Ménage à trois : la pertinence géographique des relations de lobbying entre les ONG-Bankwatch, l’Etat national et la Banque mondiale à Washington D.C.

• Main Author: Ralf Bläser
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes 2007-01-01
• Series: L'Espace Politique
• Subjects: Bankwatch-NGOs; World Bank; Washington D.C.; context; institutional thickness; socio-spatial power resource
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/espacepolitique/303

Since the early nineties, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have attracted a great deal of attention from the political and social sciences which have been studying these actors from different empirical and theoretical angles. From a geographic perspective, however, it is surprising that the socio-spatial context of NGO agency is hardly ever addressed in these studies. Taking so-called bankwatch-NGOs in Washington, D.C. as an example, the paper at hand elaborates on this deficit in NGO research. The US capital shows a striking concentration of bankwatch-NGOs that focus on the policies of the World Bank and other international financial institutions. Situated in an institutionally thick socio-spatial context in direct proximity to the World Bank and the US governmental authorities, they play a key role in the joint reform efforts of the international bankwatch-community. Beyond their sheer spatial proximity to power this is also due to their position at the intersection of various local and translocal relational and knowledge flows. With reference to D. Massey and J. Agnew Washington, D.C. shall, therefore, be conceptualized as a unique and extroverted place where societal macrostructure and human agency are reciprocally corresponding. Against this background, the place-specific context in which the everyday activities of the NGOs are embedded is conceived as a particular socio-spatial opportunity structure. The latter is primarily based on the eminent opportunities of the Washington-based NGOs to access and control specific power resources. Following structuration theory, these resources are identified as relational power, knowledge power, and framing power. In fact, the development of trust relations with individual key actors of the US national system is crucial for the NGOs’ abilities to exert influence on the World Bank. Thus, even in this genuinely international matter, the NGOs remain dependent on the executive and legislative potentials of their nation state – the Bank’s greatest shareholder. This interpretation allows for a conceptualization of Washington, D.C. as the spatial aggregation of power relations between NGOs, nation state and the World Bank, thereby integrating structure and agency. By focusing on the social interactions in the Washington ‘face-to-face-society’ the everyday struggles for (counter-)hegemony can be analyzed from a decidedly geographic perspective. A Washington campaign for the abolition of user fees for primary health and education services in the World Bank’s borrowing countries serves to illustrate these conceptual considerations as to the role of the socio-spatial context in which the NGOs operate.