[governance] individuals

[Carlos Afonso]

My few cents on this, below...

Avri Doria wrote:
> On 25 apr 2006, at 12.19, Meryem Marzouki wrote:
> 
> I have occasionally looked at NGO's and tried to put their  
> particpation into perspective.  one of the questions I keep running  
> into is how to distinguish between the degrees of NGO (1 person,  5,  
> 100, 1000 people or an NGO of NGOs).  And more then distinguishing,  
> how does one give appropriate weight to the ideas of one vis a vis  
> the other.  Or are all NGOs equal?  and how do universities, or the  
> individuals at universities fit in?

Fascinating question for us in Brazil, where there are more than half a 
million non-profit civil society organizations formally registered. :) 
This includes political parties, religious organizations, business 
associations (yes, these are non-profit too, although their mission is 
to help their companies make profits), soccer clubs, academic 
associations, more than 50,000 "social development" organizations (those 
which act in lobbying, advocacy, and carry out activities in 
environment, education, health, housing, economic leveraging and so on), 
many associations of organizations, thousands of associations of 
individuals etc etc etc. Tremendous diversity indeed.

One thing for certain: they do represent people (or ensembles of 
organizations), be them their own members, or the constituencies they 
work with and who have legitimized them as such. They represent and have 
the right to do so by that legitimacy, and are recognized as such by the 
other instances of organization -- this is how organized civil society 
participates in governance, in public policy monitoring, in cauci and 
fora, and so on. This representation takes several forms -- including 
delegation for particular issues. For example, an association of NGOs 
might delegate to one of its members representation on a certain 
specialized issue on which this organization is a recognized expert, and 
this is quite common.

We are talking about representation, not "significance" (whatever this 
means in this context...).

If claims to representation of consituencies may at times be fake or 
precarious, this does not rule out the legitimacy of civil society 
representation in general. The quality of this representation (measured 
by effectiveness in the debates and influencing in decision making, by 
reporting back timely to their constituencies with transparency etc etc) 
might vary a lot, but it is still representation.

rgds

--c.a.


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