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The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain
The Politics of Expertise offers a challenging new interpretation of politics in contemporary Britain, through an examination of non-governmental organisations. Using specific case studies of the homelessness, environment, and international aid and development sectors, it demonstrates how politics and political activism has changed over the last half century. NGOs have contributed enormously to a professionalization and a privatization of politics, emerging as a new form of expert knowledge and political participation. They have been led by a new breed of non-party politician, working in collaboration and in competition with government. Skilful navigators of the modern technocratic state, they have brought expertise to expertise and, in so doing, have changed the nature of grassroots activism. As affluent citizens have felt marginalised by the increasingly complex nature of many policy solutions, they have made the rational calculation to support NGOs, the professionalism and resources of which make them better able to tackle complex problems. Yet in doing so, support rather than participation becomes the more appropriate way to describe the relationship of the public to NGOs. As voter turnout has declined, membership and trust in NGOs has increased. But NGOs are very different types of organisations from the classic democratic institutions of political parties and the labour movement. They maintain different and varied relationships with the publics they seek to represent. Attracting mass support has provided them with the resources and the legitimacy to speak to power on a bewildering range of issues, yet perhaps the ultimate victors in this new form of politics are the NGOs themselves.
334 pages, ebook
First published March 15, 2013
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July 1, 2014
The politics of predictability
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com, Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com, Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' working conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
A historical account of the development of the 'voluntary sectory" in the UK, unfortunately uncritical, therefore more a chronicle than a history, and a boring one. The promising 'expertise' strand is referenced only here and there, without ever making a real argument. No attempt is made at distinguishing between charities and NGOs, think tanks and self-help associations. The authors' boldest stance is to distance themselves from 'social capital' theories, without ever openly criticizing them.
The result trivializes the notion of expertise, normalizing the phenomenon to a rather inevitable and harmless matter of fact. The discussion centers on professionalization and its impacts in terms of career choices and communication strategies in the third sector, rather than on the emergence of NGOs in the Nineties as a distinctive feature of post-modernity.
The nefarious expertise of the IMFs, World Banks and other benevolent multilateral bodies leaves here the scene to single-issue advocacy, which - I argue - is in great demand for its predictability and always debatable political leaning. The privatization of politics lies not so much in the citizens' ability to shift loyalties and involvements, as in the appropriation of the "issues", constantly up for grabs, by political projects. As a broken watch is right twice a day, an issue's time will come sooner or later, at politics' convenience. In the meantime, the NGO's coverage of the issue will work as an alibi for inaction on the part of the real political actors (citizens, politicians, and institutions).
It may be true that what to many observers sounds outrageous - the dumping of the state's redistribution duties and raison d'être onto the charitable sector - is nothing new under the sun in the UK, as the trend can be traced back to the Victorian age. Another successful ideological product ready to be exported worldwide.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com, Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com, Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' working conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
A historical account of the development of the 'voluntary sectory" in the UK, unfortunately uncritical, therefore more a chronicle than a history, and a boring one. The promising 'expertise' strand is referenced only here and there, without ever making a real argument. No attempt is made at distinguishing between charities and NGOs, think tanks and self-help associations. The authors' boldest stance is to distance themselves from 'social capital' theories, without ever openly criticizing them.
The result trivializes the notion of expertise, normalizing the phenomenon to a rather inevitable and harmless matter of fact. The discussion centers on professionalization and its impacts in terms of career choices and communication strategies in the third sector, rather than on the emergence of NGOs in the Nineties as a distinctive feature of post-modernity.
The nefarious expertise of the IMFs, World Banks and other benevolent multilateral bodies leaves here the scene to single-issue advocacy, which - I argue - is in great demand for its predictability and always debatable political leaning. The privatization of politics lies not so much in the citizens' ability to shift loyalties and involvements, as in the appropriation of the "issues", constantly up for grabs, by political projects. As a broken watch is right twice a day, an issue's time will come sooner or later, at politics' convenience. In the meantime, the NGO's coverage of the issue will work as an alibi for inaction on the part of the real political actors (citizens, politicians, and institutions).
It may be true that what to many observers sounds outrageous - the dumping of the state's redistribution duties and raison d'être onto the charitable sector - is nothing new under the sun in the UK, as the trend can be traced back to the Victorian age. Another successful ideological product ready to be exported worldwide.
Displaying 1 of 1 review