A rchive Date
[ 07-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Economics ]
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[http://www.nationalstrategy.com/nsr/v9n4Summer00/Salamon%20NGOs%20Summer%2000.htm
Civil Society Organizations: Non-state Actors on the Global Scene
Lester M. Salamon
National Strategy Forum Review
Summer 2000
Few developments on the global scene over the past three decades have been as momentous as the recent upsurge in private, nonprofit, voluntary, or civil society organizations. We are in the midst of a "global associational revolution," a massive expansion of structured citizen activity outside the boundaries of the market and the state. This may well prove to be as significant a development of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first century as the rise of the nation-state was to the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The growth of this new sector has broad implications for worldwide processes of governance.
Causes
It is not accidental that this development is taking place now. It reflects a number of profound social, political, and technological developments, four of which deserve special mention.
First, many have begun to question the modern state’s ability to tackle the interrelated social welfare, developmental, and environmental challenges of our time. The resulting search for new partners to assist the state in these tasks increasingly includes private, nonprofit groups. Second, the recent communications revolution has opened new opportunities for grassroots development and cross-national organizational links—just as it has for cross-national business enterprise. Third, the growing educated middle class in Central Europe and much of the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s outstripped available economic and political opportunities. This new bourgeoisie turned to alternative forms of organization to improve the quality of life in their societies.
Finally, new external actors have emerged, committed to fostering the growth of civil society organizations in developing regions. These groups include international foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Kellogg, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute; the Catholic Church in Latin America following the Second Vatican Council and the Medellin Conference; American and other northern private voluntary organizations (PVOs); and, more recently, international organizations such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
Defining the Nonprofit Sector
In the past, effective estimation of nonprofit groups has been hindered by differing definitions of groups’ status. In the Johns Hopkins Compara-tive Nonprofit Sector Project, a team of more than forty country experts from Latin American, Africa, Asia, Western Europe, and Central Europe arrived at a working definition for the nonprofit sector. Our study identified five fundamental features which define the nonprofit sector as a sphere of social action outside the market and state. These groups can be described as:
Organizations - institutionalized to some extent, even if not formally registered or legally constituted.
Private - institutionally separate from government.
Non-profit-distributing - not returning profits generated to their owners or directors.
Self-governing - equipped to control their own activities.
Voluntary- involving some meaningful degree of voluntary participation, either in the conduct of the agency’s activities or the management of its affairs.
The Scale of the Nonprofit Sector
Using this definition, it has been possible to generate a reasonably systematic picture of the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector. Data are currently available on twenty-two of the forty countries studied. We were able to generate comparable data for nine Western European countries, four other developed countries (Australia, Israel, Japan, and the US), four Central European countries, and five Latin American countries. Based on this work, it has become clear that the nonprofit sector is a much larger and more dynamic presence than previously recognized.
Employment. In the 22 countries for which we were able to generate data, we found that nonprofit organizations employ 19 million workers, and engage another 10 million full-time equivalent people as volunteers. This represents, on average, one out of every twenty nonagricultural workers, and one out of every ten service workers. Nonprofits employ more than the utilities, textile manufacturing, printing, or chemical manufacturing industries, and nearly as many as transport and communications (see Figure 1). Including volunteers, nonprofit employment swells to one out of every fourteen workers, or seven percent of the twenty-two-country total.
Expenditures. The expenditures of the nonprofit sector in these twenty-two countries are the equivalent of nearly five percent of the combined gross domestic product of these countries. Put somewhat differently, if the nonprofit sector in just these countries were a separate country, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, with $1.1 trillion in economic activity.
Composition. By far, the bulk of this nonprofit employment is in the social welfare field, including health, education, and social services. Taken together, two-thirds of nonprofit employment is in these three fields. Social services dominates with thirty percent, while health and education are twenty and eighteen percent respectively. By contrast, development and advocacy account for relatively small shares of nonprofit employment. Even in Latin America, for example, they absorb only eight percent of nonprofit employment, though with volunteers included this figure approaches ten percent.
Growth. A final feature of the global nonprofit sector worth noting is its dynamism. Nonprofit organizations are growing much more rapidly than other components of the economies for which data are available. Thus for the nine countries on which we were able to collect time series data, the growth rate of nonprofit employment exceeded that of overall employment by a factor of more than two-to-one.
This may reflect the nonprofit sector’s presence in the service sector of the economy, where changing demographics and social mores create increased demands. Also at work is governments’ growing reliance on such organizations, and expanded citizen demands for more flexible, less bureaucratic institutions through which to receive the services they need.
Implications for States
The spread and growth of nonprofit organizations throughout the world has important implications for the power and role of states and for the governance process more generally. Three implications in particular are important to highlight.
