A philosophy that hinges on a belief in individualism, free enterprise, lowered taxes, deregulated economies and labour markets, and small government, neo-liberalism idealises free markets and the market-friendly State and privileges the ‘private sector’ or corporate interests at the expense of public interests and welfare. For the past two decades, aided by the so-called Third-World debt crisis since the early 1980s and the collapse of socialism from 1989, neo-liberal economic policies have been successfully imposed or peddled in countries across the developing world by the IMF, the World Bank and its regional derivatives and donor agencies alike. The progressive liberalisation of markets since 1995 through negotiated trade rules among member states of the WTO has effectively enshrined neo-liberal ideas within a new, albeit strongly contested, framework of international law, while neo-liberal discourses on ‘growth’, ‘efficiency’, ‘reform’ and ‘governance’ emerging from World Development Reports ^[1] have come to dominate development thinking.

The movement against economic globalisation and neo-liberalism emerged in response to mounting concerns about the serious social and economic crises and extreme inequalities resulting from the implementation of restructuring and liberalisation policies across the developing world, the injustice of Third-World debt, and the growing power of international financial institutions, the WTO, and transnational corporations. The unprecedented facility for global organisation made possible by the Internet was a key factor in mobilising the movement and continues to be critical to its organisation, growth and effectiveness. Equally or perhaps more significant in spawning this movement was the series of UN development conferences in the 1990s that engaged thousands of NGOs from the First and the Third World in its processes and saw the emergence of new frameworks for global policy-making (particularly the rights-based approach) as a result of understandings and agreements achieved through negotiations that took place within them (UN System and Civil Society 2003).

Considered one of the key drivers of increased civil society engagement in global policy-making and the shaping of world public opinion, the UN conferences and their preparatory and review processes gave unprecedented opportunities to NGOs and civil society groups to not only influence, and indeed set, global policy agendas, but to meet and share information and analyses among themselves, build alliances, networks and campaigns, and strategise.^[2] Although splits and tensions among the NGOs certainly emerged, replacing the ‘single global cleavage of the Cold War … by multiple fault lines’ (ibid.), the conferences contributed to the elaboration of what might be considered a global civil society agenda, in which reforms in global governance institutions, including the UN itself, became a key goal.^[3] More importantly, the plans of action that emerged from conference negotiations provided NGOs with considerable leverage to hold national governments and multilateral institutions to account on commitments made at the conferences. This marked a turning point for many NGOs and, undoubtedly, one of the most significant outcomes of the UN conferences of the 1990s was the empowering of NGOs and the metamorphosis of many of them into effective lobbying organisations, equipped with a keen understanding of global political economy, an unequivocal human rights framework, and the necessary research and analytical capacity to play an advocacy and a watchdog role in global, regional and national policy arenas.

Outside the UN, civil society organisations and NGOs targeted WTO Ministerial Conferences in Seattle, Doha and Cancun, protesting against the WTO’s undemocratic processes, unfair trade rules, privileging of corporate interests and devastation of livelihoods. A successful global campaign by civil society organisations had, in 1998, torpedoed an EU-proposed multilateral agreement on investment under the WTO, which would have given multinational corporations far-reaching rights, including the right to sue states. The campaign was triggered by the leaking of details of the proposed agreement to a Canadian NGO. In 1999 and 2003, this global ‘movement’ for economic justice and fair trade, drawing support from a broad cross-section of global civil society, including feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous, labour and farmers’ movements, contributed to derailing WTO ministerial talks in Seattle and Cancun. Indeed, by 2003, civil society campaigns dealing with debt, fair trade and development, health before patents and profits, and corporate social responsibility had begun to show effect, testifying to the collective power of global civil society as a countervailing force against the growing power of multilateral institutions and corporations, and as a watchdog on states.

As amorphous as the movement against neo-liberalism and economic globalisation is, its diverse ‘membership’ does cohere around an unequivocal renunciation of neo-liberal orthodoxy and the new world order being constructed on this blueprint. This is evident in the already cited slogan of the World Social Forum (WSF). An ‘impressive General Assembly of civil society’ (UN System and Civil Society 2003: 16), which began to convene annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from January 2001 as a developing-world counter to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF represents an annual gathering of forces of an unprecedented global protest movement.^[4] Latin American sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in a detailed political analysis of WSF, explains its significance in simply ‘claiming the existence of alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation’. The WSF, he points out, holds ‘no clearly defined ideology either in defining what it rejects or what it asserts’; yet, in a context in which ‘the conservative utopia prevails absolutely’, to ‘affirm the possibility of alternatives’ is better than to define them (Boaventura 2003). In Boaventura’s view, the WSF is an entirely ‘new social and political phenomenon’ that is non-hierarchical and even leaderless, in that no one person or group can assume leadership or speak in its name. In their book on the second WSF, Fisher and Ponniah, in a similar vein, claim that the WSF represents ‘a new democratic cosmopolitanism, a new anti-capitalist transnationalism, a new intellectual nomadism, a great movement of the multitude’ (Fisher and Ponniah 2003: xvi).

Certainly the WSF’s political and moral force lies as much in the diversity and multiplicity of resistant voices that emerge strong and clear from within it, albeit with some discordant notes,^[5] to challenge hegemonic globalisation and insist on alternatives, as it does in the open, participatory processes put in place and implemented by organisations and groups which comprise the WSF’s International Council. The numbers of people attending the WSF have also grown exponentially since 2001, increasing fivefold from 20,000 participants in 2001 to 100,000 in 2003, with the number of workshops and countries represented rising from 420 to 1,286, and 117 to 156, respectively, in the same period. Yet NGOs are the organisational forms through which social movements function in today’s world. And it is the sustained and dedicated work of a large number of NGOs concerned about the current world order that succeeds in convening thousands of civil society opponents of economic globalisation at the WSF each year. Most of these NGOs play an active watchdog role in relation to multilateral institutions, OECD states, regional and other groupings of states in the First and Third World, and keep a watching brief on the various global and regional policy-making fora.

Only a handful of Pacific NGOs have sent representatives to the WSF but several more have engaged in other events organised by global Thirld-World networks working on globalisation and trade liberalisation, or have otherwise become linked to regional and global networks involved in advocacy for global economic justice. Yet very few NGOs in the region have engaged in research, advocacy or activism on these issues at home, much less organised in a sustained way at the regional level to influence the processes of regional economic and trade policy-making that have been in evidence since the mid-1990s. The rest of this paper explores why this is so, against the backgrounds of neo-liberal influence and a region-wide and donor-driven program of ‘reform’ in the Pacific, and the issues currently occupying NGOs in the region. It is suggested that the primary challenges to regional and national NGOs in the Pacific are to firstly equip themselves to engage critically in debates on economic and trade policy, and secondly to find and use their critical voice.