ExposE opposE proposE

Expose Oppose Propose

Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice

William K. Carroll

Fernwood Publishing Halifax & Winnipeg Zed Books London

Copyright © 2016 William K. Carroll All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Editing: Nancy Sixsmith Published by Fernwood Publishing 32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0 and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3 www.fernwoodpublishing.ca Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Carroll, William K., author Expose, oppose, propose : alternative policy groups and the struggle for global justice / William K. Carroll. Includes bibliographical references and index. Co-published by: Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-55266-834-4 (paperback) 1. Social justice. 2. Social action. 3. Social movements. 4. Globalization. 5. Neoliberalism. 6. Research institutes. 7. Pressure groups. I. Title. HM671.C37 2016

303.3’72

C2015-908516-0

Contents

List of Acronyms aa ActionAid akf Aga Khan Foundation alt kpm alternative knowledge production and mobilization brics Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa ca Christian Aid cacim India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement cash Campaign Against Sexual Harassment ccs Centre for Civil Society cetri Tricontinental Centre cim Centro Internacional Miranda cjn Climate Justice Now! crid Centre de Recherche et d’Information pour le Développement csmf Charles Stewart Mott Foundation cso civil society organization dawn Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era dhf Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation ean EarthAction Network ec European Community ec1 European Commission ecosoc U.N. Economic and Social Council ejolt Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade fao Food and Agricultural Organization (U.N.) foei Friends of the Earth International gcap Global Campaign Against Poverty geej Gender, Economic and Ecological Justice gei Gender Equity Index hwmt Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust idrc International Development Research Centre ifg International Forum on Globalization igo intergovernmental organization imf International Monetary Fund ingo international ngo ips Inter Press Service item Third World Institute

ituc International Trade Union Confederation kpm knowledge production and mobilization mai Multilateral Agreement on Investment mps Mont Pèlerin Society nafta North American Free Trade Agreement ngo nongovernmental organization nigd Network Institute for Global Democratization ntt neoliberal think tank oecd Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development owif One World International Foundation par participatory action research parecon participatory economics pip Practice in Participation pp21 People’s Plan for the 21st Century ppsg People’s Plan Study Group pria Participatory Research in Asia sdc Swiss Development Corporation sida Swedish International Development Agency smo social movement organization sw Social Watch tapg transnational alternative policy group tdh Terre des Hommes tnc trans-national corporation tni Transnational Institute twf Third World Forum twn Third World Network uk-dfid U.K. Department for International Development unccd U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (secretariat) unctad U.N. Conference on Trade and Development undp U.N. Development Programme unfccc U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (secretariat) unicef United Nations Children’s Fund un-Women U.N. Women wb World Bank wow War on Want wsf World Social Forum wto World Trade Organization yio Yearbook of International Organizations

Acknowledgements

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his book is based on a research program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Without Janet Laxton’s tireless transcription efforts and research assistance from J.P. Sapinski, Brendan Harry, Nick Graham and David Huxtable, this book would never have been written. I also appreciate Mitsuki Fukasawa’s assistance as interpreter during several interviews in Tokyo, and similar assistance graciously provided by Ana Zeballos in Montevideo. This project has four international collaborators: Elaine Coburn (Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris); Christopher Chase-Dunn (Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California at Riverside); Vishwas Satgar (Department of International Relations, University of Witwatersrand and Co-operative and Policy Alternative Center, Johannesburg); and Yahiro Unno (Professor Emeritus of Economics, Kanazawa State University, Japan). Elaine Coburn conducted the French-language interviews and did a considerable part of the transcribing and translating of them. Many thanks to all. I am also grateful for permission to incorporate previously published material. Chapter 3 draws upon “Embedding Post-Capitalist Alternatives? The Global Network of Alternative Knowledge Production and Mobilization” (in Journal of World-Systems Research, 2013, 19, 2, 211–240; with J.P. Sapinski as second author). Chapter 4 draws upon “Activist Understandings of the Crisis of 2008” (in Vishwas Satgar [ed.], Capitalism’s Crises, 2015, Johannesburg: WITs University Press). Chapter 5 draws upon “Transnational Alternative Policy Groups in Global Civil Society: Enablers of Post-Capitalist Alternatives or Carriers of ngoization?” (in Critical Sociology, 2015, 41; with J.P. Sapinski as coauthor). Chapter 6 draws upon “Modes of Cognitive Praxis in Transnational Alternative Policy Groups” (in Globalizations, 2015, 12, 710–727). Chapter 7 draws upon “Alter-globalisation

