The question marks over NGOs as media players

Autumn 2010

by Jean-Paul Marthoz

The major aid organisations have developed powerful information arms, says Jean-Paul Marthoz, yet they also have their own political agendas. What sort of relationship should there be between NGOs and journalists?

Should we define the changed new relationship between the media and NGOs? It’s not so much a question about the NGOs' communication policies as about their approach to information. For several years now a number of NGOs have become “information producers” almost on a par with the international press, and at times with greater means of investigation and distribution.

Who, for example, revealed the use of torture in American prisons in Afghanistan in 2003? Human Rights Watch. Who has been tracking down the multinationals’ pillaging of resources in Africa? Global Witness.

Although there are more and more media outlets, there is less and less old-style journalism. There are greater technological tools available for investigation and reporting, but fewer major investigations and less real reporting in the mass media.

The retreat of journalism as we knew it, combined with the revolution in satellite communications and online media, has seen both the public at large and the NGOs and think tanks invading the terrain of journalism by becoming purveyors of information and interpretation.

It’s not that recent a phenomenon. Over the past 20 years or so, when humanitarian aid was becoming so newsworthy, NGOs became information agents by bringing so many journalists to the frontline during humanitarian crises. These NGOs acquired greater credibility than most governments. And they did not merely supply information because they also determined its importance. To some extent the crises that would be talked about and those that would quickly be forgotten were selected by information-savvy NGOs in a process akin to medical triage.

The NGOs also supplied alternative “narratives” through the interpretations they offered of international events. When hundreds of millions of Hutus fled to Zaire in 1994, a number of humanitarian NGOs and UN organisations chose to describe this stampede in humanitarian terms, “forgetting” the fact that thousands of those refugees had themselves committed atrocities in the genocide.

This whole development has created a new set of risks. Among these, the grey area that now connects humanitarian and military affairs can easily lead to confusion and even collusion, with serious consequences for information.

In the world of francophone journalism the catch-phrase is “news paras”; meaning journalists who are parachuted in to cover a crisis without knowing much about the background to the events they are covering. And then, by contrast, there are the “para-journalists” who are not reporters as such but are investigators and researchers who appear to be journalists when not really part of the profession.

Organisations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First and Global Witness have become “news wholesalers”; they are on the ground like special correspondents and supplying their information to journalists. At the height of the second Intifada for instance, a researcher for Human Rights Watch was relaying information live from the embattled Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin.

Modern information technology is giving NGOs and other research organisations much more power to both obtain information and broadcast it. This has given them a new kind of media independence – every day thousands of people now visit the Human Rights Watch website just as if it were a specialised press agency.

So should we view these NGOs in much the same way as we see the press? Not if we look at their aims; for NGOs, information is a tool for influencing and even changing government or inter-governmental policies. Yet the way the NGOs process information clearly places them in much the same “sphere” as journalism. These organisations’ credibility depends on the quality of the information and opinions they disseminate. And their claim to impartiality also brings the NGOs close to the world of journalism. Even if they have a stated aim and are often “subjective”, they can only achieve their goals through demonstrating news impartiality. This means keeping a cool head when faced with the welter of facts submitted by various regimes or groups and subjecting them to the same evaluation criteria.

NGOs also share journalism’s acute awareness of the importance of accurate description and terminology. Calling a situation a massacre or a genocide has clear-cut consequences. Such an assessment can determine the international community’s reaction, define the reputations of those involved in a conflict and even settle the fate of many victims.

What all this means is that it’s essential for NGOs to put in place information collection, processing, interpretation and broadcasting systems that enable them to be reliable sources in the information chain. Their closeness to journalism doesn’t mean that NGOs are neutral, as they have their own priorities, calculations and reflexes. But these constraints do not in any way diminish their importance or legitimacy in the global newsgathering and dissemination process.

But this means that the NGOs and others must respect the fundamental principles of journalism by providing in-depth information without exaggeration or manipulation. Wherever possible they must contribute to improving journalism by making up for what it misses or ignores, by offering details from their own investigations which too often may have been overlooked by overly-rapid media scrutiny. Some NGOs do indeed see themselves as structurally part of journalism. Kimberly Abbott, a communications officer in the U.S. for the International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote not long ago in favour of a voluntary partnership policy between NGOs and journalists to improve international journalism. Her idea is that NGOs could offer their experience, logistics and knowledge to journalists, while for NGOs the media offers a way to reach a much larger audience for subjects so often ignored by the press.

