The Development GAP's Programmatic History
In 1976, having worked at the grassroots in Africa and Latin America and then on development program and policy issues in the United States, a number of advocates for new and more enlightened U.S. and multinational aid and economic policies met in Washington. During the ensuing months, they zeroed in on the creation of an organizational mechanism that would enable them to address the large gap they had seen between local realities overseas and the way that they were being perceived and approached in the North. By the end of the year, three of those activists – Doug Hellinger, Steve Hellinger and Fred O’Regan – had founded The Development GAP and had begun working inside aid agencies and Washington policy centers to demonstrate how to deliver development assistance directly to civil-society organizations. In January 1977, the organization was incorporated as the not-for-profit Development Group for Alternative Policies, one of the first economic-justice advocacy organizations dealing with global development-related issues from a grassroots perspective.
U.S. foreign aid
During its first seven years, The Development GAP worked extensively in Latin America and Africa, breaking new ground for the World Bank, USAID and smaller development assistance organizations by demonstrating, developing and implementing participatory aid approaches involving local, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly in the area of small-enterprise support and urban income generation. At the same time, we were engaged extensively in the same regions in NGO project assessment and in the conversion of our ongoing participatory field work into public education and advocacy for new aid policies and programs. This advocacy took various forms, including efforts leading to the creation of mechanisms for the funding of grassroots initiatives in Africa, the design of new strategies for public involvement in development planning and programming, and the formulation and promotion of policy proposals for a participatory U.S. bilateral aid program. Each of these lines of work led to related initiatives in subsequent eras of The Development GAP’s history.
One of The Development GAP’s first initiatives was a protracted nine-year endeavor to create an independent, U.S. government institution -- the African Development Foundation -- to support grassroots development in Africa. The creation of the ADF grew out of our first-hand experience with the Congressionally established Inter-American Foundation (IAF), on-the-ground work in Africa, extensive consultations and conceptualization, intensive assistance to Congress, and successful efforts to prevent the ADF’s politicization during its set-up phase. Since its inception in 1984, the ADF has funded thousands of local development projects across Africa. A year earlier, The Development GAP turned some of its attention to attempts to politicize the IAF and, through an intensive, decade-long collaborative effort, helped sustain the Foundation’s independence and grantmaking. Also in 1983, we built on our experience with income-generating projects in Africa by designing with Kenyan colleagues an NGO-support mechanism for this sector. The Kenya Rural Enterprise Programme (K-REP) has since evolved into a unique banking institution that finances economic endeavors, particularly those of women, in marginalized communities.
While it was working to create new aid institutions, The Development GAP was also attempting to help make USAID more responsive to local realities and priorities. Through the late 1970s and into 1980, we prepared a series of papers for the agency that proposed and defined modes of interaction between planners and citizens that would effectively decentralize and enhance development planning at the regional level. Some 13 years later, in 1993, The Development GAP, upon the request of the new head of USAID, developed a participatory approach to the agency’s strategic and program planning and implementation that was subsequently made the basis for policy in the agency’s overseas offices.
During the latter part of the 1980s, The Development GAP had already put this participatory aid approach to national and regional development into practice in the Caribbean. Having worked since 1982 with civil-society organizations in the region alarmed by the anti-development nature of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) being promoted by the United States, The Development GAP was asked by the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs to create a vehicle by which its members and other members of the U.S. Congress could hear and integrate into policy the perspectives of a wide range of Caribbean sectors. Over the course of 1987-88, The Development GAP organized and convened, in Barbados, public forums at which some two dozen sectoral representatives and public officials at each event conveyed to Congressional delegations their analysis, critique and recommended restructuring of the CBI. After The Development GAP had translated their recommendations into a detailed policy proposal for the Subcommittee, the Caribbean participants provided feedback and refined the proposal. This participatory initiative was embraced by the full Foreign Affairs Committee, and it and the House of Representatives adopted the far-reaching aid reforms. The Development GAP meanwhile supported the creation of the Caribbean Policy Development Centre to help people in the region sustain and expand their advocacy efforts.
During this same period, we also assisted the House Subcommittee on Africa in conceptualizing a Development Fund for Africa. As the chair of an ecumenical working group of U.S. religious-based NGOs, The Development GAP participated in consultations with the Subcommittee and helped shape language mandating USAID support for equitable, participatory, environmentally sustainable and self-reliant economic development.
