THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF THE NGO WOMEN'S MOVEMENT MODEL : SHAPING NICARAGUA'S DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS

This article examines the political interactions in Nicaragua between the NGO-based feminist movement and government institutions on the issue of women's health in the mid-1990s. Analysis of the Nicaraguan feminist movement yields insight into the ability of NGO-based movements to influence state policy and into the strengths and limits of using NGOs as an institutional base on which to build a social movement. By defining the mechanisms of state-NGO interactions and analyzing the democratic potential of an NGO-based social movement, this article contributes to understanding of both NGOs and social movements in the context of newly democratic governments. Since the 1980s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have begun to play a significant role in politics and public policy in Latin America. While NGOs had been active in smaller numbers in the preceding decades, they expanded in the 1980s as individuals and international agencies sought to build a democratic counterweight to the military regimes that were dominating the region.' The economic crisis of the 1980s also encouraged the growth of NGOs that sought solutions to worsening poverty. The democratic transition period that followed the military governments witnessed the growth of social movements, which had contributed to the downfall of the military regimes. Many of these social movements have also gradually institutionalized themselves in the form of NGOs. During the military and democratic transition periods, analysts of NGOs and social movements tended to view them as organizations ac*I am grateful to the Tinker Foundation and the Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for partial financial support for this research. A previous version of this article was presented to the American Political Science Association, 28-31 August 1997, in Washington, D.C. For helpful comments on that paper, I would like to thank Karen Kampwirth. I would also like to thank Jonathan Hartlyn and Evelyne Huber for their suggestions on prior drafts of this study and the three anonymous LARR reviewers for their thoughtful comments. 1. See for example Loveman (1994). Latin American Research Review volume 34 number 3 ? 1999 75 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.101 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 06:09:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Latin American Research Review tively opposed to the state, perceiving in them the promise of democracy.2 As democratic consolidation began, however, NGO and social-movement opposition to the state became tempered, in practice if not always in rhetoric, as a result of the opening of democratic channels as well as NGO and social-movement maturation. In the early 1990s, scholars began to document evidence of cooperation between NGOs and the state. Much of this literature reinforced the prior work on the democratic potential of NGOs and social movements, with the important difference that these state-NGO linkages, rather than NGOs alone, were envisioned as the contributing factors to development and democracy.3 As these dramatic political changes have occurred across the region, profound changes have also taken place in economic policy toward neoconservative economic programs that are private-sector-oriented rather than state-oriented. As a result, international and national policy makers are increasingly promoting NGOs as an efficient means of developing third world countries both economically and socially. Neoconservative policy makers, who believe that democracy is inherently tied to capitalism and the private-sector initiative that capitalism represents, also claim that NGOs promote democracy because they are private rather than state institutions. Contemporary structural-adjustment programs reflect this neoconservative position. As one component of these programs, neoconservative international development authorities like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have adopted official policies of promoting NGOs as a means of replacing state services and thus deepening democracy.4 Despite important differences among these perspectives, most of these analysts and policy makers have agreed on the democratic potential of NGOs. Charles Reilly even considered NGOs to be veritable "academies" for democratic learning (1994, 2). Only the post-Marxist view of NGOs has begun to recognize some of the problematic inequalities among 2. Many studies assert the democratic potential of NGOs, including Landim (1987), Clark (1991), Theunis (1992), and Ritchey-Vance (1996). On the democratic potential of social movements, see Mainwaring and Viola (1984), Eckstein (1989), Jaquette (1989, 1994), and Jelin (1990). 3. For general accounts of coordination between the state and NGOs, see Carroll (1992), Fisher (1992), Bebbington and Thiele (1993), and Reilly (1994). Specific case studies include Beaumount, Gamero, and Piazza (1996) on Peru; Salinas and Solimano (1995) on Chile; and Santana Rodriguez (1995) on Colombia. 4. Using NGOs to substitute for state services, often by subcontracting state services to NGOs, is a relatively new strategy promoted by international organizations such as the World Bank. This strategy fits well into neoliberal programs of cutting back the state's involvement in favor of private-sector provision of services. Examples of programs developed with World Bank encouragement that decentralize social services from the state to NGOs include the various social development funds created in Latin American countries, such as the FONCODES program in Peru and the FOSIS program in Chile. The government of Nicaragua has decentralized its social security system to NGOs (see Kampwirth 1997), in part due to World Bank requirements (World Bank 1994).