BorderLines 22 (Vol.  4,  No.  3,  March 1996)

Bridging the NGO-Grassroots Gap

During the first part of 1995, Carol Zabin traveled to several cities in northern Mexico to research and write a report for the Inter-American Foundation, with assistance from Andrea Brown. The IAF, which has funded grassroots, sustainable development projects in southern and central Mexico for many years, requested a study of "NGOs working in the area broadly defined as urban ecology" on the Mexican side of the border. It also wanted to identify funding needs not being met by existing and recently created institutions, including private foundations, Mexican government agencies, the World Bank, and the NADBank.

The following is excerpted with the authors' permission from Zabin and Brown's valuable and wide-ranging report. We have focused on only one of the many areas covered by the full text, which is available on-line from the North American Integration and Development Center of the University of California, Los Angeles (http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu) under the title "Building Community and Improving Quality of Life in the Mexican Border Region: An Analysis of NGOs and Grassroots Organizations."

Zabin is an economist at NAID currently working on immigration and labor issues in Los Angeles. Brown recently left NAID to join UCLA's Pollution Prevention Education and Research Center as a staff research associate.

There are probably more NGOs working on environmental issues along the border than on any other single issue. NGOs have played a major role in efforts to improve environmental protection on the border. During the NAFTA debate, NGOs were instrumental in promoting public participation mechanisms within the NAFTA-related environmental institutions. In the post-NAFTA situation, environmental NGOs are a dynamic force, trying to participate actively in the implementation and development of the new institutions in order to ensure their accountability and effectiveness through stakeholder participation. Furthermore, environmental NGOs are actively involved in shaping public policy, building institutions and spaces for local and regional planning initiatives, pressuring the Mexican government for more accountability and enforcement of environmental laws, and carrying out experiments in alternative environmental technologies.

At the same time, as is often the case with atomized non-governmental organizations, there is a lack of coordination between groups. As a consequence, some areas of NGO work are developed more quickly or profoundly than others, even when coordinated strategies could be more effective. The formation of several binational networks of environmental NGOs is a positive development that provides some space for strategic planning by NGOs on how to improve environmental protection in the region. Still, our observations led us to note that there is a gulf between those organizations dealing in the policy and technical arena, on the one hand, and those working at the grassroots level in poor communities, on the other hand.

This report explores some ways in which policy-oriented NGOs and NGOs that work with the grassroots can collaborate more closely. First, however, it discusses distinctions within the broad category of groups generally called NGOs.

Grassroots Organizations and NGOs in Mexican Border Communities

There still is no agreed-upon terminology for describing civil society's groupings. We make a basic distinction between grassroots organizations and NGOs. We use the term 'grassroots organization' to describe membership organizations of low-income people whose leadership and staff, at least in principle, represent and are accountable to their base membership. We use 'NGO' to describe other nonprofit groups involved in promoting sustainable development, broadly defined. These NGOs are not poor people's organizations, but are generally staffed by volunteer or professional "outsiders" who wish to promote the empowerment of marginalized groups.

Grassroots organizations

The most important grassroots organizations of marginalized people in the border are neighborhood associations. These usually emerge from squatter invasions in which residents unite to obtain land, land titles, and/or to petition the government for urban services. These organizations are usually quite transitory, and once their primary objectives have been achieved they often fall apart. Frequently, squatter invasions are organized by leaders who benefit economically from the settlement and who become intermediaries between the residents on the one hand, and government agencies, politicians and political parties, on the other hand.

In rare cases, neighborhood associations develop into longer lasting organizations, with a vision of neighborhood development that goes beyond petitioning the state for the provision of services. The Comit‚s de Defensa Popular (CDP) of Ciudad Ju rez, for example, has enormous control in specific colonias, and is an electoral force that both the PAN (now in power) and the PRI must contend with. This organization originated in PRI neighborhood organizations, which later split off and became independent. Interviews with a wide range of people in Juarez suggest that the CDP is a clientelistic top-down organization that inhibits interaction between community residents and NGOs, (as well as PRI and PAN officials). The cacique-like qualities of this organization seem to be replicated in smaller scale in a variety of neighborhood organizations in other border cities.

During the last sexenio, the PRI's comit‚s de solidaridad have changed the landscape of border social organizations. The National Solidarity Program organized thousands of neighborhood committees for the construction of urban infrastructure and services. These committees have to date survived the change of administration.

