Corporatism

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in cross-sectoral collaborations and partnerships among leaders of for-profit, nonprofit, and public institutions at both the national and international scales. These cooperative networks typically join civil society organization representatives, envoys of governmental organizations and business people to address a common concern. Such collaborations have become increasingly important, as leaders in the various sectors have grappled with complex social challenges whose contours appear to require common engagement and cooperation. Examples include efforts to address national and international environmental degradation, provide humanitarian relief following conflicts and disaster events, assure effective medical care for the most poor, oversee alternative energy research and development and secure social services for the needy. These cases suggest that the search to create inter-sectoral collaboration to address large-scale social concerns has now become commonplace.

In addition to the increased complexity of public problems now confronting nations around the globe, at least two additional long-lived trends have fueled creation of these collaborative networks. First, for several decades, proponents of neoliberalism have persistently called into question the legitimacy and efficacy of the state in addressing many social needs. These thinkers and policy advocates have argued either for state withdrawal from such responsibilities or for third sector or for-profit entities to address them on behalf of the state. This stance has been justified with arguments that these organizations were either more representative or efficient or effective or all of these, than state bureaucracies could be in providing such services. In practice, however, the state role has not been devolved as often as advocates have urged and a complex structure of government-overseen contracts and collaborations has developed which have required the creation of new networked and interorganizational structures. Many of these, though not all, are de facto led by public representatives ultimately responsible for creating sufficient cooperation among those participating to secure desired governmental results.

A second trend fueling the development of intersectoral collaboratives aimed at addressing complex social problems is a broad belief among many Western world leaders that past public efforts often had overreached and not achieved their stated aspirations. These perceived failures, themselves sometimes still debated, led many national leaders to a new modesty of public action that sought to draw on the perceived strengths of other sectoral organizations to assist the state in addressing public needs. Those who follow this line of thought have suggested it is better to bring the assumed efficiency of market institutions and the supposed democratic character of nonprofit entities to bear to serve the commonweal when possible in order to overcome the perceived wastefulness and bureaucratic clumsiness and worse, of state institutions.

Irrespective of their wellsprings, each of these arguments places collaborative networks in an essentially positive light. As framed by their advocates in recent decades, these entities are necessary to address difficult challenges and overcome the inappropriateness, inadequacies, or ineptitude of state action. One particular form of cross-sectoral collaboration now receiving sustained attention at the international scale and which has been adopted from national experience in Europe and Latin America is corporatism. The remainder of this article examines the phenomenon of inter-sectoral collaborative networks through the lens of corporatism, whose dynamics have not always been as welcome as those of collaborative networks more broadly framed. The article evaluates the current trend in the United Nations (UN) system and among other international institutions, including the World Bank, toward the creation of such arrangements involving transnational civil society organizations, international governmental organizations (IGOs) and multinational businesses. The article examines their legitimacy, representativeness, and transparency/accountability. While the analysis emphasizes the role(s) of civil society organizations in these networks, the reader should keep in mind that these collaboratives also always involve multinational businesses and international governmental organizations. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporatism may usefully help to describe an increasingly employed form of NGO engagement with international governmental (and business) entities, such patterns of interaction will demand ongoing attention and public scrutiny if they are to meet acceptable standards of democratic accountability and legitimacy.

Definition

As originally conceived, corporatism sought to provide a variety of functional interest groups – prototypically business groups and labor unions – formal and formalized opportunities to press their claims in national political systems perhaps most notably in Germany and Austria. The groups so engaged were normally peak associations and usually participated in tripartite councils that functioned separately from traditional parliamentary institutions. Government, business, and union representatives met and worked in these councils to attain consensus concerning possible policy choices, and their efforts were then introduced into public choice-making (and often quickly legitimated) as representative of the political will of large shares of society. The councils explicitly sought consensus and all concerned assumed the legitimacy of their role in shaping public decision-making processes. Schmitter (1979: 8) has defined this original conception of corporatism succinctly:

Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular,

compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly with in their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and support.

A variation of this form of governance involving civil society organizations has been applied in the international arena since at least 1999 when then Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan called for creation of a new sort of “global compact” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As part of an ongoing package of institutional reforms, the Secretary General sought development of a collaborative among relevant representatives of UN entities, civil society organizations and businesses. Annan initially envisioned these groupings working together in corporatist-like networks to address hotly contested international environmental protection and human- and worker-rights issues.

