩
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NGOs, politics, and participation: A critical case study of the foreign funded NGO sector and its capacity to empower local communities
By Kimberly Vallejo

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often employ the rhetoric of local empowerment through ‘participatory’ programming. A critical analysis of such programs, however, suggests that the capacity of NGOs to politically empower local communities is often misconstrued, especially since many of these programs overlook the ways in which foreign funding structures actually restrict local participation and limit local empowerment. This point is illustrated by a critical examination of studies claiming that the World Bank’s 1994 PLANAFLORO program in Rondônia, Brazil did politically mobilize local populations.


Introduction

At a time when nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in South America are facing political scrutiny from national leaders around the continent (Agencia de Noticias Fides [ANF], 2009; Petras, 1997), issues of the NGO sector’s political influence on and accountability to civil society are growing topics of deliberation. Some scholars have suggested that foreign funded NGOs have an impact on local, state, and national politics, as well as improve civil society’s “access to economic resources, social benefits [and] ultimately the quality of democratic representation” (Brown, Brown, & Desposato, 2002, p. 1). Such assumptions perpetuate the thinking that: NGOs promote community organization [and] mobilization … they legitimate and strengthen civil society, generate more pluralism and political participation, offer a base for civil resistance to oppressive political systems [and] contribute to democracy by helping to create a more ‘vibrant and autonomous civil society’ that can challenge despotic government.

(Boulding & Gibson, 2008, p. 483)

Following this logic, a swell in NGO activity will thus result in increased opportunities for citizens to form the “horizontal linkages,” or bonds of trust, cooperation and interdependence within civil society, which contribute to democratic participation and mobilize citizens to participate in shaping their political environment (Brown et al., 2002; Seixas, 2010). Critics,however, argue that such claims overlook the real relations of political power inherent in the organizational structures and administrative processes of organizations like NGOs, especially those which are large in scale and receive foreign funding. These scholars argue that NGOs, as organizations, are held more accountable to the desires of international donors than civil society; that they function in a way that inherently impedes critical citizen participation; and that, ultimately, they encourage neo-liberal homogeneity rather than the local and autonomous self-determination of development strategies (Ebrahim, 2003; Kamat, 2004; Wallace, Bornstein, & Chapman, 2007). While the debate between NGO and foreign aid influence on civil society and empowerment is one with substantial academic history, the topic is ever-pertinent as development institutions continue to channel aid money through NGOs and other civil society organizations (CSOs) at an increasing rate. Currently, for example, the World Bank partners with NGOs and civil society organizations in approximately 81% of its development projects, a significant jump from the 21% of projects which involved CSOs in 1990 (World Bank, 2011). In order to more fully understand the consequences of this growing NGO presence in development and civil society, the impact of past foreign funding efforts to support the NGO sector and the structural allocation of these funds should be more critically analyzed.

This paper examines the World Bank-funded Rondônia Natural Resource Management Project (Plano Agropecuário e Florestal de Rondônia, or PLANAFLORO), implemented in Brazil in the mid-1990s, as a case which can help further understanding of the relationship between NGOs, foreign funding, political participation, and empowerment within civil society. The PLANAFLORO case demonstrates how the growth of the NGO sector may have led to changes in political voting patterns, though perhaps not in the overall political structures, in spite of the project’s heavy emphasis on involving the local community via participatory programming. In viewing the case first through the lens of Putnam’s associational theory and secondly through a more critical perspective[i], the capacity of NGO participatory programs to empower civil society is called into question.

This paper begins with a brief history of the NGO sector in Brazil as it relates to the dawn of the PLANAFLORO initiative, followed, first, by an overview of the program itself and, second, by a summary of Brown, Brown, and Desposato’s (2002, 2007) interpretation of the PLANAFLORO program that is in line with associational activity theory. This synopsis will
help to contextualize the prevailing viewpoint[ii] held by many academics and international organizations that NGOs do contribute to greater democratic participation and political change (World Bank, 2011), and that NGOs do indeed serve as “bridging organizations” between social groups as well as champions of civil society (see for example Vakil, 1997).

Lastly, a critical view of PLANAFLORO’s use of participatory development practices is presented. This view, steeped in the values of critical pedagogy, suggests that the NGO sector
actually has limited capacity to promote the agency of civil society without a concordant attempt to address deeper social structures of inequality through participatory means (Ebrahim, 2003; Freire, 1974). This perspective is perhaps best supported by the fact that today, despite heavy investment in the growth of the NGO sector under the PLANAFLORO project over a decade ago, the people of Amazonia continue to struggle for local political representation and control over the development processes that pervade their daily lives (Lemos & Roberts, 2008; Osava, 2010). By critically examining the PLANAFLORO initiative and studies surrounding its impact on civil society, researchers and the development community can gain better insight into the ways in which foreign funded NGOs and CSOs can actually impede the political empowerment of marginalized populations today, despite their intent to be participatory and to incorporate local communities. Ultimately, the paper argues that (1) foreign funded efforts to organize civil society face organizational constraints in implementing the kinds of participatory practices which stem from the theoretical camp of critical pedagogy (Cervero, 2006; Forester, 1989), and that (2) the real political impact of participatory, civil society-based development programs should be carefully critiqued and assessed based on their ability to influence local empowerment, not simply on changes in voter behavior.

The Brazilian NGO sector

The Brazilian NGO sector has a long history of working within civil society to mobilize citizen participation and political change (ABONG, 2010; Fernandes & Carneiro, 1995; Landim,
2008). Born out of heavy repression during the Brazilian military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, the Brazilian NGO sector is the direct descendant of the church, grassroots organizations, and community-led organizations that worked underground to support the radical opposition forces during that time. Originally inspired by the ideologies of liberation theology, Marxism, and Freire’s popular education movement, these social change-oriented organizations played a role in the re-democratization process after the abertura (political “opening”) in 1985, aligning themselves as political actors and representatives of the Brazilian public (Landim, 2008). Many of these community and social organizations had strong international ties due to their connections with formerly exiled Brazilian academics, political thinkers, and philosophers, including Paulo Freire. These intellectuals, who had spent significant time outside of Brazil during the dictatorship, often supported these non-profit outfits—with the assistance of foreign donors—upon returning to Brazil after abertura. The growth of community organizations as legitimate political actors offered new forms of political representation for marginalized peoples in a newly democratizing society. For example,these organizations helped once politically voiceless peoples accumulate political legitimacy by providing advising, funding, and general support for newly organized identity-based movements, as well as for trade union mobilizations and policy-related initiatives especially as the government underwent decentralization (Landim, 2008). As organized bodies, these organizations became valid political actors whose intentions were considered “desirable, proper or appropriate” within the institutionalized local social structures (Scott, 2008, p. 59).

As this system of political decentralization unfolded, the newly democratic political regime moved a number of policy decision-making processes to the local level. Initiated by the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 , decentralization increased public involvement in these procedures through the implementation of “participatory associations” that deliberately managed local and national policy initiatives related to social assistance, housing, education, women’s issues, environmental issues, care for the elderly, and indigenous and racial political issues (Landim, 2008). NGOs played a major role in fostering the development of these associations (Landim, 2008). Over time, the creation of this system solidified the bonds between NGOs, their donors, and various marginalized groups in Brazilian society, promoting the idea that through working together, they could achieve empowering changes in the political structure. This belief in the NGO sector’s power to build social capital within civil society and to serve as a valid representative of the public was perhaps best reinforced by the tremendous 1990s World Bank and government partnership to fund the growth of CSOs and the NGO sector in Rondônia, Brazil.PLANAFLORO

In the mid 1990s, the World Bank in partnership with the Brazilian government initiated a program to provide a rapid and substantial influx in funding to support the growth of the NGO sector in the state of Rondônia. The program, known as PLANAFLORO, was intended to mitigate some of the harsh environmental and political damages the state had previously faced by empowering citizens through working with participatory NGO programs and forming politically active CSOs (World Bank, n.d.). Prior to this initiative, there had been only a small NGO presence in this state. This state-wide effort to bolster the expansion of the NGO sector in Rondônia would thus contribute to an opening of social space in which people could interact, generate trust, construct collective identities, build the collective bargaining skills and develop the ‘horizontal linkages’ within society that help democracy thrive.Without building such ‘horizontal linkages’, some argue that “politics is characterized by patronage, clientelism, and corruption” (Brown et al., 2008, p. 28)

