ABSTRACT
The inclusion of CSOs, nominally national NGOs and community groups is integral to the application of the Bank’s multi-sectoral agenda for HIV/AIDS. Civil society groups have long been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS campaigning since the early 1980s in the USA and UK, and civil society-government partnerships have become the norm for interventions in combating the disease. Contrary to common understandings of the role of civil society within global governance, it is not international NGOs or transnational networks that occupy the main role of engagement with the Bank or the NACs. For the Bank it is individuals and groups within local communities across sub-Saharan Africa that have thus far educated people on methods of prevention and cared for people infected and affected by the disease. These groups thus come to be at the centre of its multi-sectoral agenda. The Bank’s approach is that if you offer funds to such groups you can support existing activities and facilitate wider awareness of HIV/AIDS and participation from every aspect of society in combating this. At the heart of this multi-sectoral approach are the governance reform values of effi ciency and market-based delivery and incentives, government accountability, the need for an open and transparent civil society and the role of the individual. Community groups and the individual are the central arenas in which the Bank can fully embed its agenda for HIV/AIDS. The application of this multi-sectoral agenda leads to mixed outcomes, notably the emergence of an HIV/AIDS-specifi c service industry within local economies and individual behaviour. In sidelining transnational advocacy networks and INGOs and offering fi nancial incentives, civil society becomes an arena of commercial activity that is bounded within the governance regimes inherent to the NAC system of HIV/AIDS governance.
