Civil society, Self-help groups and voluntary organizations

-Dev Raj Dahal, T.U

Since the fifties, the prospects for involving civil society in the governance of a nation and in the development process have widened. More citizens than ever before are active in the nation's political activities. In rural areas, there are some stable social institutions, which regulate the daily social and economic behaviour of the people, but they are not independent of political authority. Guthi, Kipat, Kaschhari, etc, are some of the legacies of the past, yet deeply mutilated by the Panchayat system. The Society registration Act 1960 was the first legal instrument to ease the private sector in development. But under it, the overall patronage was provided by the state. In 1977 a new viewpoint was added into it. Many clubs, libraries, NGOs, literary societies, and cultural groupings came under the purview of this Act in which the Chief District Officer-CDO-became the sole authority to guide, direct and control them.

The controlling feature was partially relaxed by the Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal 1990. Yet, two practical limitations continue unabated.: the CDO retains inordinate power of their registration, renewal and abrogation; and the Social Welfare Act 1992 makes every NGO mandatory to register within it, which also controls the flow of INGOs funds to the NGOs. The institutional basis of participatory democracy is more likely to be captured by non-heirarchic and inclusive citizens who can minimize the monopoly of the bureaucracy. It also establishes that politics of decision-making makes the civil servants publicly accountable to the elected representatives.

The most urgent material interest of urban-based NGOs and political parties now are sifficiently lasting enough to destroy voluntary organizations, but less efficient to put anything solid in their place. If this trend is continued, social life of Nepal will face a feral struggle devoid of public sphere and national purpose. Some cultural and linguistic voluntary organizations existing now among the ethnic groups will disappear, leaving nothing but pent-up feelings.

The cultural pattern underlying the formation of political parties in Nepal are so typical that the decision making process in major political parties is based more on a hegemony of dominat castes-Brahmin, Chhetris and Newars- than on the support of a larger coalition of social forces and minorities. Interest groups and civil society are very weak in Nepal. Nepalese politicians take political processes personally upon themselves and policy is drawn without much public discourse, party programs and ideology. When development fails to deliver anything the common response of political leaders is exhorting the people to work hard and do things by themselves. Nearly all parts of Nepal suffer from the deficiency of a critical mass of an educated middle class to mediate between the private and public institutions that make up a vibrant civil society.

Local leaders in Nepal have not been able to develop their own followings independent of party framework. This is why the rural peasants are less represented either in the parliament or in party organizations. Civil society, especially human rights organizations, student unions, trade unions, women's organizations, environment groups, editor's guild, etc, are over politicised and elite-oriented, reflecting the aspirations of the urban upper and middle class.

The economic society, represented by Nepal federation of Chamber of Commerce and Industry, has not moved beyond its established logic of self-interest-privatization, denationalization and deregulation. It has been able to bring new pressures on the state from downward, upward and outside. Its agenda of globalization has increasingly been making it difficult for the government to govern and leaders hard to lead. What happens to the majority of the people if the last legitimate barrier, the core of nation-state, is taken away to permit the outsiders an open exploitation of natural resources, land, labor and culture of the nation?

If civil society and voluntary organizations do nt serve as an interface between the state and the market and mobilize and mediate social pressure from popular groups, there is every possibility for eroding good governance. Civil society can increasingly provide a political counterweight to a predatory state while voluntary organizations can serve as an economic counterweight to the economic society and the market in order to subordinate the power of the class interest and for the promotion of collective action and protection of public good. In this sense, civil society is a primary self-governing voluntary body which helps the state to protect public power, articulate voices in local concerns, and exert public pressure for good, accountable and transparent governance.

NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS:

The municipalities and VDCs acts encourage the involvement of non-governmental organizations in local development projects of Nepal. Those NGOs can also "identify, execute and evaluate" those projects. They are allowed to work in coordination with the units of local-self government. In the past two decades, most aid programs have been carried out by NGOs. By now, over sixteen thousand NGOs, and nearly one hundred international non-governmental organizations, INGOs, are estimated to have spread out over Nepal to support its development process.

These NGOs come with different theories, but their established missions almost invariably involve assisting the local people to reduce their poverty, inequality, and dependency and meet their basic needs. NGOs have dissimilar inventories of programs, and their way of functioning is frequently spread over each other, but their standings are shared in most of the cases. Because, they almost uniformly argue for sustainable development interventions, that is, the projects will keep on going even after they leave the project site.

