Northerners Direct The International Monetary System, They Should Not Also Direct The Advocacy Response
By Nora Lester Murad, Dalia Association, Palestine
A growing number of northern advocacy organizations working in coalition or in north-south partnerships are addressing issues of aid effectiveness, aid dependency, third world debt and related issues. Their efforts offer hope for system-level change to the global aid system, which, despite stated intentions, has become a contributing factor to de-development, disenfranchisement, and hopelessness.
Until change comes, the choices facing aid-recipient societies seem to be three: 1) engage with international organizations on their terms, often trading independence and sustainability for immediate cash, which in any case is severely restricted; 2) engage with international organizations as advocates for change, investing ideas and effort to try to affect policies; and 3) boycott international institutions, often trading much-needed financial support for integrity and values.
All three approaches risk losing credibility with local constituents, though short-term, quick-fix thinking tends to permeate societies, not only their leaders, so over and over again, aid-recipient societies choose to play the game, reap the rewards, pay the price, and thus they are complicit with their own oppression and share responsibility for lack of change.
For those of us who refuse to be complicit, the difficult decision, it seems, concerns strategy for influencing change. Those who engage with international organizations seek to change the terms of the relationship between donor and recipient, but they could be seen as naïve. Aid, whether humanitarian, development, military or otherwise, is an arm of governmental foreign policy. Politically correct statements about third world development not withstanding, the global north profits from the dependency and relative deprivation of the global south. Those of us who have tried to change the system from within the system know first hand the way that systems can dominate, distort, undermine, dehumanize, disempower, and marginalize.
From this perspective, advocates for change may be seen as wasting their time, or worse, being co-opted into a false hope for reform of a system that should be revolutionized. Southern efforts to “go it alone†or in south-south relationships can be seen as a form of boycott, but they may also be seen as naive. Money is power. Forgoing money may feel like the moral high road, but it doesn’t pay the bills.
Most importantly, we should not assume there is one “right†or “best†strategy to influence international monetary organizations or the global financial system. Advocacy may influence policy through persuasion or pressure, but non-participation by southern actors may also influence policy by breaking the monopoly that international monetary organizations feel they enjoy.
Nor should we assume that northern and southern change agents should play the same roles in the effort to change policy. It makes sense that each should expend effort primarily on their own systems, that is, northern actors should take the lead to change northern actors’ international policy. Southern actors should support their northern partners, but only to the extent it does not derail them from their independent agendas. There is great risk that southern actors become in service of northern agendas. Respondents who say that northern agendas are “helping†southern agendas and therefore southern actors should be motivated to contribute miss the whole point. Northerners should not be motivated by “helping†“disadvantaged†southerners (a framework that perpetuates, not challenges the power imbalance) but rather by moral concerns or self-interest.
Further, southern actors who decide not to engage, even in opposition to northern structures, but instead seek to create alternative structures should be supported, even if this approach fails to directly support northern actors’ efforts to change the system. When northern actors support southern actors on credible southern/indigenous terms, the process itself demonstrates the outcomes envisaged by advocacy – that is, global approaches to poverty driven by local leadership, objective needs, honest assessment of root causes, and active valuation of southern priorities and capacities.
This is not to romanticize the leadership of the south or to imply that southern approaches are monolithic and preferable to northern approaches. As previously mentioned, the oppression of the global south is currently achieved with the active participation of southern actors, many of whom profit through their complicity at the expense of their compatriots. Holding southern actors accountable for their complicity, either through active profiteering or through passivity, must be a primary focus for southern change agents. By concentrating on their unique role and strengths, southern change agents can directly support the shared advocacy agenda of north-south change agents.
Dividing our roles -- sometimes collaborating and sometimes working on different fronts -- northern and southern actors driven by shared values of justice and effectiveness should, at minimum take hope in each other’s efforts for a better world.