Partnerships of this sort could lead to better reporting, but they also carry the risk of a conflict of interests. Quite aside from any experiments like these, journalism must also try to win back its lost ground and rediscover its complete independence and its will to cover international news. Whether it will do so depends not only on major decisions by media organisations but also on the implementation of new economic models for collecting and processing information. Leonard Downie, a former Editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson of Columbia University have pointed out that the future of journalism involves finding new ways to financially support its activities. They envisage a number of different finance models, but it’s a topic on which debate will clearly rage for some time to come.

Technology and financial pressures are bringing about a large redeployment of the media, and that means the legitimacy of the press is in question. The role and the credibility of public information in the 21st century is increasingly at stake, and no doubt the media could make a difference if it were to take on the role of information steward and referee. So journalists should not scorn the new information players because they could make a positive contribution. But giving too much room to non-journalists, both as individuals and groups, would be a mistake. If the press were to do so it would be digging its own grave, and democracy would be the loser. Democratic societies need a free press that operates without fear or favour on its own conditions and according to its own rules. Journalism is, more than ever, the future of journalism.

Source - Europe's World

The West must open its eyes to the silent revolution among Arab women

 

Autumn 2010

by Gema Martín Muñoz

Photo: Jordan's Princess Rania

Western prejudices about Arab society and Islam have tended to cloak major social shifts in the Arab World. Gema Martín Muñoz says that smaller families and the changing role of women are major forces to be reckoned with.

Arab “reality” is multiform, diverse and many-sided. It is not a homogeneous whole that follows common rules inherent in its religion and culture. It is, on the contrary, a kaleidoscope of situations, developments and transformations, where political, economic and social factors interact with culture and religion, although these last two don’t necessarily determine outcomes. Arab countries and societies often have an image of being rigid and resistant to change because they are seen from the outside through the lens of their ruling regimes, which mostly resist development and change.

But this image does not reflect the reality of Arab societies. On the contrary, an enormous dynamism is opening doors to many types of change, albeit at different speeds and in complex, contradictory ways when change from below is held back from above. It’s a premise that is particularly important when looking at the situation of women in the Arab world.

The predominant image of Arab women is of a passive, exotic and veiled victim-woman who reacts to events instead of actively participating in them. She is an impersonal “communitarised” woman surrounded by stereotypes that feed cultural prejudices. But such simplistic ideas are in fast conflict with a reality that is much more complex. These conceptions are fixed in time and place, yet empirical evidence shows that on the contrary deep mutations are taking place that are changing everything, despite the power of patriarchal structures and equally potent reactionary forces. Arab societies are engaged in a process of intense and irreversible change in which women are playing a crucial role.

The supposed immobility of the Arab and Islam world doesn’t correspond at all to reality. Demographic change along with social and economic factors affecting education and work are forcing a profound change on the traditional family model, and this is now observable in even the most vigorously conservative states. This change has already produced a positive transformation in the role of women and in relations between sexes in Arab societies, and will continue to do so. Arabs live, needless to say, in the same timeframe as the rest of the world, even if they are affected by such peculiarities as the weight of religious norms in the rules governing family life. This influence is not in any case specific to Islam and this “resort to the religious” serves only to slow down, not to block, social developments that now seem inevitable. Research carried out by myself and a broad interdisciplinary group of academics (Sophie Bessis y Gema Martín Muñoz (coords.), Mujer y Familia en las sociedades árabes actuales. Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra, 2010) shows that although the rates of change may differ, and their forms and results diverge, fundamental changes in women’s conditions are general throughout the Arab world.

The pressures and demands of the modern world are undisputable, and they’re also widespread. Differences in schooling levels between boys and girls have lessened everywhere – even if at greater or lesser speeds. And in many Arab countries more girls than boys are now in secondary and higher education. This is a development that shows parents consider the education of their daughters to be just as important as that of their sons. Increased ages for marriage and declining fertility result directly from the teaching and use of contraception. The Maghreb region may lead in this regard, but the phenomenon is observable across the whole Arab world. All the surveys show that young men and women want to study and have a job before they marry. And more and more also want to choose their own partner.