At various moments in its history, The Development GAP has taken initiatives with Congress to fundamentally reshape USAID itself. We first worked toward this end in advising the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1977-78. Our next attempt was in 1988-89, following the publication of Aid for Just Development: Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance, in which The Development GAP’s founders drew on their experience to assess, and recommend far-reaching changes in, USAID, the World Bank, smaller aid institutions and the entire aid structure. Policy proposals that we drew from those recommendations and from input from a coalition of colleague organizations coordinated by The Development GAP prompted the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to ask The Development GAP to advise it on the overhaul of the U.S. aid program. After that initiative faltered, the new Clinton Administration requested our assistance in transforming USAID, and we built upon this endeavor by again shaping a detailed policy proposal with other NGOs. The impact of these efforts was again limited, however, as was another Foreign Affairs Committee endeavor in 2009 to which The Development GAP contributed a field-based proposal. USAID today remains far more the captive of U.S. geopolitics and special interests than the responsive supporter of equitable and sustainable development endeavors that it should be.
International economic policies
In 1983, the nature, scope and focus of The Development GAP’s work began to undergo a significant change as a result of a major shift in the manner in which the countries of the North related economically to those of the South. To ensure that Northern banks were repaid by Southern countries plunged into a debt crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had begun to impose strict financial stabilization programs on its borrowers, and the World Bank and other foreign-aid institutions were transformed by their Northern governors into wholesale prescribers of economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization and export-promotion policies. This sea change in the nature, if not the purpose, of foreign aid, accompanied as it was by the beginning of a major push by the North for trade accords that would allow its investors to take advantage of the reduced labor, environmental and other production costs induced in the South, caused The Development GAP and its Southern colleague organizations to shift gears.
Within a year, a large portion of our time was dedicated to addressing these policies with our partners, particularly the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) tied to World Bank and ultimately IMF loans, as well as U.S. trade policy in the Western Hemisphere, beginning with the CBI trade proposals. At the same time, we moved to adapt the participatory methodologies that we had collaboratively shaped for the support of development projects, programs and planning to the broad-based and democratic design of economic policies.
World Bank and IMF
By the mid-1980s, The Development GAP was working in a number of forums to educate the U.S. public and policymakers about the dangers of World Bank policies. Dissatisfied with the clubbiness of the Bank-NGO Committee established by the Bank, we joined the Committee and helped convert it into an advocacy forum for NGO challenges to structural adjustment and other Bank policies. At the same time, we joined the campaign of U.S. environmental organizations on the Bank and the other multilateral development banks and worked actively to link economic-justice organizations, in the United States and abroad, to this long-term effort to hold these institutions accountable for the negative impacts of their actions on the countries of the South. In the early 1990s, The Development GAP helped organize alternative international NGO forums in Washington parallel to the Bank/IMF Annual Meetings and joined International Rivers Network in co-editing, over a seven-year period, the quarterly BankCheck on the activities of, and challenges to, the World Bank and the other international financial institutions (IFIs).
The 1992 forum, involving representatives of some 100 organizations worldwide and focused on structural adjustment and future campaigning on the IFIs, planted the seeds for The Development GAP’s initiation of the U.S. 50 Years Is Enough campaign. Launched and coordinated with IRN and the Environmental Defense Fund, this media-focused endeavor attracted some 200 organizations into a new U.S. network and kick-started counterpart initiatives in a dozen other countries and a global IFI-accountability campaign. The mobilizing and educational efforts of those who have run 50 Years Is Enough through the years continue to reverberate around the world.
During the 1990s, The Development GAP also worked closely with colleague organizations in the South in documenting the economic, local-level and gender effects of IFI-imposed adjustment policies on regions and countries worldwide. These sites included Costa Rica (1993), Mexico (1994), Latin America (1995), Africa (1996) and Haiti (1997), and a global, multi-country study of the impact of the IMF was completed in 1999. In addition, we worked with women’s organizations across Africa to challenge existing adjustment policies and with a number of Latin American organizations in developing and presenting economic-policy alternatives at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Development GAP also presented testimony on SAPs and related IFI issues in a number of forums, including U.S. Congressional committees, the Congressionally mandated Meltzer Commission, the U.N. Economic and Social Council, and a U.N. Financing for Development Conference panel.
