Election Officer

Mainstream Conceps on State-Civil Society Relations

Ben Reid correctly points out a mainstream, discursive perspective held within the international community today regarding democratic transition in the developing world. This prevailing concept of state-civil society interaction'visible in the policies of international agencies such as the World Bank'see the development of an active, engaging civil society as a "precondition for effective governance" (Reid, 2008). This international logic is premised on a "watchdog" angle to civil society'"[which] both complements (through facilitating debate and consensus forming) and constrains the state from arbitrary despotism." Civil society input in deliberations on policy making and design is the vogue.

The recent developments on Iran seem to lend credence to this view.  Expansions in communication technology has both sustained and provided ammunition for a burgeoning Iranian civil society to mount protests against the (dubiously) reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad'on allegations of fraud'through blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Also, Archon Fung's (2006) various recommendations for more accurate mechanisms to accommodate public participation similarly underscore the dynamic between state and civil society stated above. Like he, I would like to view this perception towards civil society on a broader scale, framing it more cohesively under the emerging paradigm of "governance" that the United Nations (UN) has consistently been promoting to states. The assumption of both the UN, and governance, is that "public participation at its best operates in synergy with representation and administration to yield more desirable practices and outcomes of collective decision making and action."

A Hostile Reaction is Natural

I have always had a tendency to not take things at face value, least of all this easy, suspicious logic (civil society as a panacea to authoritarianism) to democratic transitions multilateral development institutions like the World Bank have been operating on; like political reality were so simple to figure out. Cognizant of a mainstream, I react in this paper by questioning the tautness of this widely spread perspective and by trying to offer a dialogic opposition to it. If we take ourselves to be a social science, adopting the value of the scientific method, we must comprehend that a natural extension of this is the requirement to question everything. Social sciences do not have the luxury of performing experiments akin to the laboratory types of the natural sciences'but we have our own version of "experimentation," and we call it (open) "discourse." In the presence of a dearth of views and approaches that continuously battle for logical survival for agents' approval and usage, there we have our experimentation.

Reid has already contributed to the demystification of this perceived civil society-state relationship through the Philippine context. He argues that civil society leaders (like Karina David, academic; Horacio Morales, former Popular Democrat leader) fail to live up to their "watchdog" expectation when, upon crossing over to the state, they virtually enter into a covert patron-client relationship with the President. Reid demonstrates this as when former Chief Executive Joseph Estrada, and current one Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, were doling out "pockets of authority" functioning as patronage. Civil society groups' interests are thus curtailed and rendered impotent within a system whose head they feel beholden to.

Reid makes the conclusion that civil society groups eventually get disillusioned with cooperating with the state, and inevitably breakaway from this form of direct participation and revert to more antagonistic strategies again. Hence, in his article, Reid is detailing the problems (clientelism) that prevent civil society from becoming a watchdog. So in a way he merely cautions the mainstream analysis to nuance its concept of civil society'but he can be interpreted agreeing that once these circumstances are overcome, civil society can safely assume cooperation and representation in the state under the model of governance.

What I wish to do here in this reaction paper is more hardline. Assuming that civil society is safely assuming its role within the mainstream's perceived framework, would any negative externalities result? Does heightened public participation as encouraged by governance have a trade-off? If so, is it a worthy one?

Contextualizing My Reaction to Two Instances

There are two instances that have shaped me towards this reaction, both involving the Philippine setting. The first relates to the Comprehensive and Agrarian Reform Program extension with reforms (CARPer). A classmate once shared how a technocrat within the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), UP School of Economics Professor Arsenio Baliscan, has argued convincingly in a forum how the cost of transferring land under the scheme was twice than the price of the land itself. The expert basically pointed out the truth that CARP was a failed policy. But since Akbayan and various peasant groups have strongly lobbied for the policy'and since the state operated under the discursive field of governance, apparently government officials was forced to please this strong sector. Even if the expert's analysis were flawed, this situation brings an interesting question to the fore: can civil society participation harm or render inefficient public policy?

Now the next instance I will detail is this reading I found by Mark Gasiorowski. It is a convoluted, quantitative analysis on the relationship between democracy and macroeconomic performance in underdeveloped countries'as qualified in inflation and economic growth numbers. To quote his conclusion:

The author's central finding is that more-democratic countries have higher inflation and slower growth than less-democratic countries. Inflation apparently is higher in more-democratic countries mainly because they have higher fiscal deficits and faster wage growth; this higher inflation marginally reduces economic growth in these countries. The author also finds that new and mature democracies do not have significantly different inflation and growth rates. The findings suggest that unrestrained political participation and the resulting demands placed on state officials undermine democratic [and economic] performance.

The intuitive view is that nondemocratic regimes would possess "low investment, large fiscal deficits, and loose monetary policy"'therefore poor macroeconomic performance'since their state officials were predatory, prioritizing leeching of the state apparatus for personal revenue. Apparently, democratic institutions and public participation would restrict predatory behavior; compelling them to perform on society's behalf. Contrary to this, however, what the study validated was the view that the democratization process in underdeveloped countries has led to the very opposite. Substandard macroeconomic performance highlights the negative effects caused by unrestrained political participation.

He puts to focus the problem I want to describe here: uninhibited political participation facilitates societal groups to make "extensive demands on the state." It forces the state to cater to particularistic interests, thus precluding officials from following through the larger interests of society. There is a somewhat role reversal here: civil society groups can become the patrons; the state, the clients under the mainstream scheme.

Tyranny of the Majority?

The interesting thing about this reaction is that it somehow fits into Reid's analyses about refusing to treat civil society as a black box'that it is not a unified body, but an assembly of disparate units, that it is embedded in the very same structures of clientelism that shape the state. More importantly, it jives with the idea that spheres of contestation for power that specific groups can tap are not only limited to the state. So can civil society groups become the new elites, forcing their interests upon the state? What has made this hypothetically possible is that civil society groups operate in a discursive field of governance that allows them a measure of communicative power to be the hegemony.