During the last half century there has been a massive entry of women into the public arena, influenced most certainly by the intense shift to urbanisation in all Arab countries as that has enormously increased levels of waged employment among women. Arab countries' massive change from rural to urban societies is one of the greatest transformations they have ever experienced, and it has altered family structures, reducing them in size to something much closer to the ‘nuclear families’ of the West. This new family model now has so much force behind it that it is imposing itself on rural society too, where the decline of the agrarian economy is being matched by a strong shift towards smaller families in just the same way as in urban areas. This change in the family model sometimes occurs at slightly different speeds across the Arab world, but often it is occurring simultaneously in town and country.

These changes have, not surprisingly, led to a redistribution of power between old and young, and between men and women. We are now witnessing a progressive loss of power by representatives of the patriarchal order, and that is being reinforced by a profound shift from the extended family to more nuclear ones. And the increased weight in society of young people and of women today represents a fundamental trend in the contemporary Arab world’s evolution.

But these changes do not necessarily mark a break with the past. The many realities and different forms of ancient and modern development that arise in all the countries studied reflect local compromises with tradition and with patriarchal laws, and different rates of adjustment between old and new ways of life. Local conditions reflect various negotiations and strategies to sidestep existing norms without transgressing them frontally. The changes are notably weaker and more complex in countries like Palestine and Iraq, not only for intrinsic reasons but also because of the grave conflicts they have been undergoing.

The dynamics of change in Arab societies are rarely accompanied by change in the political climates of their states. The Arab region today has strong dynamic societies but is made up of states whose governance has rarely adapted to change, but rather reflects complex and very different realities. Most states resist transferring the processes of social transformation into their own legal framework. They fear, with reason, that extending freedoms and developing individual autonomy within the family, and so weakening patriarchal authority, could have repercussions in the public arena and produce a questioning of the ideological basis of state power. The result is widespread invocation of religious norms, and to a lesser extent references by governments to tradition as a way of legitimising the continuation of patriarchal rule. “State feminisms” are generally more demonstrations of rhetoric or political symbolism, concerned primarily with projecting an international image, than they are a real motor for change.

The process of change may be deep-seated, but it is not linear. Its progress is uneven because it encounters strong forces of inertia and resistance. Arab societies are, however, undergoing intense, fundamental and inevitable change that is quite independent of uneven regional conditioning. The region's political authorities, no less than families themselves, will be forced to accept the inconsistencies of the traditional model when it comes to the transformation of the condition of women. This is also a change that affects many others, so it must be analysed from within the Arab perspective and also from outside.

The situation of women is one of the main benchmarks that the outside world, and particularly the West, uses to assess the Arab world. But such assessments tend to focus on the supposed immobilism that derives from Islamic norms. This focus on the “women-Islam” tandem obscures a better knowledge of the real changes that are taking place. This predominant view of Arab societies often stifles outsiders' ability to break free of their firmly held beliefs that Islamic society confines all Arab women in the same way, when in reality they experience very different conditions. This sort of stereotypical vision prevents us from seeing and evaluating the deep changes taking place in Arab societies, and risks blinding us to how transformation of women is changing Arab societies. The western world thus risks depriving itself of an important key to understanding the Arab world as it is today, and will be tomorrow.

Catalonia - Southern Europe's Research Pole

Autumn 2010

by Josep Huguet

Catalonia is re-inventing itself as a hot-spot for research, development and innovation (RDI), not just to benefit the researchers who have flocked to this pole of scientific endeavour in recent years, but also to benefit society at large. As a result, the Catalan region is already embarking on its first big science projects and is able to compete with the big boys on the dynamic EU scene.

Our blueprint for the future is the Catalan Agreement on Research and Innovation (CARI). Drawn up in 2008, it was approved by government, political and civil society stakeholders, universities, parliament, trade unions and business associations. The CARI established guidelines for research and innovation until 2020 and underpins the commitments made by its signatories.

GROWTH IN INVESTMENT AND ACTIVITY

Catalonia’s success in blending private and public activity is evident from the data. It hosts more than 500,000 companies, including 3,100 foreign businesses. Some 98% are small and medium-sized enterprises, with more than 10,000 companies involved in innovation. Expenditure on R&D totalled €3.286m in 2008, of which two-thirds was private finance, with investment evolving rapidly since then.

