Abstract
This article draws on contributions to the IDS 50th Anniversary
Conference stream dedicated to citizen voice, agency and accountability
to explore the shifting relationship between civil society, the state and
the private sector, as well as looking at the nature of civic engagement.
The role of digital technologies in civic engagement in the context of a
turbulent new political landscape is also examined in order to understand
the spaces that might be opened and closed by these technologies.
Keywords: digital, technology, civil society, social media, citizen engagement.
1 Introduction
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) 50th Anniversary
Conference 'States, Markets and Society' was a chance to reflect from
a global perspective on the meaning of citizen voice, agency and
accountability in a post-Brexit era. Through four conference sessions
on 'Pumping Life into Civil Society' we saw a convergence of debates
between North and South, reflecting IDS' universalist perspective on
development. As Deborah Doane, consultant and ex-Director of World
Development Movement, described it at the conference: '… we are all
fighting the same battles now'. Three issues in particular loomed large
at the IDS conference: the 2016 Brexit referendum vote in the UK and
its implications; the rise of populist social movements; and the failure of
the architectures of participation to challenge political and economic
inequality, even in promising cases like Brazil. Against the backdrop of
these events, participants asked – what is the role for civil society?
While the very concept of civil society is contested (Edwards 2014), at the conference civil society was broadly considered as an amalgamation of citizen groups, networks, organisations and social movements, together with institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which operate at local, country or international level. Each country's civil society results from completely different political histories and regimes of governance, and as such are complex, multi-faceted and well as conservative aims and ideologies.
This article reflects on contributions to the conference stream dedicated
to citizen voice, agency and accountability which explored the shifting
relationship between civil society, the state and the private sector as
well as looking at the nature of civic engagement. As the authors are
both members of IDS' Digital and Technology research cluster, the
article broadens out to reflect on the role of digital technologies in civic
engagement in the context of a new political landscape in which 'new
dynamics of collective action are injecting turbulence into politics'
(Margetts 2016).
2 Spaces for civil society
A conference panel discussing the role of civil society in the relationship
between society, markets and the state saw participants sharing
experiences of current political threats to civil society, and the potential
strengths and weaknesses of partnerships with the private sector.
In terms of the relationship between the state and civil society, we heard
how threats to civil society are being felt very keenly in Mozambique,
with an increase in government control of mainstream media and social
media. These threats have also seen lives lost; a law professor who was
a central figure in a sensitive debate about autonomy for Mozambique's
provinces and decentralising power was shot dead in 2015 (BBC News 2015). Civil society's traditional modes of operation and entry points
are under attack (CIVICUS 2016).
Numerous calls are being made for a shift in the roles and dynamics within the humanitarian and development landscape, whereby international NGOs and other more formal development and humanitarian organisations put themselves in the service of social movements and other expressions of local civil society. The 'Charter 4 Change' is one such manifestation of this movement which argues that civil society organisations (CSOs) should play a critical convening, bridge-building and catalytic role as supporters of local capacities. The charter includes commitments to 'support local actors to become robust organisations that continuously improve their role' (C4C 2015). An Oxfam discussion paper suggests that the 'supertankers' of big international NGOs might 'back local CSOs to become more effective rafts' (Green 2015: 15). However, this could be seen as implying that international NGOs can control social movements and local CSOs to direct their trajectory, which can in reality go in all kinds of directions.
Conference participants explored ways in which civil society might
positively influence the private sector by working together with it, while
avoiding being co-opted. Civil society researcher Michael Edwards
argues elsewhere in this IDS Bulletin that the most interesting examples of
contemporary citizen action – be they Black Lives Matter in the USA or
Podemos in Spain – are able to engage the market 'within a framework that is governed by democracy and the transformation of power
relations' (see Edwards, this IDS Bulletin). Yet this could be seen to be a
misrepresentation of the economic policy programme issued by Black
Lives Matter in 2016 which, rather than discussing engagement with the
market, makes a demand for 'economic justice for all and a reconstruction
of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership,
not merely access' (The Movement for Black Lives 2016).
Reflections at the conference illuminated the positives and negatives
of CSO engagement with the private sector. One speaker from
an international NGO saw that economic interests were typically
underlying threats to organisers when they were campaigning on issues
such as the exposure of land grabs, suggesting that there was a company
behind it. But another international NGO professional, reflecting on
his experiences of negotiating private sector/CSO partnerships, saw
the possibility of 'win/win' in these relationships and gave the examples
of the banking sector in financial inclusion issues and the telecoms
sector on emergency response. Their work around youth savings in
partnership with Barclays is reported to have had positive development
impacts that include enabling young women to save for their education
(Care International, Plan UK and Barclays 2016).
However, in response to these 'win/win' scenarios others raised concerns
about the ability of NGOs to maintain their values. Representatives of
the right to food movement in India speaking at the conference talked
in disparaging terms about the CSOs such as Save the Children taking
money from 'Big Cola' in the form of a grant from the soft drinks
company Pepsi but simultaneously working on nutrition advocacy
(PepsiCo India 2009). And while a recent Oxfam report on their work
with Unilever on workers' rights and conditions highlights the value
of working with companies to influence their agency in lobbying
governments or working in multi-stakeholder fora, it also calls attention
to the limits to this influence, indicating that the company has 'not yet
addressed the barriers to decent work in its employment, let alone found
a blueprint to do so in its supply chain of 76,000 suppliers' (Wilshaw et al.
2016: 7) and recognising that the challenges that remain to ensure that
human and labour rights are respected are 'systemic in nature' (ibid.: 71).
In terms of civil society's relationship with the state, discussions identified the failures of conventional 'civil society' to achieve progressive change that addresses global challenges. Recent publications from the World Bank focusing on politics and governance (Khemani 2016; World Bank 2017, forthcoming) signal a growing awareness by CSOs of the importance of politics for development. This represents a return to ideas proposed 20 years earlier in the World Bank's World Development Reports (World Bank 1997), but it nonetheless recognises the unique role of the state as a politically conscious actor, which moderates the role of the private sector and, ultimately, is responsible for sustaining a healthy balance within the society, market and state triad. According to the World Bank, the key to achieving good governance is first to obtain 'good governments', which are led by effective political leaders. Thus, civil society and the development sector should concentrate their efforts on enabling environments that promote the selection of good political leadership at all administrative levels, by providing the public with specific, reliable and impartial information on the performance of leaders (Devarajan and Khemani 2016). This 'technical' fix is clearly not enough, however, given that politics is, by definition, political. Ideological and power-related dimensions cannot be so easily factored-out. There are many other reasons to explain why bad politicians frequently lead governments, and why good leaders with ethical, democratic and progressive credentials are kept out of office.
In most of the world, however, states are failing to play this moderator
role, or rather, are doing the opposite. Conference participants discussed
increasing controls on mainstream and social media, and a reduction
in the space available for civil society space for agency in the name of
security and internal stability (Sherwood 2015). Elsewhere, governments
have adopted control tactics in digital spaces such as legal pushback,
and attempts to complicate navigation of social media sites by 'flooding
the space with supporters and sometimes paid 'trolls'' (Tufekci 2014: 6). Internet shutdowns during moments of political tension have become
commonplace in recent years (Kihara and Njeri 2016): in the first
eight months of 2016 alone the advocacy organisation Access Now
documented 20 incidences of governments ordering companies to cut
off access to communications tools – like Twitter, SMS or Facebook
(Access Now 2016). But we have also seen a rise in challenges to these
threats, with people using virtual private networks (VPNs) to continue
to organise and exchange information over social networks during these
shutdowns (Olukotun and Kenyanito 2016).
3 Citizen voice and claims in digital spaces
The growing divide between political institutions and political change
and the diffusion of digital technologies has given rise to new kinds of
networked social movements (Castells 2015) that provide new means
for the articulation of 'citizen voice', mostly outside the frameworks
of what we historically understand as 'civil society'. These informal
networks often refuse to engage in the ways officially recognised as
political and civil, resorting instead to 'unruly politics' (Khanna et al.
2013) that attract mass support. Citizen voice and claims are manifested
both through formal means such as pressure group membership and
activism, and through informal means of participation such as the
'promotion, investigation, discussion, and curation of political material'
online, which could in itself be seen as an informal means of activism
(Koc-Michalska, Lilleker and Vedel 2016).