The primacy put on the value of public participation seems to distort the expertise of technocrats and the autonomy of officials within the state, evidently leading to unwise decisions. This point is demonstrated by the CARPer example.

Answering a Burden First

Reid shows clientelism has proven itself to be a very durable phenomenon; being able to find shadows within democratic spaces to hide in. Reid shows civil society groups become clients to the state; I roughly illustrate how the reverse could also be true. Both are possibilities that exemplify the persistent nature of clientelism, while differing only in the roles of both actors in the patron-client relationship. I realize I have a burden to also prove here. I need to show a bigger systematic feature that could explain and accommodate for both possibilities'i.e. when does the state become the client? Or civil society groups? Our concept would self-destruct if both possibilities were in haste put together.

The solution I proffer here is flimsy, but I shall go on detailing it. It should be pointed out that it is flawed to conceive of democratization as not having dealt any hard blow on the traditional elites in the Philippines, who have always been shown in a lot of studies to be consistent in their power consolidation. While they may have been able to subvert democratic institutions, at least these institutions were able to make'in a way'a revolution already in that they allowed civil society groups to reverse the patron-client relationship in some instances (the groups  behind CARPer) with state officials whom we assume have enjoyed elite status for the longest time. What is the explanation for this? The governance paradigm that has penetrated through Philippine state-civil society interaction is important to note here. It has changed the rules of the game for traditional elites. While they may enjoy a head start at taking advantage of a system which pressures them to count in public participation in policy making'this does not mean they do not still operate within its newly established rules. Remember that the reason former President Estrada took in David and Morales was because he needed a face to demonstrate that he was satisfying the pressures of the paradigm of governance. At an earlier stage of the Philippines' democratization, no such pressures could have restricted an elite in his strategies to maintain power; he would probably be an all-out dictator. CARPer is in a way a triumph in that it is proof that civil society groups'using the proper narratives and discourse in dealing with the state'can take advantage of the discursive field provided by governance. Social mobility is made more promising under the current paradigm.

So the systematic relationship between the two possibilities is that the second possibility is the likely outcome after a matter of time guided by the assumption that in due course civil society groups fully develop more accurate strategies towards the state.

A Solution

It would appear we were still back at square one; assuming that civil society groups eventually take the full gains of a system of governance, do we simply move from the older elite to newer ones? Remember that I refer to Gasiorowski's point that civil society groups can force their specific interests upon the state.

What makes the current system of governance better than the older one is its better tendency towards stability. How? I am yet to make a quantitative analysis to prove this, but my reaction towards Gasiorowski's claim is that his explanations fail to realize two things. First, we should assume that civil society groups develop at different time lengths in learning the correct strategies towards the state. So maybe the groups behind CARPer were the noisiest, but we can safely presume that at a later stage of Philippine politics, other groups opposed to Akbayan et al would have lent strong voices against the policy's approval. Second, and more importantly, state officials are always compelled to satisfy a lot of sectors within the civil society; that is crucial to their reelection, getting a voting base of disparate groups enough for a win.

So we have an unpopular, but possibly needed macroeconomic policy. How do we deal with that? How can the ideal of the state serving society's broader interests be achieved? How can it move above the sphere of contestation for power by specific groups'evident in a two-fold way'within present state-civil society interactions?

The meeting point of civil society and state in policy making should not only emphasize more and more public participation, as Fung argues to an effect. Mechanisms for civil society penetration should always be fair not only towards the state, but in between the groups, so as to prevent the dominance of a single group over the others. Bureaucrats should be expected to defend their policy proposals towards these groups. At the same time, civil society groups should learn the proper narratives and strategies to take when influencing the state, to ensure they have a voice. Somewhere when these two expectations on both state and civil society converge, we might achieve our goal of serving for the broader interests of society.

Conclusion

I would like to refer to Barack Obama's situation'and his attempts to enact universal healthcare reform'to help elucidate my proffered solution.  A lot of groups are naturally rejecting the policy in the US since the political mainstream believes in free market principles guiding a rolled back state. There is no agreement on a single solution to US health care's high price tag. But if the rate of price escalation in health care spending and insurance premiums continues at current trends, the cost of inaction will severely affect employers and consumers. Here is the broader-society's-interests goal that we want.

What is going to happen? Tough negotiations await state and civil society in the US in the coming months.  To counteract strong opposition from the Republicans and other groups, Obama's guidance of his policy proposal is key. He is already trying to sell his idea to a lot of sectors, such as the American Medical Association, to form his support base.

If the policy survives such a rigorous process of deliberation'a deliberation which as I require needs emboldened actors from state and civil society'this does not necessarily mean that it is the best policy. But governance is the best framework towards achieving the best policy that we have.

In my attempts to take a devil's advocate and ad reduction absurdum position to mainstream analysis, I end up doing the same as Reid: merely cautioning to nuance an mainstream impression, but ultimately agreeing with it. But while he was referring to civil society only, I also refer to the vicissitudes of its interactions between the state.

References:

Fung, Archon. 2006. Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance. Public Administration Review, December 2006, 66

Gasiorowski, Mark. 2000. Democracy and Macroeconomic Performance in Underdeveloped Countries: An Empirical Analysis. Comparative Political Studies, April 2000 Vol. 33 No. 3

Reid, Ben. 2008. Development NGO's, Semiclientelism, and the State in the Philippines: From 'Crossover to Double-crossed. Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. 23 No.1, pp. 4-42.

About the Author:
Bernard Joseph Esposo Guerrero is a gruduate student at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is currently taking his MA in Industrial Relations. He resides in Manila.