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and Alternative Media: The Role of Transnational Alternative Policy Groups” (in Chris Atton [ed.], The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media [pp. 22–34], London: Routledge, 2015). Many thanks, also, to Fernwood Publishing and Zed Books for believing in this project, and particularly to Errol Sharpe, Nancy Sixsmith and Beverley Rach at Fernwood. Finally, I am deeply grateful to all the protagonists and the groups participating in this research, who gave generously of their time and contributed the insights that have guided my analysis here. I dedicate this book to them, and in particular, to the memory of Martha Farrell. Bill Carroll, Victoria, February 2016

Preface

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his volume is addressed to concerned citizens, activists, students, intellectuals and practitioners interested in “changing the channel.” The tightly scripted programming of neoliberal capitalism positions us as consumers in a hypermarket in which money talks. For those with funds or credit, the program offers a seductive formula for “amusing ourselves to death” (Postman 1985) — particularly as continued overconsumption portends global ecological disaster in what is now a clearly foreseeable future. For the majority world, those with little to bring to the global marketplace, neoliberal capitalism offers little more than precarity and immiseration. Either way, the need for fundamental change is visceral. But to change the channel is not only to break from the dominant ideological framework; it is to produce viable alternatives, in knowledge and in practice, which might catalyze political and social change in our troubled world. The eight chapters that follow offer insights gained from four years of intensive research into the production and mobilization of alternative knowledge. In year 1 (May 2011–April 2012), I identified key centres for such initiatives: transnational alternative policy groups (tapgs) active in global civil society today. I completed a case study of each group using available sources from the Internet and elsewhere, and made a network analysis of how the groups link up with each other and how they are embedded in a broader field of social relations within global civil society. Chapter 1, “Hegemony, Counter-hegemony and Organic Crisis,” draws upon that initial spadework. It situates tapgs within the broader, longstanding struggle for global justice that has been organized around a dialectic of hegemonic initiatives “from above” and counter-hegemonic agency “from below” (Cox and Nilsen 2014). In offering a basic conceptual framework for tapgs as producers and mobilizers of knowledge for social transformation, Chapter 1 compares them with their hegemonic counterparts: conventional think tanks, particularly those

2  Expose, Oppose, Propose

inclined toward neoliberalism as the hegemonic project that has been globally dominant since the 1990s. It sketches the context within which tapgs operate in the early twenty-first century, as actors pursuing justice globalism in an era of organic crisis, and discusses the content of justice globalism (Steger et al. 2013) as a very broad counter-hegemonic project. Finally, it introduces the sixteen transnational alternative policy groups that have participated in this project and notes how their development since the mid-1970s has followed the undulating rhythm of transnational protest waves, but has also, more deeply, traced the arc of an emergent global left. Chapters 2–8 are based on ninety-one individual interviews with protagonists in the sixteen participating transnational alt policy groups, conducted during the second year of the project (May 2012–May 2013). While on sabbatical leave, I was able to make site visits to ten of the participating groups — five in the Global North and five in the Global South — and to interview key people at each location. Not unexpectedly, the interviews were very rich. They generated a million words of text, the equivalent of ten long books. From the summer of 2013 into the spring of 2015, I grappled first with the nearly intractable problem of how to do a qualitative analysis of such a vast quantity of nuanced, information-rich text and then with the actual writing of this book. Chapter 2, “Alternative Knowledge Projects and Cognitive Praxis,” presents case studies of the ten groups at which I carried out field work and interviewed as many as a dozen practitioners. On that basis, Elaine Coburn and I outline each alternative knowledge project and the strategies and practices it implies. Each group addresses and works with a specific constituency — a combination of movements, counterpublics, general publics and subaltern communities — but also aims its communicative efforts at “targets” that may include mainstream media, states and intergovernmental bodies. How tapgs produce and mobilize knowledge for different readers and audiences is a topic at the heart of this book, and the contrasts among different groups are front and centre in this chapter. What we find is that as they have pursued their distinct projects, tapgs have devised a wide array of approaches to (co)creating alternative knowledge (often in partnership with allies) and to mobilizing that knowledge for social change. In this way, each group makes a distinctive contribution to alternative knowledge formation and transformative politics. Although each group is distinctive in project, on the whole tapgs converge around a “master frame” that resonates with the concerns of justice globalism. In Chapter 3, “Networks of Cognitive Praxis: Embedding Postcapitalist Alternatives?,” J.P. Sapinski and I map the global network of tapgs and kindred international groups — alternative media, social movement organizations, and international ngos (ingos) — to discern more specifically whether and how tapgs are embedded within global civil society in positions that enable them to