While originally commissioned by the Secretary General to advance his reform agenda, the Report of the Cardoso Panel on United Nations–Civil Society Relations, released in 2004, We the Peoples: Civil Society, the United Nations and Global Governance, was not well received by Annan or many other UN officials (Willetts, 2006: 308). Nonetheless, and perhaps paradoxically, the Panel reinforced the trend toward increased United Nations and other international organization–civil society interaction by calling for still greater engagement by these organizations with civil society institutions around the world (UN Doc.A/58/817 June 11, 2004, Willetts, 2006). In general, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had an incentive to participate actively in conferences or in other forums when called upon by the United Nations, at least in those areas of internationalization of policies and action that would permit them to enlist the international entities to assist them to obtain leverage for change in the policies of lagging individual nation-states. Linkages with IGOs provided NGOs and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) potential opportunities to influence norm-violating states (sometimes their own home states). This “boomerang model” gained particular currency in linking social movements to larger scale change opportunities in specific policy domains, including, perhaps most notably, human rights (Risse & Sikkink, 1999). These efforts included the integration of civil society organizations into UN operations in humanitarian relief via the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response and the Economic and Social Council and in broader governance and policymaking via the NGO Working Group on the Security Council. These and similar initiatives institutionalized collaborative inter-sectoral consultative institutional arrangements in the late 1990s and early in the present decade (Martens, 2006). While NGOS do not enjoy a formal status in the UN General Assembly, they have now been integrated into formal consultation roles. Taken as a whole, the trend has been toward involving NGOs and INGOs in mediating specific interests in collaborative arrangements with UN and other international entities and for-profit institutions.

Key Issues

The chief challenges confronting these evolving international UN-NGO-business corporatist networks ultimately are democratic in character and concern whether and how their individual organizational members can be said legitimately to represent and be accountable to either the broader sectors from which they are drawn or the populations/stakeholders of the nations or international organizations they serve. These concerns are treated in turn next.

The Challenge of Legitimacy

However conceived, these corporatist networks of institutions must confront the challenge of legitimacy. That is, these organizations whose members are unelected, whose gatherings, agendas, and roles are not subject to direct popular control and yet whose existence is aimed at securing consensus to proceed with policy on behalf of that populace or set of stakeholders must operate in ways that secure broad popular awareness and consent. Domestic corporatist network decision-makers are indirectly accountable for their choices to the population they purportedly represent via the state’s policymakers whom they at least implicitly serve. Policymakers can, at least in theory, reject the claims of the corporatist councils advising them. But this indirect link is weaker in international networks in which corporatist decisions serve international institutions, which themselves possess few direct connections to the populations of the states they represent. This situation suggests an ongoing paradox. Corporatist organizational forms are at least partly justified on the basis of their supposed advantages in permitting the stakeholders involved, who are viewed as aggregating the popular will for large shares of relevant populations, to come to consensus on difficult topics confronting governance. Yet, in truth, these organizations do not directly represent those populations and therefore may not claim legitimacy for their recommendations. When these recommendations are simply accepted by relevant authoritative actors, they may reasonably be challenged as illegitimate because they were never subject to all but the most indirect form of democratic accountability. They emerge as contested, contestable, or illegitimate.

The Challenge of Representation

Whether operative in nations or at the international scale, corporatist networks are open to the challenge that they do not represent the diversity of the interests of the sectors they purport to represent. They are comprised of peak associations and the representational capacity of trade unions or NGOs, for example, is often contested although these entities are joined not only by shared economic, but often fraternal or normative bonds. To be truly representative of sectors, these groupings would need to embrace the full diversity of those represented and do so in a nearly holistic fashion or be subject to popular accountability in some form. For UN-affiliated international groupings established further to Annan’s agenda for institutional change, both of these conditions have been difficult to attain.

While a number of well-known and well-established international nongovernmental organizations based in developed nations (e.g., Project Hope International, Doctors without Borders, Oxfam International) have been called upon for counsel by the United Nation and other international organizations, their Southern counterparts have complained vigorously that their views neither represent nor legitimate any perspective other than their own. Instead, representatives of these organizations suggest that Northern NGOs are in fact too often arrogant and unwilling to share capacity or wherewithal that would allow their Southern cousins to participate effectively as well. Moreover, Northern NGOs are not, their critics complain, close enough to conditions on the ground in the developing world to represent them as important international policies and concerns are considered. In short, Northern INGOs although often invited to participate in corporatist international networks, because they are perceived to “represent” an important sector of the political economy, arguably often do not attain in practice the standing they are accorded in the abstract.

