Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

Thesis proposal

Participation without political representation: the value of womens NGOs

participation in the International Public Sphere.

Tutor proposal: Jos Luis Mart / Marisa Iglesias Vila

Introduction and general objective

The feminist movement and womens Human Rights movement have used Non
Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as a political strategy to intervene in the public
sphere and influence political decisions. We can find a diversity of organized groups
that work on gender issues at local, national, regional and global level. In the
international governance network they have had an effective impact in the inclusion
and development of gender perspective in development strategies, treaties,
conventions and regulations. Nevertheless, this phenomena has raised questions
and critiques regarding the legitimacy of their political participation and the
institutional roll that NGOs should play in the decision making process.

The objective of this research is to answer these questions from a deliberative

democracy perspective, aiming to identify some plausible possibilities to
democratize the decision making process in the international arena, through the
construction and articulation of weak and strong publics (Fraser 1990; Bohman
2010).

Research Questions

What is the democratic value of NGOs participation in the international

governance system?

Are NGOs an accurate mechanism to represent perspectives of social groups

and communities?

Relevance and Contribution

The Civil Society (CS) has gained importance as a category of political subjetivity,
giving legitimacy to the participation of new private actors that explicitly try to
influence the public sphere. In general terms we can say that the concept of CS
makes allusion to the autonomous forms of social organization independents of the
Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

state and the political parties system, that are used as a mechanism of
representation and defense of citizens interests. From this point of view the CS is a
category that has been used to legitimate the political participation of citizens that
find the electoral representation insufficient to represent the societys concerns and
interests, and find the judicial system insufficient to defend their rights (Castells
2009:8).

Thus, development of democratic mechanisms and accountability has to be settled

from a post-liberal understanding of political participation(Arditi 2004). First: the
monopoly of the political representation by electoral means (that links
representation with territory) is under question as new forms of unelected political
actors are being integrated de facto and gaining importance. Second: the
increasingly complex international system and the regulatory institutions, that
nowadays influence many of the governmental relevant decisions, are a breaking
point of the Westphalian sovereign model. Thus, there is a need for effective
democratic mechanism over the political decisions that affect individuals that go
beyond the national scope of accountability.

An individual understanding of citizenship, that has been the tradition within the
liberal approach, it is impossible to implement without and aggregative mechanism
through elections that the international governance system lacks. Thus, the
possibilities of group representation appears as an alternative to increase the
democratic control over the decision making process.

The inclusion of NGOs and other private actors in the activities of international
governmental organizations is a tendency that has increased in the resent decades,
especially after the Governance paradigm that recognized the necessity to include in
non-professional politicians and governmental institutions to face the challenges of
a globalized economy (Magnette, 2003: 144). From consultive or advisory councils,
to participatory methodologies in the design of development strategies it seems to
be a multiplication of different ways to relate to the actors identified under the
category of Civil Society; as well as a diversification on the realm of intervention and
authority of private actors.

Argument

If womens NGOs are effective mechanism to bring the perspectives of social groups
and communities in to the deliberative process on the international public sphere,
then their institutional participation has a democratic value when the conditions to
the exercise of communicative freedom are met through an institutional design.
Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

The inclusion of NGOs as a mean to increase diversity of stakeholders in the public

sphere is relevant as it reflects not only reasons and arguments that increase the
quality of the deliberation process but:

The availability of the perspectives that inform these reasons and give them their
cogency. Perspectives are social, to the extent that they are practical stances towards
the social world that are informed by experiences that agents have, often in common
with others in their particular situationwhile reasons are items to be considered in
deliberation such as opinions or values, perspectives are cognitive properties of
deliberators and thus are available only when actual participants exercise their
communicative freedom and make claims.(Bohman 2010)

Here, the partiality of the argumentation is not considered as detrimental to the

deliberative process. The notion of perspective recognizes the differentiated
understanding of the issues discussed that arises from the institutionalization of
social groups experiences and private interests that become intelligible in the public
sphere.

In his communicative democracy theory Habermas characterized the public sphere

as a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be
formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes
into being in every conversation in private individuals assemble to form a public
body.(Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox 1974)

There have been a lot of critics regarding the unitary conception of Hambermas PS.
This phenomena has been studied in the context of the development of the PS in
western countries. As Nancy Fraser has pointed out, the bourgeois PS was not the
only public, but the one that got recognized as the public regarding the political
discussions. Despite the rhetoric of publicity and accessibility this PS was
importantly constituted by a number of significant exclusions. Groups of women,
workers, people of colour, gays and lesbians, illiberal political movements, have
gathered forming alternative publics, called by Fraser subaltern counter publics.
(Fraser 1990). The bourgeois public sphere changed the status requirements to
participate in the PS but did not eliminate them.

