And now for the NGO’s turn…

As I posted earlier, the IMF/WB meeting is taking place this year in Singapore. As the local authorities have been less then welcoming towards the civil society community, several NGOs have organized their usual meeting in at the nearby Indonesian island of Batam. They held a 3 day conference over the weekend before the IMF meetings. I went over for the 2nd day of discussions to see what’s what.

In my last posting I was critical of the Singaporean authorities, now it’s the NGOs turn. I will start with the caveat – I was only there for 1 day and did not participate in all of the meetings (since they overlapped). Those discussions I did participate in didn’t give me great hope, not just for the regional NGOs who were the bulk, but for the entire community of int’l NGOs. What I encountered there is symptomatic of a greater problem in the NGO community, and not a problem limited to those who participated.

Even the local cops were interested....

Such meetings of diverse, critical, caring and talented people hold within them great potential. Unfortunately that fizzled away. How did this happen? NGO type people, and I speak as one of them, have a tendency to preach. Sometimes they get so used to preaching they cant seem to stop, even when they are surrounded by other NGO people who know and AGREE with all their arguments. This doesn’t happen very often, and I understand them. But when sucha rare forum does take place, it seems to me a waste of time to spend hours in meeting after meeting whinning about the evil & corrupt practices of International Finance Institutions (IFIs) and Developed countires. Yes, I know, as does everybody else in the room. The question is what are we going to do about it?! Sorry, no time for that, we need to hear another hart-wrenching story about a fisherperson (turns out ‘fisherman’ is no longer PC) who cant make a living anymore because Shell stuck an oil rig next to his island.

With all these clever and energetic people congregated in one room, I think a real discussion of tactics, methods, and strategic planning in order to fight for change is called for. But no, let’s turn it into another pointless feel-good narrative sharing exercise in collective masturbation. Sounds harsh? Well it is. Anybody who has been to one of these knows exactly what I’m talking about. The time for networking and story telling is at night over several pints of beer, not during 3 days of group talks.

If the NGO community wants to actually achieve something, they must act. They need to stop reacting to what the “forces of evil” are doing and initiate action, let them react to us. How can this be done? First by stop waddling in our own indignation. After we do that, we can get the great minds within our community to work together towards common goals, instead of running around like headless chickens in tie-dyes. Then we can start producing positive suggestions. We should be telling the IMF what they should do instead of yelling at them to stop what they are doing. The one advantage the “forces of evil” have over us, is that they got their act together. Until we get ours together we wont succeed in bringing them down.