There is another and perhaps more significant challenge linked to the representativeness of corporatist forms in international governance and politics that concerns whether the notion underpinning the strategy – the direct representation of social interests in international governance decision-making – can ever be sanctioned as democratic, however framed. In the abstract, it appears that if left open to any civil society organization (or for-profit) willing to ask to join, this form of inter-sectoral collaboration might be representative. In practice, however, the ability to engage in such advocacy depends both on capacity to monitor and become aware of such opportunities and on the fiscal and human resources to address them once identified. Many civil society organizations possess neither and may not feel comfortable relying on other institutions to represent their interests. This has certainly been so for the many Southern NGOs that have complained bitterly that their Northern counterparts do not represent their perceived interests in UN-related collaborative advisory or advocacy networks. Notably, this slippage occurs before the corporatist network even meets to develop consensus and offer its guidance to authoritative decision-makers.

Another challenge to the representativeness of networks is still more basic: Whether most NGOs were established in the first instance to represent the broader populations from which they spring. Concerned citizens typically create NGOs to provide a service or address a perceived need. They are not created further to popular election or plebiscite, and they may, indeed often do, provide services to otherwise unpopular constituencies – the homeless, drug addicted or alcoholic, for example. NGOs do not represent relevant political constituencies. Electorates at the ballot box do not periodically popularly sanction their work or claims. Indeed, for those seeking to assist troubled clients, it is not always clear that those individuals would agree that the NGOs working on their behalf are doing so in ways with which they would concur.

This reality highlights another concern, whether and how IGO corporatist networks and their organizational participants may be made to function in democratically accountable ways. NGOs are not democratic in the sense of serving general community interests or the popular will, as understood electorally. Nonetheless, they are eminently democratic in arising from the felt concerns of at least a segment of a population who take direct action in concert to address an issue. If this is true for NGOs, it is still more significant for INGOs that operate transnationally and may count no single populace their authoritative overseer in a democratic (electoral) sense.

The Twin Challenges of Transparency and Accountability

The capacity of corporatist networks to produce consensus positions to secure paths forward for policymakers is accompanied by less public transparency and accountability among the institutions engaged than might otherwise be desirable to ensure democratic accountability. These networks risk compromising the multiple stakeholder interests involved by eliciting undue pressures to cooperate and compromise that may badly serve those in whose name the stands are taken. More than this, civil society organizations participating in these networks may lose some share of the identity with their donors that allow them to retain a degree of public salience and thereby to raise funds. More precisely, INGOs need to be able to demonstrate to their stakeholders that they are providing vital services and achieving their goals and objectives in doing so. To the extent that engagement in networks make it more difficult for donors to understand the independent roles of the NGOs participating in them or otherwise makes their operations less transparent or open to public scrutiny, it may be more difficult for them to attain enough trust and salience to raise necessary funds, let alone to assure accountability for choices made.

More generally, international corporatist networks may not be readily salient to the populations they serve and affect most directly. To the extent that network choices are not clear and open to the public and their potential impacts widely discussed, it will be difficult for their members to claim even a modicum of democratic accountability for their actions. Since neither the participating NGOs nor the participating international or business organizations possess direct democratic accountability in the first instance, this situation represents an especially difficult dilemma. Overall, this reality suggests that NGOs particularly, will want to be especially careful to make their roles in these networks transparent so as to secure and maintain a modicum of accountability to the constituencies that support them – if only for the purpose of assuring continued support for their operations.

Future Directions

The last 2 decades have witnessed the rapid growth of corporatist networks in the international governance system. Despite the skepticism of many governments and ongoing concerns among participating NGOs that the interests of their sector not be lost in the process of such engagement or lost altogether, these forms of organization, often dubbed “partnerships” to connote their positive potentials, have proven quite durable and even popular. But they bring with them enduring concerns about whether and how their deliberations and recommendations may be rendered legitimate, representative, accountable, and transparent. As it happens, none of these attributes or states is readily attained given the realities of the international system and the fact that the outputs of the great bulk of these networks are mediated by IGOs; themselves relatively insulated from the populations their efforts serve. As with the broad-scale adoption of intersectoral organizational arrangements at the national scale, international decision-makers may expect that corporatist collaboratives of the sort described in this article will continue to raise these concerns. To address them effectively will require the development of mechanisms that assure relevant network stakeholders that “their” organizational representatives are able to behave with relative autonomy as well as with their best interests at heart. These are not static criteria and neither will be easy to attain or maintain. Rather, they will require both shared norms and management systems that ensure the legitimacy, representation, transparency, and accountability claims highlighted as critical in this analysis.

Cross-References

Accountability

Coalitions and Networks

Corporate Social Responsibility

Global Civil Society

Legitimacy

Partnerships

Social Movements

Transparency

Transnational Forums and Summits

UN Global Compact