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

Alliances, Hybrids, and NGO Politics

WaterAid, the London-based development organization focused on water and sanitation issues, joined with the Freshwater Action Network in 2003 to create Right to Water, a web-based networking and advocacy tool that aims to promote understanding and implementation of water as a human right. Alliances, Hybrids, and NGO Politics Issue alliances, convergent advocacy campaigns, and hybrid NGOs are shifting the focus of the two fields. Leading NGOs in each sector —Oxfam, CARE, ActionAid, Amnesty, Human Rights First, OMCT, and others—are finding ways to broaden and deepen their sectorcrossing agendas and methods, often in the aftermath of their participation in networks, alliances, and working groups involving both fields. These campaigns are important in their own right, but they are significant for two broader reasons as well: they call attention to issues of economic governance and corporate behavior—the “globalization ” issues—in concrete, specific, and sometimes compelling ways; and they constitute an important new current in the politics of NGO advocacy that challenges prevailing themes in the scholarly debate over NGOs and their significance. We discuss this reframing of NGO advocacy and of social movement campaigns on globalization in the concluding chapter. In an era of critiques of NGO advocacy, the new alliances and convergent campaigns need to be taken into account. The heroic aura that has surrounded international NGOs in some scholarship is provoking more critical examination of their record, including the extent to which they act independently of the major industrial country governments and aid agencies. Guilhot (2005) argues that human rights advocacy has morphed into an expertise-based form of democracy promotion under the control of the United States and international financial agencies. His concern that the guardians of human rights are being enlisted in a campaign to promote a democracy agenda defined too narrowly to serve the interests of poor-country governments and their citizens should be taken seriously. But the new rights advocacy 162 Alliances and Hybrids movements analyzed here suggest that another important tendency is alive among international human rights NGOs, one that presents a more complex and alternative picture of the sector. In their work on agrarian reform, water privatization, HIV/AIDS, and other social policy issues, international NGOs are coming under pressure to form alliances with social movements and to reinforce their campaigning work by appealing to human rights standards and principles. In the process they are often working against the current of the richcountry governments. This is particularly true for U.S.-based NGOs, as the U.S. government resists all appeals to economic and social rights as a basis for policy. But on issues involving water privatization and intellectual property rights over pharmaceuticals, many European governments have generally backed the claims of multinational pharmaceutical companies and of major Swiss, British, and French water multinationals, placing human rights advocates in opposition to corporate positions, prevailing interpretations of trade rules, and to governments ’ economic and trade policies. In economic and social policy areas, many international human rights and some development NGOs appear to be anything but the obedient agents of the G-8, fixed in opposition by their commitments to human rights standards and their alliances with social movements in the poor countries. Issue alliances that involve both human rights and development advocates, campaigns that involve a convergence of objectives, strategies , and methods, and hybrid organizations in which the methods and cultures of the two fields are integrated have become an important part of the process in setting and implementing economic and social policy. The gradual intensification of human rights–development cooperation during campaigns on project-specific and issue-focused advocacy campaigns reflects both the heightened urgency that international NGOs feel about responding to conditions of poverty and the leading role that NGOs and movements based in the poor countries have played in driving that integration. As international NGOs in human rights and development reposition themselves to engage in these social policy debates, they are caught up in new relationships and alliances and exposed to new 163 Alliances, Hybrids, and NGO Politics methods and strategies that further change their historically distinct fields. The significance of these changes for the sectors themselves, their likely durability, their impact on social policy, and their importance for human rights and social theory are the subjects of the final chapter. Notes 1. The sections on HIV/AIDS and water draw heavily on Nelson and Dorsey (2007). 2...