Mass movements coordinated by social media which have emerged in recent years are a 'general phenomenon that ranges from global political movements to neighbourhood campaigns' (Margetts et al. 2015). These new species of social movement have emerged thanks to digital tools described by Manuel Castells as 'the fastest and most autonomous, interactive, reprogrammable and self-expanding means of communication in history' (Castells 2015). These movements gather momentum rapidly, yet, as in the case of Egypt, many have proved to be unstable and difficult to sustain. An interview with Wael Ghonim, the Google executive in Cairo who helped launch the Egyptian revolution, described recently how the promise of the power of networked social movements had not delivered: 'Five years ago I thought the Internet was a power that was granted to the people and that would never be weakened. But I was wrong' (Tufekci and Talbot 2016). These movements lack the organisational capacity, formalised or not, of older movements which impacts their effectiveness after the initial phases of protest (Tufekci 2014).
The affordances and design of social networking platforms play an
important role in shaping new forms of citizen engagement and
political mobilisation. On these platforms filter bubbles (Pariser 2011)
control the content that users are exposed to online, and can render
political opinions which contradict your own, invisible on social media.
Writing on digital citizenship, Isin and Ruppert discuss what they
describe as the 'soft' control of digital spaces in which 'the performative
force of filters involves directing the knowledge of citizen subjects and
closes off and encloses their worlds' (Isin and Ruppert 2015). In the
wake of the June 2016 Brexit vote, in which the UK voted to leave
the European Union, civic technology expert Tom Steinberg reflected
on the political implications of the filter bubble, which prevented
him from being exposed to opposing views during the campaign, and
suggested that the issue has now taken on greater urgency in the current
political moment (Steinberg 2016). Looking at the role of social media
in movement-building, Geert Lovink described how earlier gains by
networked social movements were being undermined by the affordances
of social media which limit the agency of users: '[E]verything you say
is rendered an "update" or "status." All we can do in the current social
media architectures is transmit news' (Lovink and Meyer 2016).
New research approaches which use data science methods are also needed to help us understand political activity in digital spaces, as they can analyse the large-scale transactional data produced by platforms such as Twitter. For example, whilst opinion polls failed to predict the recent Brexit victory, an analysis of the 'leave' campaign across social media platforms showed that the number of tweets containing the term 'leave' was nearly double the number containing 'remain' between February and June 2016 (Siegel and Tucker 2016).
Digital spaces – or the 'networked public sphere' (Benkler et al. 2015) – are also used by extremist groups with quite different aims. A new kind of 'unruly politics' sees networked technologies used by far-right and anti-Muslim groups, to support their mobilisation efforts. For example, in Germany the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) were rapidly mobilised between 2014 and 2015 (Peschlová 2015), achieving more than 200,000 likes on their Facebook page (Puschmann et al. 2016). However, the same tools that PEGIDA used to mobilise also proved instrumental in its undoing, when its leader was forced to resign because of details from a leaked private Facebook conversation.
The rapid evolution of these dynamic and diverse forms of digitally
mediated political activity highlight the shortcomings in both our current
models of governance and the theoretical frames we use to understand
civic engagement. Political institutions struggle in the face of 'emotional
bursts and populist movements that unfold on the Internet' (Polonski
2016). Recent work by Koc-Michalska et al. on civic engagement in
the digital age argues for an abandonment of the conceptual barrier
between traditional and non-traditional forms of engagement. So while
political institutions using digital platforms 'follow the political logic of
traditional campaigning' (Koc-Michalska et al. 2016: 1807) informal
forms of participation by citizens such as accessing news on Facebook
can lead to new forms of participation, engagement and political impact.
4 Future agendas for analysis and action
These new modes of engagement sparked debate at the conference,
where participants expressed a need for new mediating structures and
'Habermasian' (Habermas 1991) spaces for dialogue in light of the
Brexit vote. Given the threats to the role of civil society discussed above
it is necessary to understand the spaces, institutions and frameworks
in which citizen voice can effectively be heard. Might these enabling
environments be found in the cities? Sheela Patel of the Society for
the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), India spoke at
a conference session on 'Radical Social, Political and Theoretical
Innovation from Cities of the "South"', about successes in organising
at local level with women's collectives and slum dwellers, which then
scaled up to national and global impact. Finally, this might be a time for
an evolution in our theoretical frameworks to understand the new forms
of 'unruly politics' and social movements we have seen in recent years
and the 'openings and closings' that digital spaces offer for political
engagement and alliances (Isin and Ruppert 2015).
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© 2016 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2016.188
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This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 2A November 2016: 'States, Markets and Society – New Relationships for a New Development Era'; the Introduction is also recommended reading.