In cities governed by the PAN, this opposition party has organized similar neighborhood committees (called comit‚s de vecinos), although these are not as nearly widespread as the PRI solidarity committees. The PAN committees are also a vehicle which municipal governments use to increase participation, to distribute funding for urban services, and to gain political support.

There are relatively few grassroots community groups that maintain some degree of autonomy, have developed long- term visions of change for their communities, or have developed organizations that ensure the accountability of their leadership. The only organization we visited that meets these criteria was the Organizaci¢n Popular Independiente (OPI) in Ciudad Ju rez. This group emerged in 1987 from grassroots community-organizing by lay Catholics using the ideas of catholic base communities, but it is not part of the Church. OPI works with participants from twelve colonias in the areas of youth issues, ecology, women's empowerment, and economic development.

Finally, there are various grassroots organizations that are not based primarily on residence in particular neighborhoods, but on other unifying elements such as workplace issues and ethnicity. One interesting organization is the Frente Ind¡gena Oaxaque¤o Binacional, a federation of 14 grassroots organizations of indigenous people from the state of Oaxaca who have migrated to northwest Mexico and the United States. This organization serves as an advocacy group that defends the rights of migrant workers and pressures the government in Oaxaca to provide infrastructure in home communities.

Non-governmental organizations

NGOs are a dynamic and growing part of border society. Many are quite young, having developed in the last five or ten years. We divide the general category of NGOs into four distinct types.

1) Service-oriented NGOs work directly with a grassroots constituency and provide them with specific services and programs, such as micro-enterprise loan programs or technical assistance. A common model is that of training "promoters" who are from the beneficiary population and are either volunteers or are given a small compensation. Another model uses NGO staff to organize beneficiaries into small groups which then participate in specific programs. In the charged political environment of the border, these NGOs stress their lack of party affiliation, although their directors are often connected with important PRI or PAN leaders.

2) Grassroots support NGOs(often called grassroots support organizations or GSOs) provide organized grassroots groups with a variety of support services and seek to build the capacity of grassroots organizations. These NGOs often see themselves as supporters and allies of popular opposition social movements. This is their main difference from service-oriented NGOs, who generally work with individuals or initiate small groups of people for specific projects, and do not see themselves as contributing to social movements. There are very few grassroots support NGOs in the border area. The NGO that best fits this category that we interviewed is the Comisi¢n de Solidaridad y Defensa de Derechos Humanos (COSYDDHAC), in the city of Chihuahua. This organization gives training and advice to organized grassroots groups to support the capacity building of these groups, rather than to be their spokespeople.

3) A number of other NGOs operate in the realm of policy development, lobbying, and information gathering, especially in the environmental arena. These policy-oriented NGOs often have no direct ties to community groups or the poor, although they see their work as part of a broader struggle to empower marginal groups. They have often been very influential, especially at formulating policy at the local level. Some of the most capable and highly trained people in border cities and towns work in them. Often, NGO staff move in and out of government (especially in panista municipalities) and quite frequently hold government positions concurrently with their work in the NGOs. This has the disadvantage of slowing down the development of NGOs as independent institutions, but the advantage of providing direct influence into government policy formulation. Participation in NGOs allows this group of people to maintain their independence and choose moments in which to act in concurrence with or in opposition to local, state, and federal government agencies.

4) Another type of NGO in the border area is that of advocacy NGOs for labor, environmental, human, women's and indigenous rights. Exploration of these groups was outside the purview of this study. It is clear that these groups play an important role in the border by providing public pressure in defense of marginalized groups. Advocacy NGOs generally work most closely with grassroots constituencies, both organized and unorganized. They often respond to crisis situations affecting individuals or groups, and protest specific occurrences, such as human rights abuses or severe environmental dangers. It is more rare for them to engage in long-term, proactive development or organizing projects. These NGOs clearly have the most difficulty in obtaining funding, largely because many foundations view them as controversial, but also because their participants in general have few fundraising skills.