When Jim Wolfensohn, already stung by the impact of the 50 Years Is Enough campaign on the World Bank’s reputation, assumed the presidency of the Bank in 1995, The Development GAP, on behalf of a delegation of U.S. NGOs, challenged him to join civil-society organizations around the world in an investigation of the on-the-ground impacts of SAPs. Developed with colleague organizations across the South, coordinated on behalf of an expansive civil-society network (SAPRIN) by The Development GAP, and funded by European governments, the European Union, UNDP, non-governmental organizations and foundations, the resulting five-year, ten-country Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) yielded detailed and sharply critical assessments of the effects of such policies as trade and financial-sector liberalization, privatization, and labor-market reforms. Involving hundreds of organizations across a wide range of sectors in each country, as well as governments and the Bank, and comprising public forums, local workshops and ground-level, participatory, political-economy research, SAPRI documented not only the devastating developmental failure of SAPs. Just as importantly, it demonstrated the capacity of civil society to play a significant role on issues of economic policy and the unwillingness, in the end, of the Bank to jettison policies and policymaking processes that it itself had acknowledged to have failed.
SAPRI also spawned a book, edited by The Development GAP in English and Spanish, on its global findings, as well as two other Bank/civil-society investigations into the impact of large dam construction and the financing of extractive industries that also demonstrated the Bank’s refusal to implement findings to which it was party. Just as significant as the SAPRI findings were the participatory processes, particularly those at the country level, that produced them.
The Bank also failed to follow through on the commitment made by Wolfensohn to SAPRIN following the completion of SAPRI to apply the learning gained to the development of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Required of the world’s poorest countries by the IFIs as part of debt-reduction agreements, the PRSPs and the agreements themselves had been heavily criticized by The Development GAP and a number of other CSOs in the South and North when proposed in 1999 for, among other reasons, further empowering the IFIs to impose poverty- and debt-inducing structural-adjustment policies. Indeed, we and our colleagues had been challenging, through research and advocacy, the use of the Southern debt crisis by the Bank, the IMF and their Northern government board members to control Southern economies since The Development GAP housed the U.S. Debt Crisis Network nearly two decades earlier.
Hemispheric trade
As the North moved in the 1980s to complement economic-restructuring adjustment measures that reduce production costs with trade arrangements that facilitate the international flow of productive inputs and outputs, The Development GAP moved, as well, to address this worrisome expansion of corporate globalization. Following extensive consultations with groups in the Caribbean and Central America in 1982, we spent much of the 1980s educating the U.S. Congress, media and public about the prospective, debilitating effects of the Caribbean Basin Initiative’s trade and aid provisions. When the Bush Administration unveiled its Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) in 1990 to establish a free-trade zone from “Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego,” The Development GAP teamed with the Natural Resources Defense Council and our Southern colleagues to inform Congress of the dangers in its trade, aid and debt terms.
While the educational campaign on the EAI lasted two years, The Development GAP focused intensely for a longer period on its principal component: the Administration’s proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In January 1991, we hosted the first strategy meeting of Mexican, Canadian and U.S. NGOs, which launched an unprecedented trinational collaboration and campaign of mobilization, analysis, consensus building, media outreach and education intended to transform or sideline the anti-development trade proposal. During the next three years, The Development GAP helped organize and ultimately served as secretariat and coordinator of the U.S. network, which came to be known as the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART). We coordinated its work with its Mexican and Canadian counterparts and represented it in forums in Mexico parallel to NAFTA negotiating sessions, while producing, editing and translating educational materials, including the quarterly NaftaThoughts. The newsletter continued to be published as Our Americas/Nuestras Americas and disseminated hemisphere-wide through 1997.
When, upon the narrow passage of NAFTA by the U.S. Congress, the Clinton Administration sought to extend the U.S. trade and investment agenda to the rest of the Americas, the coordination and funding of ART became an increasingly major responsibility of The Development GAP. Our organization devoted larger amounts of its time to ART’s coordination, with Karen Hansen-Kuhn focusing on the development and coordination of close working relations with civil-society networks in and among other Latin American countries. After managing ART’s collaboration with its Chilean counterpart in an ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement, we worked with trade activists and multi-sectoral national and multinational civil-society networks throughout the Americas to create the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), which remains today a significant transnational citizens’ movement on trade and economic justice.
Over the course of a dozen years, The Development GAP played central roles in ART’s and the HSA’s challenges to the U.S.-promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to U.S. sub-regional accords with Central America and the Andean countries. In addition to facilitating hemispheric communications and strategic planning and actions, including the co-organizing of Summits of the Peoples of the Americas parallel to official hemispheric trade negotiations, The Development GAP co-authored, coordinated the production of, edited, and translated a range of publications and policy papers on each of the proposed accords. Perhaps of most lasting importance was Karen’s coordination, as head of the HSA’s Monitoring and Alternatives Committee, of successive and expanding editions of Alternatives for the Americas, a compendium of sectoral proposals prepared by civil-society analysts throughout the hemisphere as a consensus document that represents a clear and economically just and sound option to the FTAA.In addition to serving as a core reference document for trade activists, Alternatives for the Americas has been adapted and adopted by Latin American governments as the basis for an alternative vision for the economic integration of the region.