Like much of western Brazil, Rondônia is covered with delicate, pristine rainforests and is home to Amerindians, rubber tappers, and landless workers who have been traditionally marginalized from majority Brazilian society. While the people living there had traditionally survived on subsistence livelihoods, harsh and exploitative development policies brought to the area in the late 1970s and 1980s decimated the local ecology and threatened the ways of lives for many disempowered citizens (Lemos & Roberts, 2008). Projects like the government’s forced colonization program of the 1970s and the World Bank’s notoriously failed 1980s POLONORESTE development effort to construct a superhighway through the Amazon, eventually depleted almost a quarter of the state’s rainforest by the late 1980s (World Bank, n.d.). These policies and the destruction that ensued led to the rapid in-migration of ranchers, loggers and slash and burn farmers into the newly cleared area, endangering the livelihoods of over 100,000 people living in the region (Lemos & Roberts, 2008; World Bank, n.d.). In response to this development crisis, the World Bank reoriented its approach to development and natural resource management in Rondônia, crafting the PLANAFLORO project in 1994. This project was intended to mitigate some of the health degradation, poverty, land rights violations, educational issues, and environmental destruction wrought by prior destructive policies by increasing the local NGO presence in the state and by proposing that these NGOs operated  in a more participatory and inclusive manner (Lemos &Roberts, 2008; World Bank, n.d.). By inviting Brazilian professors, local agricultural workers and other rural groups to participate in strengthening grassroots coalitions, the WorldBank’s PLANAFLORO project sought to mobilize greater citizen participation in local governance and resource management via a stronger, more participatory NGO sector (World Bank,n.d.).

While the PLANAFLORO initiative is generally referred to as a World Bank development project, it functioned in coordination with the Brazilian government. The Bank was the major contributor to the program, funding approximately USD 167 million, while the Brazilian government contributed the remaining USD 61.9 million (World Bank, n.d.).[iii] While the total amount of funds granted to PLANAFLORO was a significant decrease compared to the USD 1.6 billion allocated by the Bank in the 1980s to fund POLONOROESTE, this new project channeled funding specifically to NGOs as a means of supporting more sustainable local development and resource management. These funds, which did not have to be paid back[iv],were distributed directly to NGOs in the form of grants for which NGOs first had to apply. Non-governmental organizations under the PLANAFLORO initiative were to use these grants as start-up capital, for organizational growth, and to support the organization of CSOs—like workers´ unions and other participatory associations aimed at mobilizing local communities to participate in the decision-making processes of the newly decentralized government (Brown et al., 2007, 2008).

While some authors, including the World Bank’s own program evaluators, question the extent to which PLANAFLORO was able to accomplish this goal of social mobilization for political action and resource management (Lemos & Roberts, 2008; World Bank, n.d.), a series of studies conducted between 2002 and 2007 by David S. Brown, J. Christopher Brown, and Scott W. Desposato lend support to the World Bank’s overall analysis of the PLANAFLORO project. These studies concluded that increases in NGO resources did indeed usher in a new political current and “empower[ed] new forms of political participation” in Rondônia (Brown et al., 2007, p. 135). Even if the World Bank program evaluation was critical of its own participatory mobilization techniques, civil society was nonetheless successfully mobilized to create political change as a result of the increased associational opportunities made available by a growing NGO presence in the state. In the following section, I provide an overview of Brown, Brown, and Desposato’s conclusions regarding the role of PLANAFLORO in politically empowering civil society so that (1) the case may be more critically evaluated and (2) the development community can build a better understanding of the relationship between NGO funding and political empowerment. PLANAFLORO as associational activity

The years between 1994 and 1998 presented Brown, Brown, and Desposato (2002, 2007, 2008) with an almost ideal historical scenario for analyzing the influence of NGO activity upon political change in Brazil. Between those years, the PLANAFLORO project was put into full swing in Rondônia as the World Bank rapidly increased the amount of development funds it was allocating to the NGO sector in the area (Brown et al., 2007; World Bank, n.d.). These years also happened to be the years between two national elections in which the same two candidates, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, were the front-runners for president. Given this history, the authors built a statistical model to test for a relationship between the increases in NGO activity in the state and political changes occurring within civil society. The authors believed this relationship would symbolize collective grassroots mobilization that resulted from increased public associational activities (Brown et al., 2007).