Some of the NGOs are very pragmatic in capturing social and political obstacles of development faced by the poor. Other NGOs are seen effective in terms of mobilizing, conscientizing, and catalyzing the rural people to involve them in development process and carrying out community based relief and special delivery systems. Their procedural flecibility and integrated approach in functioning have further added efficacy and legitimacy in the following areas:

# Enlarging the consciousness of rural people, especially women, poor and disadvantaged sections of the society; # social mobilization for the identification and execution of small-scale projects; # organizing consumers' committees to articulate and service demands; # taking up an integrated approach in service delivery; # accomplishng the programs in a cost-effective manner both in terms of time, manpower and finance, and # building local capacity for self-reliance, and self-governance of society.

The effectiveness and distinction between the roles of NGOs and bureaucracy, however, become pointless when they have a negative impact in the overall picture, if they control the local political and development processes through their nexus with the government, and INGOs and attempt to prune the vitality of elected bodies and consumer groups.

That most of the NGOs are confined to urban areas, mostly in Kathmandu, and their resources are flowing to the poor through powerful modernized elite, remind us how the existing power relationship is being strengthened by foreign aid. The poor are reduced to be dependent on the discarded trickle-down theory and a few poverty oriented projects. This has created an urban client-class of donors who do not have to be accountable to the people, but only to their funders. Planning of activities is more often brought about with the preference of the financier in mind than with the communities at the grassroots level. Its critics further charge that, " because NGOs at the local level have so many more resources than the local institutions, decentralization has meant increasing domination by foreign priorities".

The Public Accounts Committee of the parliament has identifies the mushrooming growth of NGOs as a "parallel government" that "poses a threat to the government in the long-run". There is an element of half truth here. The Social Welfare Council, a descendent of Social Service National Coordinating Council, which instead of coordinating social services "has its hand in the donor's pocket, and its eyes peeled for unaccountable social work".-Gyawali:1990,4.

A lawyer has provided a more scathing criticism. He says " the social welfare council, a supreme legal entity created by Social Welfare Act, has failed to act like a coordinating and supporting body due to structural and functional vagueness. INGOs, more bewildered that national NGOs are unable to confidently operate in a wider playground where neither the umpire nor the player are clear about their respective rights and obligations"- Dhungel.

In development, some NGOs are reaching those areas which are either left out deliberately or unattended by official development imagination. NGOs are also striving to recreate a civil society long contained by the corporate-bureaucratic rationality. Voluntary bodies and NGOs had remained a core of independent thought and productive life, especially of local importance, which have vanished with the agricultural practices, thus giving way to a material, urban and monetized society now.

Adaptation and innovation:The way local leadership perceives the nature of local and national situation to be and the manner in which it responds to it is an important condition determining the adaptation and innovation of LGIs. The response of leaders, as decision makers, to the pressures generated by these situations calls for new policies, new goals and new strategies that can be justified to the HMG for their usefulness to the people. The performance of this adaptive function by the LGIs will, in turn, depend upon the degree of harmony that the LGIs maintain among their constituent units-local NGOs, consumer groups, professional bodies, political parties, and socio-economic institutions.

The three methods of sustaining that harmonies are the capacity of these systems' learning process; the capacity to make effective choices and the capacity to carry out policies. The ability of LGIs in meeting these preconditions is fundamental in democracy requires. The growing awareness of Nepalese citizens towards the value of participation is bringing pressure on the government that inequality and poverty are not accepted as a natural order with fatalistic resignation.

With these functions, LGIs can look at the local problems as a challenge and try to experiment with new ideas and approaches to imaginatively suggest solutions. In the technical sphere of planning, some kind of innovative training, also spelled out by LGIs acta, is essential to open up the opportunity for local initiatives. Under multiparty democracy, now, a peaceful break with the power of long-standing habits is a must to chart a new course of development. As innovation springs from the individual, the ablest persons from villages and towns with a rich inventory of experience and wisdom, must be cultivated for public responsibilities so that they can make rational and innovative policies on the basis of people's knowledge system and therefore, can be sustainable for the long run. Innovation increases the autonomy of LGIs.

A leader who far outruns the rich experience of knowledge and praxis of his people in organizing concepts and institutions will hardly be able to get support from them and make his/her plan a basis for the devolution of power. Successful innovation occurs in the creation of new capacity of LGIs to make their performance before-better in prganization, management, leadership recruitnment resource mobilization and productivity, distribution of goods and services and, of course, in striking a balance between popular demands and their fulfilment.

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