The Trouble with NGOs: A Center-Right Take
Philippe Legrain, author of Open World: The Truth about Globalisation, is not a fan of activist NGOs:
A few community schemes here and there are fine, but a cabal of self-selected campaigners and self-interested companies should not be in the business of setting social standards—that should be for elected parliaments. ‘Change the world: burn your Nikes!’ is a catchy slogan. But it is not a good way to set public policy.
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The best way to help workers and the environment is generally through national laws drafted on the basis of democratic participation and consultation. Governments are more than capable, either individually or collectively, of achieving social aims through legislation.
Come again? It’s a nice sentiment, as sentiments go. Yet governments the world over are proving fairly inept at handling the major issues of the day. Climate change is only the biggest, most important issue on the docket, and it’s instructional to see what governments have done, and often not done, about it. Check out Ryan Lizza’s “As the World Burns” piece in a recent issue of the New Yorker. There ain’t a whole lot of democratic participation going on. Legrain and other liberal-minded pro-globalization people need to take note—which is not to say that he doesn’t have useful things to say in protesting the protesters. But it’s disingenuous to think that NGOs are the major obstacles to change. The proliferation of NGOs in recent years is a symptom of a larger problem: the inability or unwillingness of democratically elected governments to do much of anything that is democratic.