At the time, Rondônia had long been recognized as a conservative state mired in corruption and an institutionalized patronage-based political system. Concurrently, the World Bank had begun to fuel the growth of the NGO sector as a democratizing force in the 1990s. Programs like PLANAFLORO funneled monies to local NGOs to support the construction of participatory CSOs (like farmer cooperatives or other labor organizations) with the hope of empowering local stakeholders (World Bank, n.d). These organizations used these funds to provide benefits (like farming subsidies) to individuals and were strengthened as more individuals joined (Brown et al., 2007). According to the logic of associational activity, as more individuals joined, these groups became better able to establish new collective norms and practices, thus influencing collective action in ways that are beneficial to group members (Scott, 2008). Since voting was compulsory for adult Brazilians, Brown and his colleagues (2002, 2007) posited that if voter preferences changed dramatically in Rondônia between 1994 and 1998, then they could conclude that citizens had been successfully “mobilized” to support new candidates or to vote in unprecedented ways due to new norms and practices established through new associational activities.[v] For the authors, increased associational influence on collective action dramatically affected voting patterns at the national level, supporting the logic of the World Bank that increased participatory NGO activity affects the political participation of communities. However, limited change in voting patterns in local elections suggests that a more critical examination of participatory processes must be accounted for in order to glean better insight into the capacity of NGOs to empower the local citizenry.

Aid allocation matters, too Brown, Brown and Desposato’s (2007, 2008) findings confirmed their hypothesis that associational activity has a significant influence on voting patterns. More specifically, the authors believed that increased support for NGO activity would create opportunities for “horizontal linkages” to flourish within civil society, strengthening the bonds of both associational activity and collective dissent and ultimately leading to a shift in voter preferences. Brown et al. (2007, 2008) found a strong positive correlation between the amount of money allocated to the NGO sector in a given municipality and the shift in voter preferences to support the leftist presidential candidate. The difference was quite large—almost 20 percentage points between those communities that received the most PLANAFLORO funding to support NGO growth and those communities that received the least PLANAFLORO funding. Municipalities that received no PLANAFLORO funding between the two elections actually voted more conservatively in 1998, with the left vote dropping by about 5% in the second election. In the municipalities that received the most PLANAFLORO funding, the left vote increased by about 13%. According to Brown and his colleagues (2007), voters in the well-funded municipalities were suddenly expressing and acting upon decidedly less conservative political preferences, a change attributable to the democratizing effect of associational activity embedded in participatory NGO work (Boulding, 2008; Brown et al., 2007, 2008; Kamat, 2004).

At the local level, however, Brown and his colleagues observed the opposite trends in the gubernatorial elections compared to voting trends observed in the presidential elections.

While leftist gubernatorial candidates in Rondônia did worse overall from 1994 to 1998, they lost the most votes in those municipalities that received the most PLANAFLORO funding (Brown et al., 2007). Brown and his colleagues attributed this maintenance of the conservative status-quo in these areas to the fact that the project funds were allocated at the municipal levels to governors who had control over when the funds would be released to local NGOs. While the governors did not actually have the ability to increase the funds and were not themselves responsible for bringing funding to CSOs in the area, the governors appeared in the eyes of voters to be responsible for the new programs offered by NGOs (Boulding & Gibson, 2008; Brown et al., 2007, 2008). This led to the increased support of incumbent, conservative governors by voters who simultaneously supported the more left- leaning presidential candidate.

Together, these mixed results reveal how administrative factors concerning the allocation of project funding can become a key factor in determining the political effect of a project. In this case, the local incumbents seem to have benefited enormously from the ability to control the timing of aid distribution. Similarly, incumbents could have withheld funds if citizens,

NGOs, or other CSOs mobilized in ways that did not align with their political agendas. While the observed changes in voting patterns may suggest that on some level the NGOs in Rondônia were capable of building associative activity, encouraging “horizontal linkages and produc[ing] social capital that, in turn…foster[ed] alternative political ideas” (Boulding & Gibson, 2008), this broader question regarding the political effects of funding distribution raises doubt about the overall capacity of large-scale development projects like PLANAFLORO to empower civil society, despite their emphasis on employing participatory programs via local NGOs.

