ABSTRACT
To mark the G8 summit of July 2005, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Edinburgh in the largest protest march the city had ever witnessed, united by their goal to ‘Make Poverty History’. Make Poverty History (MPH) was an impressive, if short-lived, campaign coalition, established, organized, and dominated by ‘NGOs’ – the label that Rootes and Saunders (2007: 139) used to define ‘hierarchically structured, formal organizations’. At its peak, it brought together over 500 NGOs. These formally structured organizations contrast significantly with more informal networks of activists present in ‘disorganizations’ like Dissent! – a network that scorned MPH for being too reformist. Although MPH organized an impressive one-off protest march, it did not provide activists with the opportunity to intrinsically participate in global justice movement (GJM) protest and decision making, beyond participating in the hierarchically organized protest march on the day. In contrast, Dissent! offered myriad opportunities for participation in both actions and decision making: it organized a variety of autonomous protest events, was non-hierarchical and participatory, and made decisions by consensus. As such, it allowed activists to engage much more directly in the internal politics of the GJM. The contrast between MPH and Dissent! suggests that we should expect to find differences in the extent of activists’ participation in formal and informal organizations in the GJM. In this chapter, drawing on data from the Athens European Social Forum (ESF) survey (see Chapter 2 for details of methodology), we explore whether informal organizations do generally encourage wider activist participation in GJM activities and decision making than their more formal counterparts. We also explore whether activists belonging to formal organizations seem less satisfied with the more hierarchical decision making structures to which they are subjected, and we compare activists’ ideals of democracy with their perceptions of how internal democracy works within organizations. Before addressing these questions, we discuss the term NGO, arguing that it cannot accurately be used to refer to ‘hierarchically structured, formal organizations’ in the manner that Rootes and Saunders (2007: 139) suggest. This is because it is a slippery term that is defined in various ways by different scholars
within and between schools of thought. Instead of supporting the sometimes forced and artificial bifurcation between SMOs and NGOs, we instead offer a new typology of organizational types that avoids the definitional chaos surrounding the term NGO. We move on to use theoretical insights from social movement and political science theories to help us determine the effect of varying degrees of organizational formality, voice, and influence on mobilization and participation in the GJM. We hypothesize that informal social movement organizations are more likely than their more formal counterparts to directly involve their members and supporters in decision making and are also more likely to offer them direct and meaningful involvement in campaign actions. Informal organizations should also be viewed by their members as more inclusive and participative than other types of groups, which in turn should produce a wider diffusion of deliberative norms.
