Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil,
President of Coordination SUD
The right of association is recognized by international law as a fundamental freedom and one of the linchpins of a democratic way of life. This right gained acceptance by Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and enabled citizens to claim their rights and interests. It helped organized citizens react and act when facing unacceptable situations, and also interact with the authorities and all the economic, social and political actors in decision making processes.
Civil society is now celebrated by international organizations and most national authorities. The construction of a participative democracy, which extends and enriches representative democracy, is often envisaged. New approaches to governance and new forms of responsibility in the production of general interest are born of this process.
Yet we feel that referring to ‘civil society’, or people’s masses or any other vague and badly defined notion, which sound good to us as activist citizens, has its share of risks if we do not specify which kind of actors make up this civil society and how they are organized democratically at the local, national, regional and international levels.
NGOs are a part of this formless whole, but they are not authorized to represent it. On the other hand, they can, in any country, be given a national coordination authorized to represent the national NGO family or movement in its dealings with national authorities. These national co ordinations, that we habitually call NGO national platforms (NPF), can come together, cooperate with one another and create a Regional coalition (RC) at the level of a continent or a sub-region. Also, the National Platforms and/or regional coalitions can cooperate at an international level and be organized to dialogue with international, intergovernmental or non governmental Organizations. We can envisage the formation of an International Alliance (IA) of the NPFs and RCs, but the NPFs have not yet started thinking about the form that it could take. Perhaps the time has come to get down to it.
Today, we have established contact, and at times working relations, with 83 national platforms and 6 regional coalitions[1]. A programme, operational for the past five years or so, has made it possible to strengthen certain national platforms and support regional dynamics, and even the creation of three of the six regional coalitions mentioned. Regional, interregional and international co-operations have thus been brought in and supported, amongst which we can cite the creation of an International Resource Centre Web site (www.ong-ngo.org) by Brazilian (for Portuguese), Chilean (for Spanish), Indian (for English) and Senegalese and French (for French) NPFs. The aim of this website is to become the portal for National NGO Platforms and a tool that will help reinforce the above-mentioned co-operations.
- How can we strengthen the importance of NGO National Platforms? The challenges of the Paris international conference:
The ambition of the Paris conference is to help us go forward together towards this idea of an International Alliance; define the main lines of institutional reinforcement of our NGO National Platforms or regional coalitions; and plan co-operation actions.
A chain, starting from local NGOs and National Platforms, which extends up to an international alliance, represents one of the possible logical ways of internationalization of international solidarity. Other ways of internationalization do exist, but the interest in geographical logic is that it corresponds to the internationalization logic of State actors. A co-operation among NPFs certainly allows for following diplomatic processes country by country – and taking into account the diversity of the huge family of NGOs by giving a place to all national movements, especially those that are not much heard on the international arena.
We must however acknowledge that the construction of these collective national (NPF) and regional (RC) actors, and even an international actor (IA), is complicated and that their quality depends on the manner in which all these actors name their spokespersons and define their positions individually.
We would like to open a debate on this approach and on the processes that help optimize the quality of these co-operations. This is why we suggest that we reflect on six key questions that could enable us to strengthen the co-operations among NPFs, and even contribute to the conception of an international alliance:
1) What is a national platform and, therefore, who qualifies to be part of the NPF family or movement?
2) Can we get together around values or ethics that are common to and characteristic of all the NPFs?
3) What are the added values of a co-operation among NPFs and what must we do together?
4) How can we link our tools, especially information, to create regional or international spaces of communication and co-operation?
5) How can we build solidarity within the alliance among the most stable NPFs and the poorest ones?
Sheet 1
What is a NGO national platform (NPF)?
Who qualifies to be part of the NPF movement?
An NPF is the national coalition national of NGOs working in or from a country.
1 – Process of building a National Platform :
Most of the NPFs have a ‘charter of ethics’ recognized by their members, and define the membership conditions for the NGOs on the basis of common principles: autonomy in relation to the State, political parties, sectarian organizations and economic power; democratic and transparent internal working ; legal sources of financing ; legal status of ‘non-profit’; minimum number of years of existence or sponsored by several older organizations; keeping accounts as per accepted standards, transparent and open to outside verifications; proven competence in one or more fields of action. Here are some examples of those who can join the NPF movement:
- NGOs (or associations) active in the field of development, emergency humanitarian aid, defense of human rights, sustainable environment management
- NGOs participating in the building of a world of international solidarity
- NGOs of advocacy in all fields pertaining to the values of solidarity and universal rights
- Other conditions to be determined together …
The NPF defines the membership procedure of member NGOs and watches over them to ensure that they respect their commitments:
- Presentation of a dossier : covering letter mentioning motivations and accepting the charter of ethics, submission of documents proving that the conditions are fulfilled and:
o examination by a membership committee
o decision of the Governing Body
o follow-up of commitments and definition of a sanction procedure in case of defaulting
Membership to the NPF and the judgment by peers must bring a guarantee about the sincerity of the members, especially that the member NGOs are indeed non governmental, non sectarian and non profit, and follow the objectives defined in the NPF Charter.
By respecting the diversity of the NGOs, the NPF must assist them in their quest for common perspectives and their ambition to build a national NGO movement.
2 – Leadership of the NPF
The NPF must be governed democratically. For this:
- it must have decision-making bodies established by democratic and transparent procedures : general body of members, governing body, committee.