Preface  3

foster transnational counter-hegemony: to help consolidate a historical bloc for justice globalism. The development of such a bloc is clearly integral to any global left, and the role of tapgs in helping to sustain that complex process — mediating between different movements and political currents, and between global North and South — is important. While we find strong evidence that tapgs do indeed play an integrative role as collective intellectuals within global civil society, we also discern certain disjunctures in the bloc, as in the virtual absence of organizations based in Russia or China. Such gaps point more generally to the challenges that tapgs face as purveyors of counter-hegemony within transnational fields. Chapter 4, “Challenges and Responses,” begins with an acknowledgement of some of the accomplishments that transnational alternative policy groups have been able to wrest from what often appears to be an intransigent reality, but it mainly takes up the challenges that tapgs face and the ways in which they have responded to these challenges. Here again, lavishly funded think tanks of the right provide an initial point of comparison. For perennially under-resourced tapgs, the challenge is to do more with less, particularly because major funding sources — corporations, foundations — are uninterested in bankrolling their critics. Based on interview responses, this chapter recounts how tapgs have dealt with both the longstanding barriers to counter-hegemonic praxis (such as the dilemma between mainstreaming and marginalization) and more recent challenges stemming from the global crisis. If the challenges are manifold, the crisis has also opened opportunities for alternative thinking and action, and in this respect, tapgs can serve as places for dialogue, consciousness-raising, and building solidarities. One of the key challenges facing transnational alternative policy groups has been identified in a critical literature on ngoization, reaching back a couple of decades (Petras 1997). In Chapter 5, “The Challenge of ngoization,” J.P. Sapinski and I explore how tapgs and related groups address the challenge of their own dependence upon some of the dominant institutions of the system they critique. To the extent that such dependence coopts and constrains, the capacity to help organize and inform an emergent global left would be grievously compromised. With that in mind, we map out how tapgs are embedded in a global political field of foundations and igos/state bodies; and recount, from interviews, how tapg protagonists construe the challenges posed by financial dependence and ngoization, and the kinds of defenses or responses their organizations have mounted. The former analysis shows tapgs to be embedded not only within an incipient global left but also within a network of hegemonic institutions — consistent with the ngoization narrative. Yet the latter reveals that tapg protagonists think critically and strategically about such relations, and have devised “preventive measures” to mitigate their colonizing impact.