The Development GAP played a particularly active role in the civil-society challenge to the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Spending a considerable amount of time in the region, Karen worked closely on behalf of ART with national citizens’ networks and with national legislators in highly effective educational campaigns. While CAFTA was narrowly passed by the U.S. Congress and by Central American legislatures, it represented a rather hollow victory for U.S. corporate lobbyists, as the United States was in the meantime unable to secure support for the hemisphere-wide FTAA.The negotiation of the accord was effectively suspended at the official Summit of the Americas in Argentina at the end of 2005, with key South American leaders moving forward with their own program of regional economic integration.
Democratic governance
Throughout its history, The Development GAP has worked with its Southern colleagues in support of their democratization efforts, primarily their endeavors to regain national control over, and inject citizen input into, economic policymaking. In a number of countries, however, we have sought to address crises in the political systems themselves. In the case of Nicaragua, our on-the-ground experience enabled us to provide guidance to the U.S. State Department and Congress in the transition from the Somoza dictatorship, to improve relations between the new Sandinista government and the United States through “baseball diplomacy” in the form of the organization of a visit to Nicaragua by the Baltimore Orioles in 1980, to support national economic reconstruction and reconciliation through participatory development programming and the facilitation of foreign assistance, to contribute to efforts to terminate the illegal U.S. involvement in the subsequent “Contra war”, and to assist the successor government as it sought to prevent the U.S. imposition of unjust economic policies that could instigate civil strife.
In the case of Mexico, where The Development GAP was prominently active for more than a dozen years in the civil-society struggle against NAFTA and the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF, we also provided a haven and platform in Washington for a university team forced into exile for revealing electoral fraud in the 1994 presidential election. During the mid-1990s, The Development GAP advised the National Security Council and the State Department, as well as Congressional committees, on U.S. policy toward Haiti and then revealed efforts by our government to promote the position of anti-democratic forces in that country. Meanwhile we worked with Haitian and U.S. NGOs to prevent the U.S. imposition of adjustment policies on the Aristide government. In other parts of the world, such as the Horn of Africa and East Timor, we have also responded to civil-society and government requests for assistance in securing national control of sufficient policy space to enable effective governance.
Southern colleagues and partner organizations
The Development GAP has been fortunate to have established through the years close working relationships with some of the finest individuals and organizations in the South with long involvement with grassroots organizations in the struggle for national and global economic justice. Perhaps our closest partner has been Equipo Pueblo of Mexico, with which we worked intimately on a range of important bilateral, regional, hemispheric and global issues starting in 1991. Carlos Heredia worked intensively with The Development GAP on behalf of Pueblo, as a member of our staff in the mid-1990s, and from a succession of Mexican public-policy positions. Atherton Martin of Dominica worked with us in Washington in the 1980s, and our equally intensive collaboration on key economic issues continued after he returned to the Caribbean and founded The Development Institute.
In The Development GAP’s early years, we worked on the ground with a number of organizations, most notably for several years with the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS) in Egypt. In Africa we have also collaborated for extended periods with, among others, the African Women’s Economic Policy Network, in whose founding we provided assistance, Third World Network–Africa, and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and other organizations in Zimbabwe. In Asia, The Development GAP’s longest and most intensive collaborations have been with Third World Network in Malaysia, Focus on the Global South in Thailand, Freedom from Debt Coalition in the Philippines, and PROSHIKA in Bangladesh. In addition to Equipo Pueblo, our long-term relationships with colleague organizations in Latin America have been with IBASE in Brazil, FOCO in Argentina, FUNDE in El Salvador, and IEDECA in Ecuador, as well as with the Hemispheric Social Alliance and its member national networks, most notably RMALC in Mexico and the Alianza Chilena por un Comercio Justo in Chile.
In the United States, Canada and Europe, we have worked over the years in partnership or in coalitions with a large number of economic-justice development, environmental, church and human-rights organizations, including, in the last case, the International Labor Rights Fund, to which we proudly provided its first home.
Our relationships with these and many other organizations in the South and North have been indispensable to The Development GAP’s work over the
decades. Indeed, the learning and trust that we have gained from the many outstanding people in these organizations have been the basis for everything we have done in our joint efforts to promote economic justice.
Today, The Development GAP continues to assist like-minded organizations, monitor public institutions with development-support mandates, teach occasional graduate classes in development studies, and analyze and inform on global economic-justice issues.
