Critical Mass: The Emergence of Global Civil Society

4. Amplifying Voices from the Global South: Globalizing Civil Society

Amplifying Voices from the Global South Globalizing Civil Society Rajesh Tandon and Mohini Kak 4 75 INTRODUCTION The twenty-first-century world is a world with porous boundaries, where very little remains limited within the national or local frame. Local issues and priorities, like that of water and sanitation, are no longer local but are determined by global policies and priorities. Our goals of development are no longer ours, but instead are clearly outlined for us by multilateral institutions in the form of Millennium Development Goals, Kyoto Environmental norms, etc. It is the concerns and the needs of the most marginalized that these global goals seek to address. Yet who determines these goals? Is it the “developed” North or the “underdeveloped” South? Thirty years ago, the answer would have been an emphatic “developed” North. Within the developed North, what mattered were the views and priorities of the governments. Today, the situation has changed. Governments of southern countries (especially bigger ones, like “Chindia,” or India-BrazilSouth Africa Trilateral [IBSA], or G22 at Cancun) have begun to speak out and emphasize their views too. Civil society has also emerged as a growing voice on the global arena. It is the voice of non-state actors—the people’s voice. Northern civil society organizations have occupied much of the global space over these decades. During the past fifteen years or so, Southern civil society has also begun to be visible and audible at the global arena. The growth of Southern civil society as a credible and influential actor in the development sector, both nationally and globally, has been a journey of challenges, influenced by a range of individual and collective endeavours and emergent politico-economic conditions. Addressing all such influences is not only difficult but perhaps beyond the scope of this chapter. The chapter does, however, seek to look at the development of Southern civil society from the eyes of an institution, Participatory Research In Asia (PRIA), with a twentyfive -year history of engaging with civil society. It looks at how its belief in the tenet “knowledge is power” provided a depth and a direction to its efforts at amplifying the voices of the marginalized from the South in the global debates on development. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first examines the role of participatory research in the development of PRIA. The second section looks at PRIA’s involvement in the growth of the civil society movement and at networks in India and internationally, and the third section focuses on civil society voices in global governance today. Finally, some lessons learned during this journey are shared. HISTORY OF A MOVEMENT: PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH AND PRIA What people in this movement share is a commitment to working with those women and men in our different societies whose voices are not heard. They share a belief in the fundamental intelligence of everyone and the right of all to make history and to create knowledge. No matter how compelling, abstract theories are not sufficient to transform the world without the involvement of the vast majority of working people.1 Every movement has a history, a motivation, an angst that stirs action for change. The movement of participatory research had similar trajectories. Within that movement, the birth of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) was no different. Stirred by the emerging discourse on participatory research in the 1970s, its founding members joined the debates motivated by the possibilities that participatory research offered as a methodology of social change. The movement for participatory research was a movement for equality and for a voice. It was a movement and ideology that captured the imagination of young scholars and practitioners around the world in the 1970s. Participatory research believed in the power of people’s knowledge—the knowledge of communities, the knowledge of farmers, tribals, workers—the knowledge of the common man or woman. The existing academic regime at the time, with its stress on scientism (objectivity and neutrality) had dispossessed people’s knowledge of all cred76 Rajesh Tandon and Mohini Kak ibility. It had robbed people of self-belief—belief in their capacity and knowledge gained from years of experience of living and struggling. For example, the voices of the farmers were made irrelevant in assessing the quality and credibility of new seeds; doctors’ views on the health of industrial workers were more relevant than the experiences of the workers themselves; the government...