Voting, and participation: A critique

From a critical theory perspective, one cannot help but argue that efforts to create real political change on behalf of marginalized communities entail more than half-hearted efforts to involve them in voting for government representatives. Instead, political change requires that the inequalities entrenched within social structures be recognized and dealt with intentionally through participatory programming (Cervero, 2006; Forester, 1989; Freire, 1974). The option to choose between two pre-selected political platforms in an election is not the same as problematizing and acting on the issues that affect people’s livelihoods and marginalized statuses on a daily basis. While breeding horizontal linkages in society such as collective identities and increased communal trust can strengthen the associational activities of CSOs and produce changes in electoral results, this does not equate to an increase in the political agency[vi] of civil society. Changes in voting preferences alone do not necessarily mean that more people are empowered to have a voice in the laws, policies, and norms that govern their everyday lives. While Brown and his colleagues (2002, 2007, 2008) present a compelling case for the power of associational activities to sway elections, they only,briefly recognize the power structures embedded in the discourse of development and the political constraints of working within internationally funded structures. Oftentimes,emphasis on power structures are excluded from analyses like Brown et al.’s due to the fact that socio-political relations are difficult to identify clearly and measure quantitatively.

Researchers working with econometric and statistical regression models often face difficulties in accounting for such social complexities. In this same light, program planners in the development community often struggle to account for the power structures embedded in their work as they are difficult to monitor and manage administratively (Ebrahim, 2003;Fischer, 2000; Kamat, 2004). As NGOs and the rest of the development community have come to embrace a more participatory rhetoric, the idea of participation has evolved into something far different from its critical roots as the idea has been adapted to something more easily managed and monitored by program donors and evaluators.

While the World Bank did not begin implementing participatory programs in Brazil until the early 1990s, participatory development practices were initiated in the 1980s as both a response to top-down planning and development strategies and as a product of new civic-engagement alternatives emerging out of the 1970s dependency theory movement  (Ebrahim,2003). Initially advanced much earlier by thinkers like Freire, critical participatory methodology is a slow and tedious process which facilitates empowerment via “the creation of institutional and intellectual conditions that help people pose questions in their own ordinary (or everyday) languages and decide issues important to them” (Fischer, 2000, p. 184). A humbler understanding of the capacity of NGOs to empower civil society through participatory engagement is important here; ‘local participation’ is a term used commonly in development today, but it has become quite decoupled in practice from its essential meaning. Many of today’s ‘participatory’ programs “have moved away from education and empowerment programs that involve structural analysis of power and inequality” and have instead turned to technical projects, emphasizing managerial-style, solution-based approaches for addressing issues of poverty and oppression (Kamat, 2004, p. 168). The “mainstreaming” of these “radical and transformative” methodologies (Wallace et al., 2007, p.21) results in their conversion to de-politicized approaches, essentially robbing them of their empowering character and diminishing the space within which citizens can genuinely participate and become more politically empowered. A loss of local problematization processes—which are the foundations of Freirean critical pedagogy and other critical program planning perspectives (Cervero, 2006; Fischer, 2000; Forester, 1989)—jeopardizes the capacity to mobilize the agency of civil society.

Though the PLANAFLORO project was intended to be participatory and to engage local citizens, the Bank concludes in its program evaluation that the participatory measures used to engage citizens in policy making failed to function effectively in practice (World Bank, n.d.). Initially geared to “[c]ontribute to the social and political organization of rural communities and traditional peoples [to] stimulate the process of democratization for the exercise of citizenship” in Rondônia (Brown et al., 2007, p. 128), local government representatives were resistant to the participation of CSOs in local decision-making dialogue (World Bank, n.d.). Oftentimes, government officials were absent from community meetings, which were meant to include stakeholders from both the government and civil society in decision-making processes. Meetings that included stakeholders from various social groups were not always productive because the language of communication (including the high usage of technical jargon) hindered participation by constituents. Citizens were often viewed as “partisan” or too “technically weak to participate in complex development projects,” making government officials reluctant to work with the participatory organizations that NGOs had organized (World Bank, n.d.). Furthermore, working together was difficult for those who had little experience or training in participatory methodologies, as the concepts of ‘problematizing’ and ‘facilitating of empowerment’ were unfamiliar to those local leaders in charge of programming (Fischer, 2000; World Bank, n.d.). Moreover, the World Bank assessment noted that the state of Rondônia had been historically run by elites and had a political system that functioned via political clientelism. The involvement of civil society in decision-making processes thus threatened to upset institutionalized oligarchic power structures. As a result, local leaders were de-incentivized from being inclusive of local citizens groups, causing