Binational NGO collaboration

Mexican NGOs have developed dynamic and fruitful collaborative relationships with U.S. counterparts. There are a number of binational networks of environmental NGOs with varying degrees of formality, including the Red Fronteriza de Salud y Ambiente in the west and the Binational Network on the Environment on the eastern part of the border. There are also binational networks in specific sister cities and rural micro-regions, in which both NGOs and government officials participate, and which have developed into important forums for strategic regional planning.

But problems emerge even with U.S.-Mexican NGO collaborations built on the premise of equal partnerships. The lack of philanthropic organizations in Mexico, and the poorly developed fiscal infrastructures of many newer Mexican NGOs, has led some U.S. foundations to funnel money to Mexican NGOs through U.S. NGOs with whom they collaborate. This can foment patron/client relationships or other kinds of tensions, which could be ameliorated if U.S. foundations were willing to provide basic operational support to Mexican NGOs to strengthen their organizations. In addition, the resource imbalance between U.S. and Mexican NGOs and the high cost of phone, fax and computers in Mexico make it more difficult for Mexican NGOs to take a leadership position in binational dialogues.

Despite these problems, there is often more collaboration among U.S. and Mexican NGOs of a particular type, i.e. advocacy NGOs, than between, for example, advocacy and policy-oriented NGOs within Mexico.

Bridging the NGO-Grassroots Gap

There seems to be enormous potential to build collaborative relationships between NGOs involved in Right- to-Know (RTK) work, NGOs carrying out environmental education and outreach, and NGOs involved in community and occupational health issues. Each set of NGOs has developed specific skills, knowledge, and institutional infrastructure and could both contribute to and benefit from more collaborative efforts. We see the possibility of greater collaboration at two levels. The first is in continuing to develop the links between the thematic areas of environmental protection and public health. The second is in developing better links between NGOs that work in the policy arena and those that have direct links to marginal communities.

The NGOs carrying out RTK and monitoring efforts contribute two elements. First, they provide a trustworthy knowledge base about environmental dangers. Second, they have carved out a niche in policy circles that provides a mechanism for on-going pressure for transparency and accountability in environmental policy. The major weakness of many RTK efforts is that they haven't developed pervasive or consistent methods to translate access to technical information into community empowerment.

Occupational health and training can be a powerful tool to link environmental and community health, to build public pressure for transparency in environmental regulation, and to empower workers who are exposed to hazards. However, in practice its potential has been limited. On the one hand, it requires access to information about plant-specific hazards, which is frequently not available. On the other hand it requires either the cooperation of maquila managers or sufficient resources to carry out neighborhood-based training programs.

NGOs (and government agencies) involved in community health programs and health outreach programs have developed strategies that are linked directly to the community through the provision of services and education. Yet these programs rarely deal directly with environmental health issues, concentrating instead on family planning and prenatal care, aids prevention, hygiene, nutrition and other public health issues. These programs could provide an infrastructure through which to promote environmental health education and community organizing around environmental health issues.

One of the major obstacles to the kind of collaboration we are suggesting here is that RTK hasn't yet become accepted in Mexico. Therefore, information about actual use and release of hazardous materials is very hard to obtain. In addition, clear links between the release of specific pollutants and specific health effects are difficult to make and much more research is needed in this area.

Another obstacle to collaboration is that relationships between these different kinds of NGOs are limited in many border communities. Since all groups operate with severe resource constraints, they focus on what they are able to do and what they have become specialized in. They rarely seek collaboration with other NGOs in a proactive way when common interests are not explicitly recognized.

Even with the limited access to information and limited collaboration among different sets of NGOs, we found several very interesting projects which are successfully building links between health and environmental issues, and are concurrently influencing laws and policy and building community organizations that can use legal reform to gain a voice in decisionmaking.

A variety of NGOs could be encouraged to build stronger relationships with grassroots constituencies through specific projects that link the NGOs' work to neighborhood or workers' organizations. All involved will need to be open to working in groupings that include municipal governments, U.S. border NGOs, and even the private sector when these can help form or build the capacity of Mexican NGOs and community groups.

One strategy would be to convene a set of meetings bringing together NGOs and other groups involved in community and occupational health education and outreach with groups involved in RTK. This would encourage the latter groups to think about the missing link with community organizing. These meetings could also serve to encourage the community and occupational health people to think about ways to address environmental health issues and to use their community work as part of a larger strategy to pressure for transparent environmental policy and better enforcement. If effective, the meetings could lead to collaborative projects.

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