New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Development and Human Rights NGOs

Local and Global Cooperation Sets the Stage, 1980s–1990s

127 Local and Global Cooperation Sets the Stage, 1980s–1990s greater power or authority for human rights principles or standards. But these campaigns, alliances, and hybrids virtually all address power directly and adopt methods and strategies that call for greater power in rulemaking and greater authority over corporate and state actors. We will see that each of these three forms of convergence—alliances , new rights campaigns, and hybrids—is deeply influenced by contact with community and national organizations in the poor countries and shaped by other changes in global systems, confirming the hypothesis advanced in chapter 1. The direct significance of these trends is for NGOs organized in the industrial countries. The lines that divide development and human rights have been much less significant among most NGOs in the poor countries, as multiple identities such as those of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement—development, environmental , women’s rights, human rights NGO—are common. Local and Global Cooperation Sets the Stage, 1980s–1990s The local and global interactions around development projects and UN-sponsored global conferences produced three broad sets of results for environmental, development, and human rights advocates. Activists in each sector began to learn from the impact of the strategies employed in the others; international activists in all these sectors learned from their interaction with community groups and social movements in the poor countries, who often articulated their values and agendas in ways that crossed the northern activists’ sector lines; and the interaction began to change expectations, especially in the human rights and development sectors, of the kind of work each carried out to advance its mission. FIGHTING MAJOR INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS ACROSS THREE DECADES Organized local resistance to certain major infrastructure projects has a long history, and major projects, which nearly always have implications for the distribution of land, water, energy, and wealth, have seldom been without controversy. Beginning in 1983, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth initiated a Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) project that brought these local debates to the global stage. Challenging World Bank financing of such projects (Rich 1994; Schwartzman 1986), they altered or blocked projects, which led to policy changes and new safeguards at the World Bank (Nelson 2002; Fox and Brown 1998). As international development and human rights NGOs engaged in these local conflicts, their objectives and strategies often differed, and their advocacy was seldom tightly coordinated . International human rights NGO involvement has focused overwhelmingly on violations of civil and political rights in governments’ treatment of villagers and demonstrators. A second current of human rights activism, smaller but growing, has called attention to the violations of ESC rights that accompany the loss of land and housing when river valleys are inundated. In early cases such as India’s Narmada dams, this human rights engagement responded to allegations of civil and political rights violations. But by the mid-1990s, human rights, development, and environmental NGOs were monitoring disputed projects in a more coordinated and proactive way. Development NGOs involved in campaigning sometimes signed on to statements and letters critical of notorious World Bank projects , including Narmada. But development NGOs’ involvement is much more dependent on their physical presence and pre-existing working relationships with local organizations near the project site. The British NGO Christian Aid, for example, collaborated in the early 1990s with the Highland Church Action Group in Lesotho to monitor the massive Highland Water Project. The project, which dammed and reversed the flow of Lesotho’s Senqu River, provoked local opposition, but Christian Aid, like most development NGOs, focused on ensuring adequate compensation and resettlement arrangements for villagers whose land was inundated. The story of international NGO involvement in the Sardar Sarovar Dam project on the Narmada River illustrates this parallel advocacy. 128 Alliances and Hybrids Sardar Sarovar Dam Sardar Sarovar is the archetypal big dam project. Still a site of major organizing and controversy in 2007, it was planned in the 1950s and first financed with a $450 million World Bank loan in 1985. The international debate over Sardar Sarovar rose to an unprecedented level with the determined resistance of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada, NBA), the stubborn and sometimes brutal insistence of the Indian government and Gujarat state that the project proceed, successful challenges within the World Bank primarily by international environmental NGOs, and the combination of social justice, environmental, and human rights themes...