5. Conclusions and Trends

Civil society organizations have been given and have assumed greater responsibility than ever before, but their effectiveness is limited by factors still beyond their control. CSO access to institutions of power has never been easily or completely granted, and it is not clear that this is uniformly desirable. The role of CSOs in global governance is to influence agents and act as moral compasses, not to replace states or an intergovernmental process. It is not clear that civil society wants fiduciary authority or responsibility to participate in key public policy decisions. In order for the forces of civil society to operate most effectively in this period of globalization, it is crucial that CSOs operate through a global political arm such as a re-invented UN. Given the dominant trend toward market deregulation and the denigration of the United Nations, positive visions on what the state and intergovernmental institutional infrastructure could look like in the twenty-first century are only beginning to surface.

This tension is at the centre of the uneasy relationship between CSOs and the intergovernmental process. It is ironic that the late twentieth century has seen the unprecedented growth and influence of civil society and unprecedented decline of those national and intergovernmental organizations most open to participation. Having spent five decades lobbying at the gates of the United Nations, non-governmental groups have finally been granted access only to see that real power now lies behind other doors.

In intergovernmental fora, civil society will retain a strong interest in a robust, reformulated UN and in institutional methods to balance social, environmental and human rights concerns with economic priorities. A true vision for democratic global governance can only arise from the interaction between international civil society and a democratic international political process. One crucial testing ground will be whether the WTO succeeds in bringing areas of public policy decision-making under its umbrella, thus closing out the public from public policy formulation in the areas of trade and economics. Indications are that this is where civil society will concentrate some of its energies in the coming years. It remains to be seen, however, whether CSO skills learned in the local and intergovernmental arenas, coupled with new technologies, can be effectively transferred to this new terrain where there is limited formal access.

Some key concerns remain: global civil society clearly has a limited capacity to act in a cohesive fashion. The exponential growth of new and Southern CSOs, as well as CSOs from former communist countries, provides strength in numbers but not experience. Much depends on how rapidly these organizations will be able to build the internal organizational infrastructure and the external networks needed to be effective locally as well as globally. The diversity within the NGO community naturally also creates divisions, inequities of power and divergent interests and strategies. Thus, while hundreds of CSOs have joined the boycott and campaign against McDonald's, for example, some major CSOs and numerous local community groups work with the firm to achieve environmental or community ends. For CSOs interested in having an impact on international affairs, these issues are of deep concern. As long as the initiative in international politics and decision-making remains with the international economic institutions, an infrastructure will be built that will make building democratic global governance harder in the future.

To this challenge has to be added the complexity of building credible links between groups in the North and South. We may see a new self-interest on the part of some Northern CSOs in forging partnerships with Southern CSOs on Southern terms. Significant gains have been made, facilitated by decades of relationship- and capacity-building. International CSO networks have shown that they can have significant effect, particularly in mobilizing the international media and Northern public opinion. Their campaigns have defined issues in the public mind, have toppled governments and have put international firms on the defensive. But a North-South gulf between NGOs still exists, particularly as the global financial forces re-create a new economic colonialism and a structural dependency of the South on the North. Globalization, the new trade rules and free-trade ideology may produce a gulf between Northern and Southern CSOs that becomes greater than the ties that bind.