In 1976, having worked at the grassroots in Africa and Latin America and then on development program and policy issues in the United States, a number of advocates for new and more enlightened U.S. and multinational aid and economic policies met in Washington. During the ensuing months, they zeroed in on the creation of an organizational mechanism that would enable them to address the large gap they had seen between local realities overseas and the way that they were being perceived and approached in the North. By the end of the year, three of those activists – Doug Hellinger, Steve Hellinger and Fred O’Regan – had founded The Development GAP and had begun working inside aid agencies and Washington policy centers to demonstrate how to deliver development assistance directly to civil-society organizations. In January 1977, the organization was incorporated as the not-for-profit Development Group for Alternative Policies, one of the first economic-justice advocacy organizations dealing with global development-related issues from a grassroots perspective.
U.S. foreign aid
During its first seven years, The Development GAP worked extensively in Latin America and Africa, breaking new ground for the World Bank, USAID and smaller development assistance organizations by demonstrating, developing and implementing participatory aid approaches involving local, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly in the area of small-enterprise support and urban income generation. At the same time, we were engaged extensively in the same regions in NGO project assessment and in the conversion of our ongoing participatory field work into public education and advocacy for new aid policies and programs. This advocacy took various forms, including efforts leading to the creation of mechanisms for the funding of grassroots initiatives in Africa, the design of new strategies for public involvement in development planning and programming, and the formulation and promotion of policy proposals for a participatory U.S. bilateral aid program. Each of these lines of work led to related initiatives in subsequent eras of The Development GAP’s history.
One of The Development GAP’s first initiatives was a protracted nine-year endeavor to create an independent, U.S. government institution -- the African Development Foundation -- to support grassroots development in Africa. The creation of the ADF grew out of our first-hand experience with the Congressionally established Inter-American Foundation (IAF), on-the-ground work in Africa, extensive consultations and conceptualization, intensive assistance to Congress, and successful efforts to prevent the ADF’s politicization during its set-up phase. Since its inception in 1984, the ADF has funded thousands of local development projects across Africa. A year earlier, The Development GAP turned some of its attention to attempts to politicize the IAF and, through an intensive, decade-long collaborative effort, helped sustain the Foundation’s independence and grantmaking. Also in 1983, we built on our experience with income-generating projects in Africa by designing with Kenyan colleagues an NGO-support mechanism for this sector. The Kenya Rural Enterprise Programme (K-REP) has since evolved into a unique banking institution that finances economic endeavors, particularly those of women, in marginalized communities.
While it was working to create new aid institutions, The Development GAP was also attempting to help make USAID more responsive to local realities and priorities. Through the late 1970s and into 1980, we prepared a series of papers for the agency that proposed and defined modes of interaction between planners and citizens that would effectively decentralize and enhance development planning at the regional level. Some 13 years later, in 1993, The Development GAP, upon the request of the new head of USAID, developed a participatory approach to the agency’s strategic and program planning and implementation that was subsequently made the basis for policy in the agency’s overseas offices.
During the latter part of the 1980s, The Development GAP had already put this participatory aid approach to national and regional development into practice in the Caribbean. Having worked since 1982 with civil-society organizations in the region alarmed by the anti-development nature of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) being promoted by the United States, The Development GAP was asked by the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs to create a vehicle by which its members and other members of the U.S. Congress could hear and integrate into policy the perspectives of a wide range of Caribbean sectors. Over the course of 1987-88, The Development GAP organized and convened, in Barbados, public forums at which some two dozen sectoral representatives and public officials at each event conveyed to Congressional delegations their analysis, critique and recommended restructuring of the CBI. After The Development GAP had translated their recommendations into a detailed policy proposal for the Subcommittee, the Caribbean participants provided feedback and refined the proposal. This participatory initiative was embraced by the full Foreign Affairs Committee, and it and the House of Representatives adopted the far-reaching aid reforms. The Development GAP meanwhile supported the creation of the Caribbean Policy Development Centre to help people in the region sustain and expand their advocacy efforts.
During this same period, we also assisted the House Subcommittee on Africa in conceptualizing a Development Fund for Africa. As the chair of an ecumenical working group of U.S. religious-based NGOs, The Development GAP participated in consultations with the Subcommittee and helped shape language mandating USAID support for equitable, participatory, environmentally sustainable and self-reliant economic development.