This critics have been accepted and dicussed by Habermas in latter works
(Habermas 1992). But in latter works Habermas continues to rely on a unitarian
concept of the PS where citizens discuss the problems of the whole community. This
spatial methaphore is necesarry within a theory of communicative democracy as
the public sphere consists of an intermediary structure between the political
Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

system, on the one hand, and the private sectors of the lifeworld and functional
systems, on the other(Young 2002:170). So, eventhough the PS may be
fragmentated, the spatial methaphore is necessary to to describe the process of
specifically public discussion as occurring in a single continuous arena of discourse
and expression(Young 2002:172) that links strong publics within the state to weak
publics through the use of public reason. The spatial methaphore also enables this
aproach with means to concive one continus public sphere, instead conceiving those
who participate on it as partial interests and attributes of some individuals.

Within the international arena the spatial metaphor of a unique public sphere that
meets the conditions for the exercise of communicative freedom required for the
functioning of a communicative democracy is inconsistent with the reality of a
fragmented and decentered governance network conformed by public and private
actors. The international PS In a democracy at national level the state plays an
important roll providing citizenship to the members of the political community; a
shared status and a set of rights that guarantee the exercise of freedom of speech,
democratic inclusion and publicity of the decision-making process. A part from this
marginalized groups, at the international level there is not a framework that can
provide theshared status that the democratic inclusion requires, making it difficult
for to participate in the deliberative process. As there is no global state that can
provide these conditions, the international public sphere has to be conceived as
fragmented and constituted by a diversity of publics that may be more o less
democratic (Bohman 2010).

State of the Art

NGOs are formal institutions with legal recognition that are part of a wider group of
Civil Society Organizations. The international government organizations have had a
tendency to privilege NGOs participation as representatives of the CS in their
institutional relationships with social groups and communities, over the
participation of informal social organizations. Taking into account the diversity and
size of women as a social group, their representation through this mechanism is
especially challenging. Different groups of women have accessed decision-making
spaces in the international governance system through NGOs, both from
mainstream feminism and from marginalized groups (like sex workers, domestic
workers, indigenous women) as representatives of Civil Society. Some of the
Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

critiques that NGOs have received, as they do not fulfill the requirements that
political representation mechanism usually hold in liberal democracies1, are:
Some academics argue that NGOs participation could mean the intromission
of private interests into public discussions and distort the decision making
process (Dunoff 1998:437).
Some decisions taken by governments or international instances may affect
discrete and well organized interest groups that are likely to lobby and enjoy
disproportionate influence; while benefits and interest for the general public
may be diffuse and hard to quantify. (Dunoff 1998:438)
The inclusion of NGOs in deliberative instances could lead to an unequal
opportunity among actors (Nanz 2004:331).
At international level, it has been pointed out that the disparity between the
numbers and founding of southern NGOs compared to northern NGOs could
be problematic as the predominant point of view would come from the
industrialized countries.
At national level there could also be a disparity as NGOs are frequently in
hands of local elites that do not necessary reflect the characteristics of the
groups they intent to represent (Atack 1999:862).

These critics are grounded in an aggregative understanding of democracy. That

model interprets democracy as a process of aggregating the preferences of citizens
in choosing public officials and policies that will best correspond to the most widely
and strongly held preferences. (Young 2002:19) Voters and politicians pursue their
own interests: in order to stay in office politicians try to satisfy as many and alienate
as few individual interests as possible. This would lead us to a balanced aggregation
of individual interest mediated by the accountability of the electoral process. From
this point of view NGOs participation leads to a distortion of the power balance of
the actors that have the legitimacy to negotiate in the decision making progress, and
lack accountability mechanisms (like elections or transparency).

1 Following the conceptualization of political representation systematized by Pitkin (Verge Mestre

2004), NGOs lack some of the dimensions that have been attributed to political representative
mechanisms. They lack the authorization of their representatives; they lack the accountability and
transparence mechanisms of public institutions, and they have a limited capacity of responsiveness
(the capacity to meet the populations needs and demands and transform them into inputs for the
political system) at a national scope. While in some cases they may be able to meet other dimensions
of political representation like the symbolic and legitimacy dimension, the descriptive or
representativeness dimension (mirror representation that emulates the social characteristics of the
represented); and in some cases has been argued that despite the NGOs lack the capacity to address
the needs and demands nation wide, they may exercise the responsiveness dimension by meeting the
in a accurate way the needs and demands of their specific communities.
Gabriela Castillo Quintanilla

Another way to understand democracy can be found in the deliberative democracy

(DD) model, which is a form of practical reason. Participants in the democratic
process offer proposals for how best to solve problems or meet legitimate needs
participants arrive at a decision not by determining what preferences have greatest
numerical support, but by determining which proposals the collective agrees are
supported by the best reasons. (Young 2002:23). Under this account the primacy of
the logic of negotiation is substituted by the primacy of the logic of argumentation
(Mart 2006), making of less relevance who brings the argument (and if they
represent someone) and more relevant the content and distinctive perspective of
this argument (Bohman 2010).

The DD point of view enables a legitimate political participation without meeting

the requirement of political representation. We could value the participation of
NGOs in democratic terms as their participation meets with the normative ideals of
this model (inclusion, reasonableness, political equality and publicity). NGOs
function as a mean to have better quality in the discussion, but also among other
things can be a link between the strong publics that take decisions and the soft
publics that control trough public reason the exercise of power within the public
sphere.

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