In terms of infrastructure, there are 12 universities and 24 science and technology parks in the region. The Spanish High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) has 21 centres in Catalonia, alongside a wide variety of research institutes, 39 of which are supported by the Government of Catalonia under the umbrella CERCA system of research centres. A further 100 TECNIO units are devoted to knowledge and technology transfer. The jewels in Catalonia’s research crown are the large-scale centres such as the Synchrotron Alba, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and the Clean Chamber for microelectronics. They share with the other organisations an enormous capacity to attract and promote talent. In total, this integrated system of RDI hosts more than 227,000 university students and around 25,000 researchers.

A LONG-TERM POLICY DESIGNED FOR THE FUTURE

The success of recent years has been built on a longer-term strategy, which began ten years ago when Catalonia started transforming its research landscape. The government put in place a policy to attract scientific talent by creating the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and founding and funding research institutes with their own legal identity and flexible working structures. As a result, we currently have 217 ICREA researchers, of whom 78 work in CERCA institutes.

Since then, this policy has been enriched with plans to attract large-scale research infrastructure. The result has been the creation of 24 new research institutes, while another 15 university institutes have been expanded and transformed. Prestigious names such as the Centre for Genomic Regulation, the Institute of Photonic Sciences and the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology are all products of this policy. The quality of RDI in Catalonia is reflected in the high level of grants awarded to our institutions by the EU’s European Research Council (ERC). Collectively, the CERCA research centres, the universities and the other Catalan organisations have received 1.85% of all the competitive funds available from the ERC’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7). In addition, 40 Catalan projects have been awarded grants for being among the most groundbreaking in Europe, amounting to 60% of all such ERC grants to Spain. More than half of the 40 researchers who have received these ERC awards belong to ICREA.

LOOKING AHEAD

To fulfil the commitments of the CARI, the Government of Catalonia introduced significant changes to its RDI policy in 2009. For the first time, the 2010-2013 Plan for Research and Innovation (PRI) was designed as a truly inter-ministerial programme, with research and innovation integrated across all sectors of government. Organised into 10 strategic objectives, it provides a framework for publicly-funded research. The aim is to add economic value to RDI projects and to put talent – scientific, creative, innovative and entrepreneurial talent – into the driving seat. For private businesses, the PRI offers a more systematic, international approach, while also establishing that public contracts are aimed at innovative companies too. Wider society is not forgotten either, with some initiatives being launched to involve citizens in scientific progress as well.

THE EUROPEAN DIMENSION

RDI is a dynamic and highly competitive international sector. The European context, too, provides an incentive for regions such as Catalonia to adapt their local scientific structures. In this regard, Catalan science and innovation priorities have been organised into 17 areas, which will be developed into knowledge and innovation communities able to compete at the international level. They will target three main sectors: environmental resources and territorial challenges; people and society; plus scientific, productive and organisational challenges. Catalonia is also co-ordinating its actions with other administrations concerned with science policy, especially the European R&D programmes. With EU research funding growing, and the Catalan share already significant, the Catalan government has recently approved its official position regarding the next EU Framework Programme for research – known as FP8 – which will run from 2014-2020.

The first outstanding issue was to link the FP8’s priorities, and the Catalan PRI priorities, to the pressing socioeconomic challenges facing European society today. The Catalan government also needed to respond to proposals to allow regions to participate in the governance of the European Research Area, which would open up decision-making to places with a significant record in promoting, managing, evaluating and implementing RDI programmes. Sub-programmes of the FP8 are also due to be opened up to regional administrations. The Catalan position on the FP8 also backs the continuation of the Ideas Programme, in particular its support for young researchers, and stronger initiatives to ensure that RDI helps to make Europe more competitive. Catalonia is also well placed to benefit from another proposal for FP8 – to strengthen Europe’s RDI ties with third countries, particularly those in the Euro-Mediterranean region. When combined with local scientific excellence and emerging economic sectors, this can only support Catalonia’s on-going efforts to create a real research pole in the south of Europe, one with a growing influence in the Euro-Mediterranean area.

This section is sponsored by the Government of Catalonia.

www.gencat.cat/diue