PLANAFLORO great difficulty in enacting critical participatory projects.

Perhaps the greatest indication that the PLANAFLORO project diverged from critical participatory methodologies is the fact that the goals of the project were not defined by members of the local community to begin with. Instead, the program came equipped with four major themes that happened to align with overseas donors and the Brazilian government’s interests (World Bank, n.d.). To some extent this divergence may indicate a lack of experience or training in managing participatory experiences—a shortcoming which the World Bank evaluation itself acknowledges—or to the inherent difficulties in translating such a non-hierarchical and fluid participatory discourse into the language of controllable projects which by nature must be manageable, clearly defined, generally quantifiable, and are often severely limited by both time and budget (Cleaver, 1999).

Conclusion
Overall, the PLANAFLORO project calls to attention the ways in which foreign funded participatory NGO programs may influence political affairs within a country but are still unable to facilitate transformations of power relations at the local level. This calls into question the capacity of the NGO sector to organize and mobilize civil society and, most importantly, the relationship between foreign development aid and local empowerment. As the international development community continues to pursue its course of funding participatory programs and relying heavily on NGOs to act as agents of change in civil society, a more critical view of these processes needs to be developed in order to more fully account for the political implications of such aid allocation structures and its effect on marginalized communities. Until this happens, international development efforts may offer few opportunities to politically empower local communities, whether their programs are participatory in nature or not.

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[i] Critical perspective here refers to the camp of theory based heavily on a Marxist tradition. This perspective has evolved over time and across the social sciences, but is primarily concerned with the liberation of human beings from the socio-political and economic inequalities that oppress them. For a comprehensive overview of a number of critical perspectives,see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/)

[ii] See works like Wallace, Bornstein and Chapman’s (2007) The aid chain, coercion and commitment in development NGOs for more insight into this perspective as well as critiques of the democratic capacities of NGOs which have evolved over the past decade.

[iii] This is a massive amount of money allotted for a single project in a single state, especially when compared to the total amount of USAID assistance given to the entire country of Brazil in 2010: USD 22.5 million (http://brazil.usaid.gov/).

[iv] Neither the World Bank (n.d.) nor Brown and colleagues (2007, 2008) address how it came to be that these “loans” from the World Bank were granted with no strings attached.

This is a far cry from the Bank’s typical loan procedures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One possible explanation for this inconsistency is that PLANAFLORO implementers were aware of the growing criticism of this loan scheme and the growing pressure from other international donors and country leadership advocating the removal of debt repayment obligations on funds given to Brazil for sustainable development initiatives in the Amazonia region (Brooke, 1989).

[v] Brown et al. (2002, 2008)also base much of their logic on the works of Robert Putnam’s interpretation of associational theory and social capital, which attributes better functioning
democracies to increases in civic engagement. For a brief overview, see http://www.infed.org/thinkers/putnam.htm.

[vi] I use the term agency here to mean the ability of individuals or social groups to understand, control, and change the way they act and interact within social structures (e.g. the “rules and resources” which are allocated within society and upheld by social institutions) (Giddens, 1979).

காஸ்மீரில் வன்முறை வெறியாட்டம்! யாழில் அகிம்சைக் கொண்டாட்டம்!!

“அன்புக்கும் உண்டோ அடைக்கும் தாள் ”

யாழ்ப்பாணத்தில் அகிம்சை தின விழா!

யாழ் அகிம்சை தின விழாவில் அரங்கம் நிறைந்த காட்சி!

