Hello again. In the last video, you looked at the power relationships between multinational corporations and national governments. And we looked at the concentration of control in the form of ownership over the multinationals network concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of so-called super entities. We had to admit that we didn't know if or how that control was used, but we speculated that it represented a serious threat to the continuation of real prosperity. Now juxtaposed against this corporate world, we have civic society, organized at various levels-- local, national and international. Some organizations provide goods and services to the communities they serve. Others act as spokespersons for specific interests. And many do both. Many are also organized at all three levels, their peak organization operating at a regional or international level. In total there are about 25000 international non-governmental organizations in the world. And in this video we will concentrate on those espousing a specific cause or interest. In the literature, they've become known as transnational advocacy groups. Some are professional groups representing teachers, lawyers, accountants and the like. But many represent major societal interests. Some are very well known. For example, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are active in the human rights field. Oxfam and Save the Children deal with humanitarian issues. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth represent environmental concerns. Now, the power of the people's voice against organized big business is a popular image. But what factors determine the success of advocacy groups? Well, the first thing to note is there are a lot of them, many with overlapping and competing ambitions. Not for nothing, did we mention two examples for each of the three fields we introduced. But the fragmentation goes far deeper. Now in as far as these advocacy groups rely upon citizen support, this is more easily gained if the issue has some local resonance or if it's addressed in a proper cultural context. The result is the emergence of what has being called maps of grievance, where different groups identify with different causes or different slivers of causes. Local and regional advocacy groups therefore tend to compete with existing transnational groups, squeezing the resources and blurring the focus. Of course once an advocacy group is formed, its success not only depends on its own organizational ability and strategy but also on the permeability of the organization it's trying to influence, and the organization's strengths and tenacity of the influence groups ranked against it. In the case where it's pitched against corporate interests, transnational advocacy groups face a double imbalance. There is often an imbalance in the resources in terms of funding access and expertise that can be mobilized by an advocacy group compared with that of organized big business. But there is a second imbalance in the importance of the issue for the two parties. And I don't mean here the importance to the advocacy group itself. Issues are always important to them, but to the citizens interests and what they claim to represent. And we take a simple example and hopefully a neutral one to illustrate what I mean. Several years ago I worked on the question of why that almost all economists condemned the European Common Agricultural Policy as illogical, inefficient and counterproductive. The policy seemed so resistant to change. One thing to emerge was that the farmers lobby was extremely well organized at both the national level or it had been active very often since the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and at the international level. Of all the interest groups examined, they were the most active, bombarding governments and parliaments with policy advice at both national and European levels. They were far more active and probably far better resourced than the consumer groups lobbying against them. But why was this the case? And this led me to look a little further. One of the things that GATT has done is to calculate how much of a farmer's income derives from, what they call producer's subsidy equivalence. In other words, how much protectionist measures contributed to their welfare. This amounted in the 60s and 70s, 80s to almost half of their income. So no wonder they were so active. On the other hand, the extra burden imposed by these measures on consumers as a percentage of their expenditures, was far far smaller. Not only had the proportion of food and consumer budgets been falling over the last 30 years, but the proportion that farm gate prices, what the farmers receive, portion of what that represented in final market price, when everything had being transported, processed, packaged and neatly arranged in a convenient shop, was relatively small. The sad fact is, that for all the justification for the cause adopted by an advocacy group, it does not usually impact immediately on the life of a citizen. This is the same whether it's the price of butter, the tortured cries of a prisoner in a God forsaken jail, the starving child at the other end of a television documentary, or that little bit of extra carbon footprint that the car journey to the shops involved. So much less, therefore, than additives for food, the exact safety standard, the legal responsibility of banks. For corporate interests, on the other hand, these questions do matter. They matter a lot. They immediately show up on the balance sheets, on the profit and loss accounts and on the shareholder value. And they will use all their channels, the regular contacts with national officials as well as special pleadings with the relevant ministers and decision makers to be heard. Corporate interest groups have deep reserves of patience and deep pockets of cash. The challenge of advocacy groups is agenda setting to raise the level of consciousness of an issue, so as to galvanize a larger constituency and more difficult still to keep it there. One of the problems apart from capturing the citizens attention in the first place, is the so-called free rider problem. It's difficult to sustain interest when any positive achievement is shared by society as a whole regardless of whether citizens have even thought about the issue let alone joined or helped fund any such campaign. But let's finish on a more positive note. There are cases where international advocacy groups or networks have registered some success. The anti-apartheid movement succeeded in mobilizing government support that eventually forced policy change in South Africa. The movement against whaling, despite setbacks, has curbed the hunting of these animals to the brink of extinction. And the work of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons based in the Hague was rewarded in 2013 with a Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, we can sum up now. We have seen how globalization was accompanied by a growth of transnational advocacy groups. And we touched on some of the conditions for success. We also investigated the imbalance in their position as opposed to that of corporate interests. In the next video we're going to look at Supra-nationality as a way of increasing state effectiveness in this globalized world of ours.