At various moments in its history, The Development GAP has taken initiatives with Congress to fundamentally reshape USAID itself. We first worked toward this end in advising the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1977-78. Our next attempt was in 1988-89, following the publication of Aid for Just Development: Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance, in which The Development GAP’s founders drew on their experience to assess, and recommend far-reaching changes in, USAID, the World Bank, smaller aid institutions and the entire aid structure. Policy proposals that we drew from those recommendations and from input from a coalition of colleague organizations coordinated by The Development GAP prompted the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to ask The Development GAP to advise it on the overhaul of the U.S. aid program. After that initiative faltered, the new Clinton Administration requested our assistance in transforming USAID, and we built upon this endeavor by again shaping a detailed policy proposal with other NGOs. The impact of these efforts was again limited, however, as was another Foreign Affairs Committee endeavor in 2009 to which The Development GAP contributed a field-based proposal. USAID today remains far more the captive of U.S. geopolitics and special interests than the responsive supporter of equitable and sustainable development endeavors that it should be.
International economic policies
In 1983, the nature, scope and focus of The Development GAP’s work began to undergo a significant change as a result of a major shift in the manner in which the countries of the North related economically to those of the South. To ensure that Northern banks were repaid by Southern countries plunged into a debt crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had begun to impose strict financial stabilization programs on its borrowers, and the World Bank and other foreign-aid institutions were transformed by their Northern governors into wholesale prescribers of economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization and export-promotion policies. This sea change in the nature, if not the purpose, of foreign aid, accompanied as it was by the beginning of a major push by the North for trade accords that would allow its investors to take advantage of the reduced labor, environmental and other production costs induced in the South, caused The Development GAP and its Southern colleague organizations to shift gears.
Within a year, a large portion of our time was dedicated to addressing these policies with our partners, particularly the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) tied to World Bank and ultimately IMF loans, as well as U.S. trade policy in the Western Hemisphere, beginning with the CBI trade proposals. At the same time, we moved to adapt the participatory methodologies that we had collaboratively shaped for the support of development projects, programs and planning to the broad-based and democratic design of economic policies.
World Bank and IMF
By the mid-1980s, The Development GAP was working in a number of forums to educate the U.S. public and policymakers about the dangers of World Bank policies. Dissatisfied with the clubbiness of the Bank-NGO Committee established by the Bank, we joined the Committee and helped convert it into an advocacy forum for NGO challenges to structural adjustment and other Bank policies. At the same time, we joined the campaign of U.S. environmental organizations on the Bank and the other multilateral development banks and worked actively to link economic-justice organizations, in the United States and abroad, to this long-term effort to hold these institutions accountable for the negative impacts of their actions on the countries of the South. In the early 1990s, The Development GAP helped organize alternative international NGO forums in Washington parallel to the Bank/IMF Annual Meetings and joined International Rivers Network in co-editing, over a seven-year period, the quarterly BankCheck on the activities of, and challenges to, the World Bank and the other international financial institutions (IFIs).
The 1992 forum, involving representatives of some 100 organizations worldwide and focused on structural adjustment and future campaigning on the IFIs, planted the seeds for The Development GAP’s initiation of the U.S. 50 Years Is Enough campaign. Launched and coordinated with IRN and the Environmental Defense Fund, this media-focused endeavor attracted some 200 organizations into a new U.S. network and kick-started counterpart initiatives in a dozen other countries and a global IFI-accountability campaign. The mobilizing and educational efforts of those who have run 50 Years Is Enough through the years continue to reverberate around the world.
During the 1990s, The Development GAP also worked closely with colleague organizations in the South in documenting the economic, local-level and gender effects of IFI-imposed adjustment policies on regions and countries worldwide. These sites included Costa Rica (1993), Mexico (1994), Latin America (1995), Africa (1996) and Haiti (1997), and a global, multi-country study of the impact of the IMF was completed in 1999. In addition, we worked with women’s organizations across Africa to challenge existing adjustment policies and with a number of Latin American organizations in developing and presenting economic-policy alternatives at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Development GAP also presented testimony on SAPs and related IFI issues in a number of forums, including U.S. Congressional committees, the Congressionally mandated Meltzer Commission, the U.N. Economic and Social Council, and a U.N. Financing for Development Conference panel.
