NGO Phenomenon in Nepal

Dipak Gyawali, Lalitpur

Neti Neti

One difficulty in discussion NGOs is the very term itself: how can one introduce something that does not say what it is but choose to say what it is not? It is not the government, nor is it supposed to be a profit-making private sector business or industry. It is not quite the age-old Nepali tradition of guthi, kipat, parma or the like, which are community-based organizations. It also does not capture the centuries-old institutions of resource management in our midst such as farmer-managed irrigation systems and their very complex, multi-hued social organizations. Does this mean that to understand NGOs, one has to employ the Vedantic method of neti neti, or "not this-not this", peeling the onion layer by layer to arrive at the Nothingness at the Core of Being?

Even the term NGO is artificial, translated as it is into Nepali as gair sarkari sansthan. Besides confusing the rich sociological differences between "institution" and "organization", the use of the word gair in this phraseology to signify "outside of government" structure implies a kind of outlaw status, akin to its use in the phrase gair kanuni. Given the hostile, step-sibling attitude of much of the bureaucracy towards newly formed NGOs and their development activities, the use of this term may hide within it more than just a Freudian slip. Respected Nepali social workers have tried to popularized the term asarkari samajik sangathan, with an implied pun that such NGOs are both non-government a-sarkari as well as effective asarkari; but, for reasons that may be debated, this expression has no caught on.

This very confusion, exasperating perhaps to the bureaucrat or the businessman, can be a rich forensic resource for someone studying society. The nature and behavior patterns of non-western and non-industrialized societies such as ours are still in the process of being scientifically understood; and where best to indulge in such enquiries than in place and events characterized by uncertainties? That traditional patterns of thinking are of limited help in understanding the problems of today and tomorrow in societies of the South is something that is difficult to digest, especially within the confines of the corridors of power and centers of learning fixed in old ways of thinking. The very compartmentalization of social science into economics, history, political science, sociology/anthropology, law, social geography and social psychology is steeped with the nineteenth century intellectual history of five locales (Britain, France, German, Italy and the United States) and their perception of the world.

Many of the old social science, whether law, economics or history, often take the nation-state boundaries as the only container within which social activities and relations take place. In reality, nation-state boundaries have hardly been able to contain much of the meaningful social relations, whether they relate to religion, language or ethnic identity. Arnold Toynbee tried to break out of this by writing not the history of countries but that of civilizations as the more intelligible unit of analysis, and Stavrianos made a similar effort by writing the history of the process of "third-worldization". The state centric model of thinking about the society, which is related to the thought-constricting history if compartmentalization in the social sciences and the baggage of a priori institutional framework it imposes in non-western realities, is a part of the difficulty in explaining NGOs, their growth as well pervasiveness in the South. Thus in analyzing the NGO anomaly, it is equally important to re-examine the various disciplines of social sciences, their inter-relationship, and perhaps their interdisciplinary re-configuration as well.

External realities can sometimes fit theories very badly, but that cannot be an excuse for not theorizing. Perhaps the aim should be to theorize and hypothesize more richly, maintaining a modesty about the sacro-sanctity of its all. Social sciences are spread between two ends of a behavioral spectrum wherein anthropologists map all variety and propose nothing while economists impose uniformity and propose everything. Meanwhile the decision maker cannot defer decisions and has to make them based on significant uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. What new behavioral wisdom can social scientists give to them that is less than the hubris-ridden haste of neoclassical economists and more than the laid-back paralysis or pure anthropologists?

The example of the WTO negotiations compared with the climate change debate and the ozone treaty would be instructive. In the case of the former, the explosion of protests in Seattle seems to have taken everybody by surprise. In comparison, the Conference of Parties (COP) of the Framework Convention on Climate Change continues to be a forum where differing perspectives do not fail to engage each other (and thus retain some hope of conflict resolution), and the Ozone Treaty is perhaps an example of such multiple engagements that have produced successful results. There is little doubt that successfully incorporating environmental NGOs into the negotiating process in a manner that had hitherto not been done in the past in international relations or diplomacy, an agreeable treaty could be crafted between antagonistic parties and perspectives.

WTO in Seattle is an example of just the opposite. In the process leading to Seattle, crucial issues were decided behind closed doors, excluding important solidarities such as the Greens and Trade Unions with serious concerns of their own. The issue is not which theory of international relations or economic behaviour works (maybe none of them currently do, maybe all of them do partially).Rather, it is of assuring whether there exists a public forum where contending views are given respectful space where constructive engagement may lead to a consensus that may not be all of what any one solidarity may want but will certainly be more than the nothing that would be their lot had there been no such engagement. This is in total contrast to the single-mission solidarity of a limited set of political parties and their so-called "national consensus" in the water resources management sector in Nepal. In framing the Mahakali Treaty, the engagement in Nepal excluded other important solidarities, as a result of which the treaty is currently in a limbo. Just about the same thing happened with the late Arun-3, an event of great forensic value to understand modern Nepali society which is carrying for sociologists not to leave it unexamined as an ostensibly "technical" subject.

Why this was so can be seen in Fig. 1. The conventional view of international relations defined by the old political science was that nation states got together, discussed among themselves, reached a consensus and crafted treaty that they then signed with pomp and ceremony, binding all signatory nations to act in consonance with it. This is how the United Nations system as well as the Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank were designed and brought to existence. But this has not been the reality in global relations, certainly not since Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring which would have come from the pesticide time-bomb, the 1970s with the Oil Shock, and the global hippies. The new reality resembles more closely the polycentric decision making model where consensus that is arrived at after a constructive engagement between governments, businesses as well as social and environmental activists and professional societies, the latter motley bunch sometimes being collectively referred to as the "civil society". This kind of polycentric decision-making model works in a scale ranging from village-level conflicts to global disputes. The question for us is to look at the NGO phenomenon in Nepal and see if the engagement that defines their role and responsibility comes to being constructive, if not what might be the modality for making it so.

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