Summit calls for Govt-NGO cooperation

Summit calls for Govt-NGO cooperation

Now that the UN social summit is over, governments are left with enormous tasks in their war against poverty. Noted sociologist Kastorius Sinaga suggests that the Indonesian government change its attitude toward NGOs.

JAKARTA (JP): With one billion people living in poverty and 120 million unemployed around the world, social development in general and poverty alleviation in particular are among the world's concerns today. The declaration of the recent UN social summit in Copenhagen reflects a new hope in the fight against world poverty because it includes the one-world perspective.

Indeed, such a perspective reflects the emergence of a new awareness among nations on a scale never achieved before. The first is the awareness on the fact that although the brunt of such social crises as mass poverty is on the "South", the "North" is also increasingly experiencing their effects. This can be seen in the increasing number of worker migrants or economic refugees flooding the rich countries. This phenomenon has also caused social problems in the North such as the neo-Nazi movement in Germany.

The second is that social crises breaking out in poor countries have been exacerbated by state policies and actions of the elite not only in the South, but an interlocking set of elite interests in the North. Most of the Copenhagen summit participants also agreed that efforts to cope with social problems, be they poverty, unemployment or basic needs problems, require more than increased official development aid.

The solution also requires an enormous amount of political effort to ensure that these grants are effectively used and applied as intended, especially by strengthening collaboration between NGOs and government in recipient countries. The relevant questions involve the conceptual base of this collaboration and the reasons why collaboration between NGOs and government agencies has been gradually deteriorating in Indonesia.

The NGO sector is a combined product of what economists term the failure of the market and the state to provide social development services. The state, which is dominated by a few strategic groups, is faced with the overwhelming task of providing resources on equitable terms for society. A discriminatory decision is usually manifested in the state policies, which tend to benefit only a small group: either the power base of the state or small groups having access to the core of power.

Unlike state failure, the failures of market organizations in distributing resources or assets equally to the poor are inherent in the market mechanism. The market as an instrument for economic mobility is only significant for groups which own or control the means of production. For the majority of the population, such as the poor, opportunities to benefit from market liberalization hardly exist and the poor are often even further impoverished by a fully competitive market.

Thus, NGOs spread throughout Indonesia should be judged purely as complementary to both the government and the private sector, rather than adversarial. NGO actions are not primarily motivated by power-seeking or profit-gaining considerations, but philanthropic and voluntary values. As such they reach down to the poor and qualitatively serve them better than other types of organizations.

Apart from this, transaction costs to mobilize governmental efforts tend to be much higher than the NGOs. Bureaucratic in nature, for the government to act a substantial segment of the public must be aroused and public officials must be trained or guided. Laws and manuals must be formulated and then socialized. To generate a NGO action, by contrast, a handful of individuals involving professional members acting on their own or with outside support, often suffices.

Compared to other developing countries like India, the Philippines, Thailand or Bangladesh, collaboration between NGOs and government agencies has not been effectively institutionalized in Indonesia. There is even an obvious tendency of the deteriorating relationship among them which is reflected in the issuance of various counterproductive regulations. The background of this relationship is manifold.

Firstly, conflicts between NGOs and government bureaucracy have been much exacerbated by a few NGOs, particularly those which advocate political reform. Because such NGOs play an important role in providing critical information, they are politically overestimated both by the government and the press. Frankly speaking, these NGOs are a small minority attempting to go to the root of the crises by launching political reform advocacies.

Secondly, according to ministerial decree No. 4/1981, the authority and right to conduct state-financed development projects in rural areas are, by law, monopolized by government agencies. Such a monopoly is primarily based on a security approach. All development projects in rural areas will have a political impact on the depoliticized rural community, the majority of whom still live in poverty.

This climate does not allow the "privatization" of the social development sector through which better and effective social development services can be created. Based on the above explanation and particularly in light of the increasing scarcity of financial resources, it is time to reconsider the prospect of collaboration between NGOs and the government by means of privatizing our social development sector.

The writer is a social sciences lecturer completing a postgraduate program at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta.