Global Civil Society: Perspective from MENA Region

Regional Workshop20 November 2013

Amman, Jordan

Global Civil society today•Recent years have seen the remarkable rise of civil society and citizen action as a global phenomenon. This transnational activity has been facilitated by:• The wider process of globalization, •The (ICT) revolution, which has provided unprecedented levels of access to information.•The emergence of ‘global issues’ and global threats like climate change and HIV, AIDS and other issues.•Global civil society contributed to :•Opening up a global public space for debate and actions;•Shaping the political agenda and generating a cosmopolitan set of norms and citizen demands that transcend national boundaries. •Reshaping multilateralism•In this sense, civil society is as much part of today’s global governance as are governments.

Global Civil society today

International non-government organizations (INGOs) have been the most visible part of the global civil society movement. Their numbers have grown dramatically in the last few decades, up from 1,083 in 1914 to about 13,000 in 1981 to over 47,000 by 2001 (UNDP 2002). Groups like Oxfam International or Greenpeace are among the best known of these INGOs – and their campaigning and policy agendas are essentially progressive.

Growth in the United Nations•Civil society engagement with the United Nations has grown exponentially.•At the UN alone, NGOs in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council mushroomed from 724 in 1992 to 3050 in 2007, representing an increase of over 400%, still only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 civil society organizations that emerged in the 1990s at local, national, and international levels.

MENA CSOs and transnational activism

•So, what is the situation in the Arab region? •What is the level of participation and representation of MENA CSOs at the global level? And what are the issues raised? •What is their participation to international organizations and large multilateral institutions such as the UN? •How to bring the voices of the marginalized people and the south insight into global debates? •What is the current situation, challenges and solutions??•What are the actions required to improve the participation of Developing countries’ NGOs to the United Nations activities?•So may questions to be answered..time will not allow us to answer all of them, but I would just want to bring some relevant indicators that can answer part of them.

Arab NGOs with consultative status in the MENA region

Let’s have a look for example to the Graph 1: •In 2009, there was 3194 NGOs with consultative status in ECOSOC of which 162 are from the Middle East and North Africa. The MENA region has only 6% shares in the global number of NGOs, coming second from the bottom on world ranking by region. •In general, graph 1 shows the under-performance of civil society in developing countries as opposed to those of developed countries. •Together, Europe and North America own 65% of NGOs with consultative status around the world.•Moreover, most of these NGOs have special status. That is to say they work in only a few areas of ECOSOC activities. 88% of MENA’s NGOs with consultative status have special status.

Source : ECOSOC NGO Database (July 2009)

Graph 1 :Share of NGOs with consultative status by region (June 2009)

Indicator Number of NGOs per million of persons

•The under-performance of developing countries, particularly those MENA’s countries revealed above, is also confirmed by the Indicator Number of NGOs per million of persons. This index is 0.41 NGOs per million of persons for the MENA region while it is 1.35 NGOs per million of persons for Europe and 2.27 NGOs per million of persons for North America. The world average is 0.41 NGOs per million of persons. •Nevertheless, the MENA region is more competitive for this indicator than Sub-Saharan Africa (0.27 NGOs per million of persons) or Latin America and the Caribbean (0.28 NGOs per million of persons).

Graph 2: Indicator Number of NGOs with consultative status per million of persons for different regions (June 2009)

Quantitative analysis by country•The graph 3 below presents the MENA’s NGOs with consultative status by country. •Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, all from North Africa, occupy the first three places of NGOs with consultative status with 35, 25 and 23, respectively. The three countries combined, account for 51% of the total number of MENA’s NGOs. This result reflects the predomination of North African NGOs in the Arab world.

•It could be explained partially by their geographical and cultural proximity with Europe.

•To note is the absence of Palestine, Syria and Oman from the graph. The three countries have no NGOs with consultative status.

•We can try to explain this result further; but we must worry about this type of findings in order to improve civil society action around the world

Graph 3: Number of MENA’s NGOs with consultative status by county (June 2009)

MENA’s NGOs contribution to UN activities

There are two other indicators that can be chosen to assess MENA’s contribution to the UN activities:

•Firstly the contribution of NGOs in ECOSOC meetings and conferences and •Secondly the submission of written statements to the United Nations. •The NGOs from the Arab region participated in 116 ECOSOC meetings and conferences from 2001 to 2008. These conferences essentially concerned the status of women (71%), sustainable development (18%) and social development (9%). This statistic matches the increasing interest regarding women rights which has been observed these last years in Arab countries.

Graph 4: Number of ECOSOC Meeting participation by country (2001-2008)

Submission of written statements to the UN

•Concerning the second indicator, the Arab NGOs, more precisely North African NGOs own 5% of written statements submitted to the United Nations during 2006 and 2008. The Middle-Eastern NGOs did not submit any written statements to the United Nations during this period.

•The regional share of submitted written statements is fully shown in graph 7. The developed countries (in Europe and North America) together own the largest part of the submitted written statements (64% of the world total)

Submission of written statements by region

Other indicators neededOther reference points such as: the Arab CSOs’ contribution to:

•The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, which is a new mechanism of the Human Rights Council (HRC) aiming at improving the human rights situation on the ground of each of the 193 United Nations (UN) Member States……which have seen many Arab NGOs submitting reports….•The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as the world prepares for a post-2015 development agenda. •However, there is a lack of data regarding the subject.

ConclusionsSo, the situation concerning MENA’s NGOs with consultative status can be concluded as follows:

•The performance of MENA’S NGOs is very low, with only 6% of shares in the total number of NGOs with consultative status around the world ;•Civil society action in Arab countries is characterized by a high specialization in the area of status of women, social development and sustainable development;•North African NGOs are the most active from the Arab region regarding the civil society participation;•No regular trend is observed from the annual evolution in the number of new NGOs getting consultative status.•Of course this is situation can be explained by the External and internal obstacles CSOs are facing in the Arab region.

Conclusions•In this view, the Arab world NGOs face two main challenges. Firstly, most of organizations from MENA countries are associations of limited sizes, and oriented to the provision of services. They would not have vocation, and even skills and resources needed to participate in international activities.

• As revealed previously, MENA NGOs countries are facing several internal obstacles regarding essentially the lack of clear vision and strategies, constraints related to human and financial resources and the deficit in communication and information.

•This means that many actions have to be taken to enhance the Arab CSOs contribution at the international level. The improvement of Arab NGOs participation in ECOSOC, CIVICUS… requires a set of actions concerning both external conditions and environment as well as internal conditions of NGOs.

Enhancing Arab Transnational activism

•The associative space in many Arab countries has grown in leaps and bounds during the last decade. Authoritarian controls are losing their grip on societies and becoming increasingly obsolete. •NGOs are acting with greater courage and sense of responsibility.

The quantitative and qualitative development of CSOs.The new characteristics of CSOs (younger, new leadership, more

educated, more diverse (informal, virtual groups), more women’s engagement, new forms of civic engagement

Investing the reform agenda..new topics•Many factors are contributing to the mushrooming of contacts and networking between local Arab civil societies and global civil society.

Yet these emerging civil society movements are still in the process of identifying modes of engagement with other stakeholders that could lead to constructive and positive contribution to the process of change, beyond street mobilization.

Thank you for

your attention