Abstract
This study explores the way Indian civil society organizations (CSOs) in the state of Jharkhand that work from rights-based approaches construct the legitimacy of their advocacy roles regarding marginalized groups. Finding that they typically do so from a stance of solidarity, the article shows that solidarity in this context supports access to rights and entitlements, but can be delimited in terms of its emancipatory quality. The article identifies these limits, discussing the position of superiority that is often taken, the limited engagement with constituency perspectives and leadership that can be found, and a negotiated positioning that seeks to harmonize organizational, constituency and state interests. The implication is that CSOs’ solidarity through rights-based approaches needs close examination rather than flat-out embracement as the mainstay of legitimate CSO advocacy.
I. Introduction
In the development sector, civil society organizations (CSOs) are commonly considered to be the voice of society: articulating citizens’ needs and views, connecting state and society and holding power to account, through their advocacy (van Wessel, 2023). However, the assumption that CSOs can be seen as the ‘voice’ of people has hardly been examined beyond relations between Northern and Southern CSOs. 1 At the same time, the idea is laden with consequential suppositions. It suggests a relation: Voice is someone’s voice, and it is not that of the CSOs, whose legitimacy lies exactly in their assumed capacity to work for the ‘constituencies’ whose voice is supposedly advanced. The need to examine and advance our understanding of the legitimacy of such voices becomes all the more complicated and important with the current interest in recognizing and advancing the leadership and ownership of Southern-based CSOs. The assumption of such organizations and the voices they articulate being ‘local’ suggest legitimacy within their respective settings, without considering that Southern-based CSOs can have highly diverse relations with their assumed constituencies (Katyaini et al., 2021; van Wessel et al., 2023). This is an underdeveloped research area.
This article centres on these relations between Southern-based CSOs and their assumed constituencies, presenting a case study to advance the so-far limited debate on how to understand and assess these relations within specific settings. Focusing on CSOs in the Indian state of Jharkhand, our research question is: How do CSOs in Jharkhand, working from a rights-based approach, construct the legitimacy of their advocacy work in terms of their relations with constituencies? Given the wide currency of rights-based advocacy, often couched in terms of universal rights, this is an important dimension of CSO advocacy legitimacy that is understudied, especially in the context of advocacy in the Global South. We also seek to problematize the notion of ‘constituency’, as a term that suggests a relation between CSOs and the people they work for or with. In development discourse and CSO and donor practice, constituencies are often assumed as given, implying backing for the ‘voices’ that are articulated. CSOs may legitimize this idea with reference to many things: assumed support among people ‘spoken for’, knowledge of communities, commitment to values, experience or participation of partner organizations in programme development or the advocacy itself (see, e.g., Katyaini et al., 2021). At the same time, development programmes carried out by civil society are often largely defined before constituencies are called in. Professional, urban-based CSOs tend to be in leading roles, and their donors define goals in contexts far removed from constituencies, thus creating important legitimacy issues (Elbers et al., 2022). Moreover, CSOs often get involved with constituencies as ‘outsiders’, coming in with projects, rather than emerging from constituencies themselves. CSOs also face diverse legitimacy audiences, with different expectations (Kontinen and Ndidde, 2023). This indicates that relations with constituencies will be conceptualized, developed and sustained in varied ways, contingent on many factors surrounding the advocacy.
These include the constructions by CSOs themselves. In this article, we explore how CSOs’ constructions of the legitimacy of their advocacy roles relate to their assumed constituencies, embedding this relation in the local context in which these CSOs’ work. We thus shift focus from legitimacy as a problematic dimension of North–South development relations (Elbers et al., 2022) to legitimacy construction as locally situated. We focus on the advocacy role of rights-based CSOs in the Indian state of Jharkhand, concerning the rights of a range of marginalized groups in this state. We define advocacy in broad terms here, including a wide range of activities meant to strengthen people’s voices and support for the same to advance rights, such as capacity strengthening, lobbying, campaigning, litigation and collaboration in policy processes. Below, we chart our theoretical framework as the lens through which we analyse CSOs’ constructions of legitimacy. We continue with a discussion of the case context and methodology, to then present our empirical findings. We conclude with the main insights and implications of our study.