When Jim Wolfensohn, already stung by the impact of the 50 Years Is Enough campaign on the World Bank’s reputation, assumed the presidency of the Bank in 1995, The Development GAP, on behalf of a delegation of U.S. NGOs, challenged him to join civil-society organizations around the world in an investigation of the on-the-ground impacts of SAPs. Developed with colleague organizations across the South, coordinated on behalf of an expansive civil-society network (SAPRIN) by The Development GAP, and funded by European governments, the European Union, UNDP, non-governmental organizations and foundations, the resulting five-year, ten-country Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) yielded detailed and sharply critical assessments of the effects of such policies as trade and financial-sector liberalization, privatization, and labor-market reforms. Involving hundreds of organizations across a wide range of sectors in each country, as well as governments and the Bank, and comprising public forums, local workshops and ground-level, participatory, political-economy research, SAPRI documented not only the devastating developmental failure of SAPs. Just as importantly, it demonstrated the capacity of civil society to play a significant role on issues of economic policy and the unwillingness, in the end, of the Bank to jettison policies and policymaking processes that it itself had acknowledged to have failed.
SAPRI also spawned a book, edited by The Development GAP in English and Spanish, on its global findings, as well as two other Bank/civil-society investigations into the impact of large dam construction and the financing of extractive industries that also demonstrated the Bank’s refusal to implement findings to which it was party. Just as significant as the SAPRI findings were the participatory processes, particularly those at the country level, that produced them.
The Bank also failed to follow through on the commitment made by Wolfensohn to SAPRIN following the completion of SAPRI to apply the learning gained to the development of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Required of the world’s poorest countries by the IFIs as part of debt-reduction agreements, the PRSPs and the agreements themselves had been heavily criticized by The Development GAP and a number of other CSOs in the South and North when proposed in 1999 for, among other reasons, further empowering the IFIs to impose poverty- and debt-inducing structural-adjustment policies. Indeed, we and our colleagues had been challenging, through research and advocacy, the use of the Southern debt crisis by the Bank, the IMF and their Northern government board members to control Southern economies since The Development GAP housed the U.S. Debt Crisis Network nearly two decades earlier.
Hemispheric trade
As the North moved in the 1980s to complement economic-restructuring adjustment measures that reduce production costs with trade arrangements that facilitate the international flow of productive inputs and outputs, The Development GAP moved, as well, to address this worrisome expansion of corporate globalization. Following extensive consultations with groups in the Caribbean and Central America in 1982, we spent much of the 1980s educating the U.S. Congress, media and public about the prospective, debilitating effects of the Caribbean Basin Initiative’s trade and aid provisions. When the Bush Administration unveiled its Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) in 1990 to establish a free-trade zone from “Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego,” The Development GAP teamed with the Natural Resources Defense Council and our Southern colleagues to inform Congress of the dangers in its trade, aid and debt terms.
While the educational campaign on the EAI lasted two years, The Development GAP focused intensely for a longer period on its principal component: the Administration’s proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In January 1991, we hosted the first strategy meeting of Mexican, Canadian and U.S. NGOs, which launched an unprecedented trinational collaboration and campaign of mobilization, analysis, consensus building, media outreach and education intended to transform or sideline the anti-development trade proposal. During the next three years, The Development GAP helped organize and ultimately served as secretariat and coordinator of the U.S. network, which came to be known as the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART). We coordinated its work with its Mexican and Canadian counterparts and represented it in forums in Mexico parallel to NAFTA negotiating sessions, while producing, editing and translating educational materials, including the quarterly NaftaThoughts. The newsletter continued to be published as Our Americas/Nuestras Americas and disseminated hemisphere-wide through 1997.
When, upon the narrow passage of NAFTA by the U.S. Congress, the Clinton Administration sought to extend the U.S. trade and investment agenda to the rest of the Americas, the coordination and funding of ART became an increasingly major responsibility of The Development GAP. Our organization devoted larger amounts of its time to ART’s coordination, with Karen Hansen-Kuhn focusing on the development and coordination of close working relations with civil-society networks in and among other Latin American countries. After managing ART’s collaboration with its Chilean counterpart in an ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement, we worked with trade activists and multi-sectoral national and multinational civil-society networks throughout the Americas to create the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), which remains today a significant transnational citizens’ movement on trade and economic justice.
Over the course of a dozen years, The Development GAP played central roles in ART’s and the HSA’s challenges to the U.S.-promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to U.S. sub-regional accords with Central America and the Andean countries. In addition to facilitating hemispheric communications and strategic planning and actions, including the co-organizing of Summits of the Peoples of the Americas parallel to official hemispheric trade negotiations, The Development GAP co-authored, coordinated the production of, edited, and translated a range of publications and policy papers on each of the proposed accords. Perhaps of most lasting importance was Karen’s coordination, as head of the HSA’s Monitoring and Alternatives Committee, of successive and expanding editions of Alternatives for the Americas, a compendium of sectoral proposals prepared by civil-society analysts throughout the hemisphere as a consensus document that represents a clear and economically just and sound option to the FTAA.In addition to serving as a core reference document for trade activists, Alternatives for the Americas has been adapted and adopted by Latin American governments as the basis for an alternative vision for the economic integration of the region.