4  Expose, Oppose, Propose

Chapter 6, “The Repertoire of Alternative Knowledge Production and Mobilization: Modes of Cognitive Praxis,” examines in depth the collection of practices upon which tapgs draw as counter-hegemonic knowledge generators. Just as movements for global justice have developed and deployed their own collection-action repertoires, tapgs, as organic intellectuals to the contemporary global justice movement of movements, have created, in parallel, a repertoire of alternative knowledge production and mobilization (alt kpm). These are ways of supplying intellectual fuel to justice globalism and oxygen to subaltern counterpublics. Given the richness of the interview data, I have divided the analysis of this repertoire into two chapters, for which the case studies in Chapter 2 set the stage. In Chapter 6, I present, at some length, eight modes of cognitive praxis, and discuss how they interlink in the work of alternative policy groups. These modes are posed at the level of strategy rather than tactics. In combination, they can be seen as promoting a dialectic of knowledge production and social transformation: striving to produce transformative knowledge concomitantly with knowledge-based transformation. Modes of cognitive praxis are not sealed off from each other, but overlap and interpenetrate. Indeed, effective alt kpm typically means that a group combines various facets in a coherent initiative. This chapter closes with a brief comparison of the sixteen participating groups, highlighting the main modes of cognitive praxis each group employs. Although the comparison shows diversity in how transnational alternative policy groups go about their work, we can also find tracings of a double dialectic in the cognitive praxis of alt policy groups: one of theory/practice and one of dialogue. I conclude that it is in a forward movement, combining dialogue among well-informed publics with the iterative integration of theory and practice, that alternative knowledge can not only thrive, but have a transformative impact. Chapter 7, “The Repertoire of Alternative Knowledge Production and Mobilization: Key Practices,” pursues a more fine-grained and concrete analysis, and presents a compendium of alt kpm practices. Four categories of practice are very much at the centre of the work that transnational alternative policy groups do: networking, research and analysis, training and learning and outreach. In a sense, they distinguish tapgs as a type of organization within the global left that has a characteristic repertoire of practice. We can see in this nucleus both knowledge production and knowledge mobilization: research and analysis are important, but tapgs devote a great deal of attention to spreading alternative knowledge through networking, training/learning and outreach; and in enacting all these forms of knowledge mobilization, they help build stronger solidaristic relations within and among movement communities and counterpublics. Mobilizing counterhegemonic knowledge leads tapgs into a wide range of activities as producers of alternative media of a critical-reflexive kind — whether print, audiovisual,

Preface  5

electronic or social. Concomitantly, tapgs engage with the mainstream media that are gatekeepers to reaching general publics. They are thus positioned as mediators between movements and media, between counterpublics and general publics: an advantageous location from which produce the intellectual ballast and coherence of social vision to go beyond resistance, into the realm of counter-hegemonic politics. The types of practice reviewed in Chapter 7 specify how the modes of cognitive praxis analyzed in Chapter 6 gain traction on the ground. It is through various creative combinations of these modes and types of praxis that transnational alternative policy groups cocreate counter-hegemonic knowledge and help put that knowledge into practice within movements, subaltern communities, counterpublics, state and intergovernmental bodies and (last, but definitely not least) general publics. Chapter 8, “Convergent Visions: The Ends of Alternative Knowledge,” proceeds from recognition of the fact that alt policy groups fashion their strategies and practices, not only in response to what are seen as problematic features of extant reality but also on the basis of social visions: conceptions of a feasible and desirable future. When articulating their visions, many participants chose to invoke values or strong images of an alternative way of life, which we can glimpse in practices, relations and sensibilities that already exist. Some pointed to specific but wideranging radical reforms that have the potential to bridge into a transformed future. The visions seem convergent, yet far from homogeneous. They include substantive fulfillment of the human rights agenda; plural social forms (i.e., There Are Many Alternatives); and a world of diverse voices, knowledges and public discourses, of participatory democracy, of a decolonized humanity, of open, democratic socialism, of the commons reclaimed, of buen vivir — the Andean phrase denoting a good, balanced life, in harmony with the rest of nature. These convergent ends shape the means of alternative knowledge and the political practices informed by that knowledge, or they should. That is, the actual process of sociopolitical transformation needs to prefigure its end, which is why participatory, dialogical, democratic, empowering methods are so integral to alternative knowledge production and mobilization. A counter-hegemonic project that integrates many convergent visions into an alternative paradigm has been presented recently by Mario Candeias, a project participant at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis in Berlin. Candeias’s vision is that of a socioecological “green transformation.” I feature it in this chapter because it incorporates many of the values and visions of tapg protagonists. Engaging with proposals such as Candeias’s can build a basis for dialogue, mutual aid and collaboration among transnational alternative policy groups — and that can strengthen the movements, publics and communities with which these groups engage. My concluding reflections at the close of this chapter offer a summary statement of key lessons from my work with participating groups, and of the challenges that lie ahead.