யாழ்ப்பாணத்திற்கான இந்தியத் துணைத்தூதரகமும் அகில இலங்கை காந்தி சேவா சங்கமும் இணைந்து நடத்திய சர்வதேச அகிம்சை தின நிகழ்வு இன்று 02.10.2016 காலை 9.30 மணிக்கு நல்லூர் துர்க்காமணி மண்டபத்தில் நடைபெற்றது.

மகாத்மா காந்தி பிறந்த தினமாகிய அக்டோபர் 02 ஆம் திகதி சர்வதேச அகிம்சை தினமாக ஐக்கியநாடுகளின் பொதுச்சபையால் 2007 ஆம் ஆண்டில் பிரகடனப்படுத்தப்பட்டதைத் தொடர்ந்து இந்தத் தினம் உலகளாவிய நிலையில் முக்கியத்துவம் பெற்றுள்ளது.

இன்று மகாத்மா காந்தியின் 147 ஆவது ஜெயந்தி தினம் ஆகும்.

நிகழ்வில் கலந்து கொண்டிருந்த முக்கியஸ்தர்கள் மங்கலவிளக்கேற்றியதைத் தொடர்ந்து மகாத்மா காந்தி விரும்பிப்படிக்கும் ரகுபதி ராகவ ராஜாராம் என்ற பஜனைப்பாடல் இசைக்கப்பட்டது. யாழ். பல்கலைக்கழக முன்னாள் துணைவேந்தரும் அகில இலங்கை காந்தி சேவா சங்கத்தின் உபதலைவருமாகிய பேராசிரியர் எஸ். மோகனதாஸ் வரவேற்புரையாற்றினார்.

அதனைத் தொடர்ந்து இந்தியத் துணைத்தூதர் ஆ.நடராஜன் தலைமையுரை ஆற்றினார்.

சிறப்பு நிகழ்வாக தமிழ்நாடு கோயம்புத்தூரில் இருந்து வருகை தந்த பேராசிரியர் ஜெயந்தஸ்ரீ பாலகிருஷ்ணனின் உரை இடம்பெற்றது.
“அன்புக்கும் உண்டோ அடைக்கும் தாள் ” என்ற பொருளில் உரையாற்றிய அவர் அன்புதான் மனிதனில் உள்ள அக வெளிச்சம் அந்த வெளிச்சத்தை இலகுவில் பெறலாம். ஒரு நன்றி, ஒரு வணக்கம் என்கின்ற வார்த்தைகள் அன்பை மலரச் செய்யப் போதுமானவை. சிறு புன்முறுவல் ஒன்றே அன்பை உருவாக்கும் சக்தி கொண்டது என்றார்.

தொடர்ந்து காந்தியம் இதழ் வெளியீடு இடம்பெற்றது. இதழுக்கான வெளியீட்டுரையை கோப்பாய் ஆசிரிய கலாசாலை பிரதி அதிபர் செந்தமிழ்சொல்லருவி ச.லலீசன் ஆற்றினார். இதழை துணைத்தூதர் வெளியிட்டு வைக்கப் பேராசிரியர் ஜெயந்தஸ்ரீ பாலகிருஷ்ணன் பெற்றுக்கொண்டார். அகில இலங்கை காந்தி சேவா சங்கத்தால் நடத்தப்பட்ட கட்டுரைப் போட்டிக்கான பரிசளிப்பும் இடம்பெற்றது.

நிகழ்வில் வீணை ஆசிரியர் கோ. விதுஷா குழுவினரின் வீணைக்கச்சேரி, இசையாசிரியர் வாசஸ்பதி ரஜீந்திரனின் மாணவர்கள் வழங்கிய இசைக்கச்சேரி என்பன இடம்பெற்றன. அகில இலங்கை காந்தி சேவா சங்கத் தலைவர் என். சிவகரன் நன்றியுரை ஆற்றினார்.

காந்தீயம் இதழ் 1948 ஆம் ஆண்டு தொடக்கம் வெளிவருகின்றது. இடையிடையே சில தளர்ச்சிகள் ஏற்பட்டாலும் இதன் வெளியீட்டை தற்போதும் தொடர்வது பெருமைக்குரியதே. காந்தியம் இதழின் ஆசிரியராக எம்.ஷாந்தன் சத்தியகீர்த்தி செயற்படுகின்றார் என்பது குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது.