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.