This article was downloaded by: [Syracuse University], [Hans Peter Schmitz] On: 06 October 2011, At: 14:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Civil Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcis20 Commentary: A Gap between Ambition and Effectiveness a a Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken & Hans Peter Schmitz a Transnational NGO Initiative, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Syracuse University, NY, USA Available online: 22 Sep 2011 To cite this article: Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken & Hans Peter Schmitz (2011): Commentary: A Gap between Ambition and Effectiveness, Journal of Civil Society, 7:3, 287-292 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448689.2011.604998 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.  Journal of Civil Society Vol. 7, No. 3, 287– 292, September 2011 Commentary: A Gap between Ambition and Effectiveness Downloaded by [Syracuse University], [Hans Peter Schmitz] at 14:34 06 October 2011 TOSCA BRUNO-VAN VIJFEIJKEN & HANS PETER SCHMITZ Transnational NGO Initiative, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Syracuse University, NY, USA John Clark explains in his essay that the crisis of civil society today is driven by a number of external causes, including the recent financial crisis and the re-assertion of state power, but their negative consequences are amplified by an inability of activists to articulate appropriate solutions to global problems. We argue here, primarily from the perspective of US-based transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that Clark describes that most of the symptoms are of two larger, structural developments driving the civil society sector over the past two decades. First, the fragmentation of civil society did not start with the three crises, but has been an endemic problem for some time, resulting from the equally splintered funding structures and growing competition. While donations are rising again (Burk, 2011), the global financial crisis has only highlighted a failure of organized civil society to make progress in measuring and reporting on effectiveness and invest in appropriate accountability practices. This failure to proactively define their role in global affairs has left civil society organizations (CSOs) vulnerable to the whims of donors and boards, discouraging horizontal collaboration and privileging narrow donor objectives over common agendas defined by a shared understanding of what constitutes desirable answers to global problems. This is not unique to periods of crisis, and advocacy groups have for a long time faced severe collective action problems because they have limited incentives to coordinate. As a result, the rapid expansion of CSO demands can quickly make ‘both campaign asks and government promises become deva- lued currency’ (Green, 2011). Second, we argue that the lack of solutions provided by civil society actors has to be understood in the context of increasingly ambitious goals of CSOs which have moved beyond limited strategies such as letter-writing campaigns or ‘aid as charity’ to address in a more holistic way complex problems such as global poverty, the global food crisis, or climate change. These ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973) cannot be solved overnight, and civil society’s role is not necessarily in providing the solutions, but in Correspondence Address: Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, 346J Eggers Hall, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. Email: tmbruno@maxwell.syr.edu ISSN 1744-8689 Print/1744-8697 Online/11/030287– 6 # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17448689.2011.604998  288 T. Bruno-van Vijfeijken and H. P. Schmitz ensuring the broad-based participation of those usually excluded from governance pro- cesses at the global, domestic, and local levels. While Clark primarily focuses on the rise and fall of advocacy groups, we derive our assertions here from a broader set of CSOs, including the majority of NGOs with a traditional service mission active in the development and humanitarian fields. Although it is difficult to establish precise numbers on CSOs and their resources across different sectors, a recent representative study found that the most common type of US-based CSO employs a conventional chari- table approach while largely avoiding advocacy (Mitchell, 2011, p. 82). This dominance of service-oriented NGOs is even more lopsided when accounting for the resources con- trolled within each sector. Downloaded by [Syracuse University], [Hans Peter Schmitz] at 14:34 06 October 2011 Effectiveness and Accountability With the rapid expansion of the civil society sector, the public witnessed more high-profile cases of financial misconduct, including the case of UNICEF Germany mentioned by Clark and the more recent scandal around Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute. While the global financial crisis not only temporarily shrank the funding pie, it can also do more long-term damage by solidifying public concerns about misused donations. But it would be short-sighted to focus only on the financial crisis and the outliers of a few ‘bad apples.’ The real weakness of organized civil society emanates from its systematic inability to credibly demonstrate ‘outcome accountability’ (Mitchell, 2010) by assessing outcomes and impact against goals set. In the US context, this weakness has led to the emergence of ‘charity watchdogs’ as well as the ascendancy of a new breed of results- driven funders, labelled by Michael Edwards as ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Edwards, 2008). Organizations such as Charity Navigator have attempted to fill this void by assessing finan- cial benchmarks—notably overhead ratios—to offer potential donors guidance in a crowded field of nonprofits. Unfortunately, the emphasis on overhead ratios provides no information about the actual impact of an organization, starves their infrastructure (Goggins Gregory & Howard, 2009), and creates incentives to manipulate financial infor- mation reported (Wing & Hager, 2004). Following various critiques of the efficiency measurements (Lowell, Trelstad & Meehan, 2005; Schmitz & Mitchell, 2009), Charity Navigator and others are now developing more outcome-based assessments, although their efforts are hampered by a lack of reliable information provided by nonprofits them- selves (Mitchell & Schmitz, 2010). Until NGOs are better able to define effectiveness against pre-set goals (sufficiently operationalized and matched to the scale of the organiz- ation), to validate their outcomes through robust as well as independent means, and to dis- close those outcomes in a format that is accessible as well as allows for comparison, the sector remains vulnerable to losses in public trust. Unaddressed questions about effectiveness directly relate to challenges regarding CSO accountability. The reason why civil society groups based in the Global North are often perceived as ‘shrill’ and ‘elitist’ may have less to do with their inability to provide policy solutions, and more with insufficient attention to accountability challenges, in par- ticular, towards those affected by their actions (Bexell, Tallberg & Uhlin, 2010). While US-based CSO leaders rhetorically aspire to be accountable not just to their boards and donors, but also to beneficiaries and peers, actual accountability practices continue to high- light traditional financial audits, project and programme evaluations, board reporting and internal policies (Schmitz, Raggo & Bruno-van Vijfeijken, 2011). When NGO leaders feel  A gap between ambition and effectiveness 289 most beholden to their boards and donors—both large institutional as well as small individual—then this fosters civil society fragmentation and messaging driven by complaints rather than the more constructive representation of interests of the beneficiaries targeted. Northern-based donors, in particular, may be especially fervent on particular causes and may well be satisfied with CSOs taking an uncompromising stance, even if it has little chance of providing solutions compatible with beneficiary needs. In contrast, if CSOs truly felt accountable to multiple stakeholders, including their peers and benefi- ciaries, then a shared perspective across sectors might be easier to establish because CSOs would be forced to internalize competing demands made by various groups they interact with regularly. While more downward and horizontal accountability is not Downloaded by [Syracuse University], [Hans Peter Schmitz] at 14:34 06 October 2011 likely to eliminate all differences among civil society groups, it will diminish such ten- sions by forcing individual organizations to engage productively with the demands of beneficiaries as well as take note of the position of other stakeholders, including other CSOs, social movements, and governments. The proactive construction of effectiveness and accountability systems (Brown, 2008) is a precondition for civil society to collectively address current and future global crises. A Lack of Solutions or a Case of Increased Ambitions? As a majority of civil society groups struggle with issues of effectiveness and accountabil- ity, many of these organizations have simultaneously become more ambitious in their goals. One of the important points Clark raises is that transnational activism has fragmen- ted ‘politics into countless causes’ and has created an elitist class of activists who believe that much good can be done by pressuring states and their societies from the top down, rather than doing the hard work of building cross-sectoral local and transnational coalitions from the bottom up. But it is also important to give many CSOs credit for having made serious efforts at overcoming these divisions and becoming more sophisti- cated in the analysis of global problems. Unfortunately, by taking on what some scholars refer to as ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973), including global poverty and climate change, individual CSOs as well as broader transnational networks are often chal- lenged well beyond their own capacities and capabilities to research and engage effec- tively with the outside world. In the human rights and environmental sectors, the transnational activism emerging during the Cold War period was able to combine grass- roots mobilization with new strategies of ‘naming and shaming’ (Rodio & Schmitz, 2010), but its strategies remained largely confined to perceptions of solvable problems, including the release of political prisoners or the protection of the ozone layer and the fight against acid rain (Hulme, 2009). In the development field, charity and a simple trans- fer of resources was for a long time viewed as the solution to poverty. The fact that civil society actors today seem to be less able to provide policy solutions is to some degree a positive development since it indicates that we have overcome simplistic analyses of crises and have abandoned inadequate or even harmful strategies of addressing them. One example for increased collaboration across previously isolated civil society sectors is the emergence of rights-based approaches (RBA) and the increasing focus on economic and social rights among prominent Northern human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. While human rights activism during the Cold War was largely focused on a narrow set of political and civil rights, ignoring the situation of the billions of poor people in the developing world, economic and social rights are today  290 T. Bruno-van Vijfeijken and H. P. Schmitz an important part of the ‘new rights advocacy’ (Nelson & Dorsey, 2008). At the same time, many development CSOs began to use a human rights framework to focus on root causes of poverty focusing on questions of discrimination and inequality (Chapman, 2005). In principle, human rights activism today is more inclusive of the majority of the world’s population, and development efforts no longer foster paternalism and dependency. This transformation remains very much incomplete and poses new challenges, as CSOs pay more attention to the structural causes of poverty and experiment with expanding rights discourses as a possible solution. The reality of applying rights in the context of development is more complicated and reveals many challenges faced by NGOs trying to reframe poverty by addressing benefi- Downloaded by [Syracuse University], [Hans Peter Schmitz] at 14:34 06 October 2011 ciaries as rights holders and (primarily) governments as duty bearers. Research on the implementation of RBA as a more holistic approach to poverty reveals that many transna- tional CSOs used to the role of service provider and implementation agency find it difficult to simultaneously mobilize rights holders through the explicit politicization of poverty issues while also attempting to strengthen the capacity of duty bearers, for example, the ability of government agencies to provide health or educational services (Gneiting et al., 2010). As these organizations grapple with previously largely ignored issues of dis- crimination and rights violations, they face a steep learning curve in developing solutions to complex local and global problems. It is unrealistic to expect civil society to provide quick answers to ‘wicked problems’ such as climate change or poverty, but in its diversity of approaches and experiments, these groups are in a unique position to develop solutions that may eventually be scalable. While Clark debates throughout much of his article the lack of concrete solutions proposed by civil society (the ‘substance of governing’), towards the end he shifts attention to the governance processes and the need for civil society to broaden public participation. We suggest reversing the order of emphasis. Civil society actors are certainly in a unique pos- ition to develop and test small-scale solutions to global issues, but their real contribution is in democratizing participation in governance when ‘wicked problems’ require continu- ously changing problem definitions and negotiating competing stakeholders’ demands. Conclusions The idea of a ‘rise of transnational civil society’ (Florini, 1999) was partly based on the wrong assumption that NGOs replace, rather than complement the state. With the expan- sion of the civil society sector many problems of financial misconduct and vulnerability to economic decline, as described by the lead essay of this special section, became more visible. We argue here that the problems are more fundamental and that CSOs need to focus first and foremost on developing measurements of their effectiveness at the program and organizational levels and developing outcome-based accountability systems balancing often-competing demands from different stakeholders. Becoming more responsive to beneficiaries, rather than competing with other CSOs for media atten- tion using exaggerated claims, is likely to also have the side effect of creating a basis for civil society consensus necessary to get more access to intergovernmental organizations and state-dominated negotiations. On a more positive note, we find that the lack of solutions and a seemingly growing dis- sonance among CSOs are actually to a large degree the result of the growing ambition among CSOs to address more complex global problems with more sophisticated strategies.  A gap between ambition and effectiveness 291 We illustrate this more holistic approach in reference to the emergence of RBA as a link between the human rights and development sectors. While RBA avoids many of the pit- falls of previous CSO efforts, the jury is still out with regard to its implementation and impact on effectiveness as a real measure of relevance. As CSOs are increasingly inclined to acknowledge the complexity of the problems they claim to address, they need to under- stand better their own limitations as well as the need to participate in partnerships and net- works designed to manage these issues. 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