The Development GAP played a particularly active role in the civil-society challenge to the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Spending a considerable amount of time in the region, Karen worked closely on behalf of ART with national citizens’ networks and with national legislators in highly effective educational campaigns. While CAFTA was narrowly passed by the U.S. Congress and by Central American legislatures, it represented a rather hollow victory for U.S. corporate lobbyists, as the United States was in the meantime unable to secure support for the hemisphere-wide FTAA.The negotiation of the accord was effectively suspended at the official Summit of the Americas in Argentina at the end of 2005, with key South American leaders moving forward with their own program of regional economic integration.
Democratic governance
Throughout its history, The Development GAP has worked with its Southern colleagues in support of their democratization efforts, primarily their endeavors to regain national control over, and inject citizen input into, economic policymaking. In a number of countries, however, we have sought to address crises in the political systems themselves. In the case of Nicaragua, our on-the-ground experience enabled us to provide guidance to the U.S. State Department and Congress in the transition from the Somoza dictatorship, to improve relations between the new Sandinista government and the United States through “baseball diplomacy” in the form of the organization of a visit to Nicaragua by the Baltimore Orioles in 1980, to support national economic reconstruction and reconciliation through participatory development programming and the facilitation of foreign assistance, to contribute to efforts to terminate the illegal U.S. involvement in the subsequent “Contra war”, and to assist the successor government as it sought to prevent the U.S. imposition of unjust economic policies that could instigate civil strife.
In the case of Mexico, where The Development GAP was prominently active for more than a dozen years in the civil-society struggle against NAFTA and the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF, we also provided a haven and platform in Washington for a university team forced into exile for revealing electoral fraud in the 1994 presidential election. During the mid-1990s, The Development GAP advised the National Security Council and the State Department, as well as Congressional committees, on U.S. policy toward Haiti and then revealed efforts by our government to promote the position of anti-democratic forces in that country. Meanwhile we worked with Haitian and U.S. NGOs to prevent the U.S. imposition of adjustment policies on the Aristide government. In other parts of the world, such as the Horn of Africa and East Timor, we have also responded to civil-society and government requests for assistance in securing national control of sufficient policy space to enable effective governance.
Southern colleagues and partner organizations
The Development GAP has been fortunate to have established through the years close working relationships with some of the finest individuals and organizations in the South with long involvement with grassroots organizations in the struggle for national and global economic justice. Perhaps our closest partner has been Equipo Pueblo of Mexico, with which we worked intimately on a range of important bilateral, regional, hemispheric and global issues starting in 1991. Carlos Heredia worked intensively with The Development GAP on behalf of Pueblo, as a member of our staff in the mid-1990s, and from a succession of Mexican public-policy positions. Atherton Martin of Dominica worked with us in Washington in the 1980s, and our equally intensive collaboration on key economic issues continued after he returned to the Caribbean and founded The Development Institute.
In The Development GAP’s early years, we worked on the ground with a number of organizations, most notably for several years with the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS) in Egypt. In Africa we have also collaborated for extended periods with, among others, the African Women’s Economic Policy Network, in whose founding we provided assistance, Third World Network–Africa, and the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and other organizations in Zimbabwe. In Asia, The Development GAP’s longest and most intensive collaborations have been with Third World Network in Malaysia, Focus on the Global South in Thailand, Freedom from Debt Coalition in the Philippines, and PROSHIKA in Bangladesh. In addition to Equipo Pueblo, our long-term relationships with colleague organizations in Latin America have been with IBASE in Brazil, FOCO in Argentina, FUNDE in El Salvador, and IEDECA in Ecuador, as well as with the Hemispheric Social Alliance and its member national networks, most notably RMALC in Mexico and the Alianza Chilena por un Comercio Justo in Chile.
In the United States, Canada and Europe, we have worked over the years in partnership or in coalitions with a large number of economic-justice development, environmental, church and human-rights organizations, including, in the last case, the International Labor Rights Fund, to which we proudly provided its first home.
Our relationships with these and many other organizations in the South and North have been indispensable to The Development GAP’s work over the
decades. Indeed, the learning and trust that we have gained from the many outstanding people in these organizations have been the basis for everything we have done in our joint efforts to promote economic justice.
Today, The Development GAP continues to assist like-minded organizations, monitor public institutions with development-support mandates, teach occasional graduate classes in development studies, and analyze and inform on global economic-justice issues.