- nominations must be made according to pre-established rules and time frames and through an election process
- statutory documents must be published according to pre-established rules
- external checks must be planned and made known to the members
3 – Actions of an NPF
The platform must be at the service of its members and strive to make available to them information, training, expert evaluation services, etc. It can allow its members to take up certain tasks or functions so as to benefit scale economies or improve the quality of their activities.
The platform can, and in certain situations must, prepare itself to be the collective interlocutor of the NGOs vis-à-vis other national organizations having responsibilities in international solidarity, and particularly vis-à-vis the authorities. This implies defining a collective procedure for adopting collective positions. The NPF must be able to mobilize the expert evaluation of member NGOs, and even outside expert evaluation and, should the need arises, create specialized working committees.
The NPF must also represent the NGOs of the country in the NPF regional coalitions and, directly or through these regional coalitions, in international co-operations among NPFs. They can be called to become a member of an international grouping of NPFs or an international alliance of NPFs, if the NPFs wish to prepare themselves for representing the NGOs at the international level.
Sheet 2
Can we come together on common values and adopt a charter of ethics for the alliance of NGO National Platforms?
The international conference of NGO national platforms could provide the opportunity to agree on the common principles that found the action of the NPFs. The Paris Conference could be the occasion for :
- affirming the importance of the right of association enabling citizens to react and/or act together for achieving common objectives (defense of human rights, emergency humanitarian aid, development support, sustainable environment management, international solidarity), which can be commented in a few sentences in a joint declaration.
- Promoting the rights written in the Universal Declaration of Rights of Man (article 20 : ‘everyone has the right to freedom for peaceful meetings and associations’) and in the two 1966 Pacts (international pact related to economic, social and cultural rights, and international pact related to civil and political rights)
- Recalling the ‘fundamentals’ of the identity of NGOs: non-governmental, non sectarian, and non-profit organizations. We could try and come to an agreement on these three characteristics.
- Specifying that the task of NGOs and NPFs is to correct democratic ‘short-comings’ and support actors who are not well represented and defended in common law processes, that is, the classes of the poorest, excluded or marginalized, victims of conflicts or natural disasters, people or groups whose rights are scorned, victims of under-development or bad development, present and future victims of badly managed or deteriorating environment, etc..
- Affirming our own responsibility and our commitment in reinforcing the process of democratization, development and environment management.
Sheet 3
What are the added values of co-operation among NPFs and what must we do together?
The first objective of NGO NPFs is not necessarily developing partnerships with NGOs of other countries and implementing projects in the field. They can however participate in specialized international networks. They can and should cooperate with their counterparts- the NPFs of other countries and other regions.
The co-operation among NPFs can target several objectives:
1 – Exchange of experiences and good practices
The NPFs of each country have activities or functions that are quite similar (member reinforcement, dissemination of information, follow-up of legislative measures that govern the activity of the NGOs, promotion of the sector, setting up and adopting codes of ethics, etc.). It is therefore relevant to have exchanges on the ways of carrying out these functions or implementing these activities through an effort of capitalization of good practices on the most effective methods of action.
2 – Joint advocacy actions
The NPFs target similar objectives and can have similar positions in regional or international negotiations or debates. Advocacy actions can then be planned if joint positions can be constructed. Such processes of position construction and joint advocacy actions can have a large impact on media and negotiators. The added value of the NPFs resides in the importance given to interaction between NGOs and the authorities. It is important to gain from this co-operation when it exists, in order to influence, country by country, the negotiations on major regional and international issues. This procedure however calls for the implementation of practices that respect the sovereignty and authority of each one of the NPFs and of tools that facilitate the exchange and adoption of joint positions on a certain number of issues that are predefined and have to be discussed.
3 – Joint co-operation actions or programs
We can imagine that joint programs can be charted and can serve as the framework for an extensive mobilization of NGOs. Please refer to the following sheets.
Sheet 4
Linking of information tools and creation of a world space of communication among NGO national platforms
One of the conditions for creating a space of communication among NPFs is the existence of national Web sites compatible with and linked to a portal site of what could constitute an International Alliance of the NPFs.
The Web sites are tools of information and communication. They can become ‘National Resource Centers’. It is up to each NPF to procure such a tool, if necessary with the help of the experience of other NPFs.
Nevertheless, if we wish to construct an international portal site, we must together define the technical characteristics that will enable efficient linking among national and regional Web sites.
When regional coalitions exist, they most often have a Web site that puts together all information common to all the member platforms
The portal site could therefore be provided the content of the regional and national sites. What remains to be done is the construction of a purely international component based on information coming from international partners (mainly international organizations) and coalitions of national platforms having variable dimensions.
The Brazilian (ABONG), Chilean (ACCION), French (Coordination SUD), Indian (VANI) and Senegalese (CONGAD) NPFs have drawn up a prototype of a portal site, called ‘International Resource Center’ (IRC : www.ong-ngo.org).
The question of languages is obviously crucial. These 5 NPFs have decided to work in four languages: English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. The translation of documents is an onerous but necessary task.
The IRC is an information tool on the NPFs, regional coalitions of NPFs and international negotiations. It is also a tool for communication among the NPFs, which helps compare the positions of the NPFs and, should the need arise, undertake measures for drafting joint positions. Each of the NPFs is therefore invited to syndicate its site on the portal site of the NGO National Platforms so as to give even greater visibility to its actions.
A project is underway with UNDP to support the NPFs that do not yet have sites or need to update theirs to facilitate such a move.
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