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158 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
government policy and economic performance that primarily animates
aid policy. By funding organized groups within developing countries,
aid agencies seek to create a virtuous cycle in which rights to free association
beget sound government policies, human development, and
(ultimately) a more conducive environment for the protection of individual
liberties. (Jenkins 2001: 253)
The influence of multilateral bodies like the World Bank and bilateral
aid agencies like USAID have created a ‘sanitized’ version of civil society
where NGOs serve as ‘public-spirited watchdogs quarantined from
political society’ (Jenkins 2001: 261). 13
Political society includes social movements that are often at odds with
the narrow development agendas of NGOs, publics that may be outside
formal channels of participation and a variety of state actors that have
sometimes productive relationships to different sectors of what counts as
‘civil society’. In practice, civil society should be historically situated in
relation to the nation-state and the complex trajectories of modern capitalism.
It is vital, therefore, to question assumptions about the universality
of civil society such that more training and resources to local NGOs in the
area of ICTs will inevitably lead to greater public-interest intervention
following models established in the North. In fact, as Anita Gurumurty
and Parminder Jeet Singh (2005), Directors of IT for Change, have argued,
there is a need to reinforce the centrality of the role of the state
in discussions about ICTs and development – as the only institutional
actor capable of funding and coordinating development on this scale. In
the case of India, they call for pressures on the state to reprioritize ICTs
as a sustainable development priority. In this vein Carlos Afonso (2005),
the Director of RITS (Third Sector Information Network) argues that
the reason that civil society has had more impact on debates over Brazil’s
position on Internet Governance is because ‘The Brazilian government
continues to seek a national consensus proposal regarding the future of
global Internet governance’ (131).
In this chapter we have so far argued that the fact that CSOs within
the WSIS were able to make claims about freedom of information but
were unable to make progress on redistributive claims forces us to pay
attention to the structural limitations of multistakeholderism, as well as
the limitations of civil society as a universal category. In contrast to the
North, where CSOs have emerged in public-policy debates over communication
and information policy as ‘public interest’ or ‘consumer rights’
groups, in postcolonial societies we must pay attention to the murky lines
which divide state institutions from civil society, as well as those between
civil society and political society. As we discussed at the end of Chapter 2,