The transformation of domestic politics. Traditional institutions for interest aggregation such as political parties are increasingly losing their monopoly on the political process as single-purpose groups attract popular support. Even countries such as Sweden, where service-providing nonprofit organizations are limited in number and scope, have large numbers of "movement organizations" with substantial membership and support. The rise of "Green" political parties in Western Europe is another manifestation of this trend. Special-purpose nonprofit organizations are particularly engaged in political activity in the developed countries, but are also present in the developing world.
On the one hand, this trend provides more opportunities for popular political expression and thus contributes to the democratization of political systems. At the same time, however, this proliferation of nonprofit groups complicates the task of forging governing coalitions and reaching consensus on difficult policy issues. While contributing to democratization, the expansion of nonprofit issue and interest representation can thus also lead to gridlock. Which of these outcomes dominates in particular cases will depend on local political traditions, governance arrangements, and leadership skills.
Reshaping international relations. The nonprofit sector is also increasingly engaged at the international level. Side-by-side with multinational corporations challenging the premier role of national governments in the international arena are a growing number of multinational nonprofit organizations—or more accurately, multinational nonprofit networks.
Although accurate numbers are difficult to establish, the Union of International Associations estimates there were 42,100 international non-governmental organizations in existence in 1998. This number has been growing rapidly; in 1978, it was just under 10,000 (see Figure 2). Today’s count of 42,100 is augmented by the fact that many of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous organizations are involved in international networks.
This growth of international nonprofit organizations is merely the tip of a very large iceberg of increasingly dense relationships among locally organized nonprofit organizations. Many of the resulting networks are loosely structured at best. They are held together by shared values, shared political experience, joint participation in international gatherings, and often joint involvement in international projects.
The series of international conferences held under the UN’s auspices over the past years have been of special importance in the development of these networks. The run-ups to these conferences have increasingly featured lengthy preparatory sessions not only by governments, but also by nonprofit groups. Beyond this, new general-purpose networks of nonprofit organizations and philanthropies are developing throughout the world, such as the Asia-Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, The International Society for Third Sector Research, and CIVICUS, the World Alliance of Citizens.
Despite their often loose structure, these networks have exerted a growing impact on both domestic and international policy. Sometimes, their action takes the form of mobilizing to influence World Bank or UN policy. Often, however, it aims at a "boomerang effect." Nonprofits can influence the actions of their own governments or international corporations through a transnational network to an international community—thus overcoming political weakness at home. This pattern is most clearly evident in the human rights field, where an elaborate apparatus exists to allow local groups to turn domestic abuses into an international issue. Similar patterns are at work in the environmental field. Because of countries’ need for IMF loans or other forms of international assistance, local regimes are vulnerable to this kind of pressure.
Multinational corporations have also been increasingly vulnerable to cross-national nonprofit mobilization. The importance of "reputational capital" to multinational firms leaves them vulnerable to public relations campaigns conducted by nonprofits through the media. Few multinational companies can afford to be known as an international exploiter of child labor or a polluter of another country’s rivers.
Redefining governance. The growth of nonprofit organizations helps to push government into a new role as orchestrator and collaborator rather than monopoly provider of public services.
The impulse for this transformation has been both conceptual and practical. Growing public frustration with the cost and effectiveness of exclusively governmental solutions to complex social, economic, and environmental problems has combined with an ideological commitment to rely more heavily on alternative arrangements to address public problems. The vehicle for it throughout the world has been a massive proliferation of new tools of public action—loans, loan guarantees, contracting, grants, regulations, vouchers, tax expenditures, insurance, and more.
The indirect character of these newer tools of public action leads to reliance on a host of "third parties" to carry out public functions. Private nonprofit organizations have been major beneficiaries of this trend. They are often well-established in fields that governments are newly entering. In many cases, nonprofit organizations have been instrumental in advocating for the government programs they then help to implement. They consequently function both as pressure groups and partners at the same time.
The upshot has been the emergence of a new collaborative style of governance. The government is obliged to share significant portions of its discretionary authority over public funding and the operation of public programs with third-party institutions, including a wide assortment of nonprofit organizations. The government’s ability to control its partners is constrained by its imperfect information as to the activities of these partners.
Conclusion
The civil society sector has arrived as a force to be reckoned with on the global level. It can at times be a disruptive force, as the December 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle demonstrated. But it can also be a positive one, signaling a widespread new willingness to take the initiative in working for the common good.
A key issue over the next two decades will be how governments react to these citizen stirrings. Where governments resist the emergence of such organizations, difficulties are sure to follow. But where they accommodate the new pressures and join forces with the new organizations, synergies may strengthen efforts to deal with public problems, even if they marginally weaken the state’s capacity for autonomous action. For this to be possible, however, new attitudes and new forms of political and administrative skill will need to be developed. Developing such attitudes and skills are therefore high priorities for the near future.
Professor Salamon is Founding Director at the Institute for Policy Studies, at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a leading expert on alternative tools of government action and on the nonprofit sector in the US and around the world. Within the Institute, he currently directs the Center for Civil Society Studies and the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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