II. Theoretical Framework
Legitimacy of CSO Advocacy
We conceptualize legitimacy following Suchman (1995: 574): ‘a generalised perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’. In recent years, studies have zoomed in on CSO legitimacy in the context of development, stressing its complexity. Thrandardottir (2015) conceptualizes different models for legitimacy, pointing to differentiated sources of legitimacy at play in these models, ranging from the capacity to deliver services to normative legitimacy as representatives or as actors in institutional contexts. Kontinen and Ndidde (2023) conceptualize different legitimacy audiences, ranging from constituencies to central and local government actors and development partners such as international NGOs, which uphold different legitimacy requirements. Matelski et al. (2022) synthesize literature on CSO legitimacy, identifying regulatory, moral, cognitive, pragmatic and political sources of legitimacy.
Importantly, these diverse conceptualizations do not all concern legitimacy in relational terms, and thus also do not explicitly consider questions of power in constructions of legitimacy. Many conceptualizations also do not necessarily concern advocacy, limiting their direct usefulness for questions of how legitimacy is constructed by CSOs involved with advocacy. These are important matters given how questions of whose voices get to count come in with advocacy in the context of development. In this article, we analyse CSOs’ constructions of the legitimacy of their advocacy roles, exploring the nature of their relating to constituencies in these constructions. We do not include perspectives of constituencies themselves, and this is an important limitation since we cannot tell how the interviewees’ constructions of legitimacy resonate with constituencies, and to what extent they would agree with our interpretations. The reason for not including constituency perspectives is that the scope of our project did not allow for this in terms of time and resources. However, constructions by CSO staff have their own relevance, as this sense of the organization’s legitimacy is likely to reflect the conceptualization and enactment of CSO roles in relation to constituencies and assumptions underlying the advocacy that is undertaken. With this focus, we zoom in on an often-ignored theme in the current debate on power in development, as held and exercised by civil society actors: the power of ‘local’ CSOs in Southern contexts. We use representation, solidarity and capacity as analytical lenses through which to explore constructions of CSO advocacy legitimacy in relation to constituencies, for reasons we discuss below.
Representation
Many CSOs engage in representation, here conceptualized as acting on behalf of others, for example, by articulating rights for groups, advancing problem definitions important to groups and advocating solutions for groups’ problems. In political science, representation is being re-theorized to address the volatility of present-day politics and governance. However, in the study of civil society in development, representation remains undertheorized. Available literature centres on challenging the legitimacy of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) as representatives. The limited literature available mostly questions the legitimacy of representation by international NGOs, being far removed from assumed constituencies (see, e.g., Holmén and Jirström, 2009). ‘True’ representation is expected more from in-country CSOs, especially those working at local levels. This is also reflected in the embracement of ‘the local’, ‘localization’ and ‘local ownership’ in the development sector in recent years (Acosta et al., 2021; van Wessel 2024). However, legitimacy rooted in such local grounding can be based on assumptions rather than research, given that civil society collaborations concern CSO partnerships rather than constituencies. Elbers et al. (2022) indeed show how this legitimacy, when it comes to constituencies, can be limited and performed by the CSOs involved rather than authentic. Meanwhile, many organizations do claim to speak and act on behalf of others and are accepted as such by states and multilateral institutions that seek to include ‘society’ or ‘the voice of marginalized groups’ and may see CSOs as intermediaries through which society’s voices are channelled or as proxies for society (cf. Lang, 2012).
In theory, representation by development CSOs, shaped by constituencies’ interests and perspectives, can potentially advance the inclusion of marginalized groups. Maia (2012: 429), argues that non-elected representatives:
although they were not elected or formally nominated, and may not even participate in deliberative forums directly with those concerned themselves – have a fundamental role in democratic politics as they claim to represent interests and aspirations and act in the name of women, ethnic groups, disabled groups, gays and lesbians, the poor, animals or the environment.
However, assumptions of such representation deserve to be examined, as Maia also argues. Conceptualizing representation as constituted in a process of interaction, Maia conceives of a framework conceptualizing non-electoral representatives as translators of people’s needs and viewpoints, as vehicles of association and as creators of resources and opportunities to mobilize and exert influence. This framework is in line with leading political science theory that takes the starting point that representation will not be direct and posits that representation can only truly come about through confirmation by the represented (Disch et al., 2020; Saward, 2010). This approach takes the starting point that representation is constituted in the interaction between representatives (making representative claims), and their audiences that become constituencies legitimizing such claims through their active confirmation of the representative status of the claims-maker (Saward, 2010). This approach is well-geared to the multi-actor nature of present-day governance in many contexts in which CSOs work, and the only one that provides CSOs some standards for their (non-electoral) representation. However, this theory does not necessarily sit well with the reality of CSOs. It sets the condition that representative claims are actually communicated to audiences, giving also an active role to constituencies in shaping and confirming representation. This may or may not happen. A recent study by Katyaini et al. (2021) indicates that development CSOs that seek to represent do so from diverse, organization-centred understandings of what this entails, not necessarily involving direct engagement with constituencies’ perspectives. Indeed, many CSOs’ relative independence from constituency funding enables them to take up representative roles without necessarily communicating about representative claims with constituencies. Close relations with funders, donors and governments may even discourage interaction with constituencies or shape them in ways that constrain voice, for example, by forcing them to adapt to donor requirements or government ideologies (Banks et al., 2015; Lang, 2012; van Wessel et al., 2020). Moreover, CSOs often ground their advocacy in the representation of values, positions or perspectives (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2008) as sources of legitimacy in their own right, rather than seeking legitimation by specific constituencies. The degree and way in which CSO advocacy can be conceived as representation is thus an open question.
That non-electoral representation in development as such has hardly been studied is perhaps a consequence of the disciplinary gaps between development studies and political science. Moreover, scholars studying CSO–constituency relations have often prioritized large international NGOs like Oxfam over national/sub-national CSOs, which often do not explicitly justify their roles in terms of representation. They have also prioritized professional NGOs over other forms of CSO such as social movements or individual activists that often take up leading roles in advocacy, and are likely, again, to be closer to constituencies. At the same time, the lack of attention is surprising, given the wide and long-standing interest in questions of voice, representation, coloniality and power in development (e.g., Spivak, 1988; Ziai, 2004). While it is now common to criticize INGO power over their partner organizations, there is hardly a discussion of the question of whether it is possible for CSOs to ‘speak for others’. Are they part of structures of oppression (only), or can they also wield their power legitimately, to support oppressed groups, by ‘speaking for them’? (Alcoff, 1991). Are CSOs to ‘step back’ or would not speaking out against oppression constitute an abandonment of political responsibility? (Alcoff, 1991). While there is debate on this in the domains of social movements concerning race, LGBTQ+ and indigenous groups (see, e.g., Garbe, 2022; Louis et al., 2019), the development sector is not taking part in it.
Representation through CSOs, therefore, needs to be explored more widely, with openness to the diversity of CSOs and their diverse degrees and types of engagements with constituencies. Of particular importance here is the study of national and sub-national representations by CSOs in the Global South, which are often assumed to be well-placed to represent as ‘local organisations’, blackboxing the power dynamics and politics in Southern contexts (cf. van Wessel et al., 2023: 25).
Solidarity
Solidarity is, in development studies and practice, a popular concept by which to characterize relations between CSOs and constituencies. Solidarity is a complex concept that takes multiple forms in theory and practice. Some understandings connote social cohesion, entailing moral obligation across group members (Scholz, 2008). In the development sector, notions of solidarity are commonly used as referring to ‘standing with’ oppressed, marginalized and vulnerable groupings. Solidarity is not explicitly conceptualized, functioning rather as a buzzword used to invoke a relation and mobilize and legitimize multiple forms of action and support. At the same time, solidarity in the context of CSO roles in development typically connotes relations across differences, in particular power differentials, with the more powerful describing their solidarity in terms of support to the less powerful, reflecting common hierarchies in solidarity relations (cf. Dean, 1995). However, authors have also used the concept of solidarity with reference to the centrality of Southern CSOs’ agency, understandings and agendas as starting points for collaboration (Deveaux, 2021; Garbe, 2022). Outsiders like international NGOs can then take supportive and complementary roles from that stance (Deveaux, 2021). Solidarity can, for example, mean exerting pressure for a Southern-led campaign internationally, or supporting Southern social movements’ self-identified goals and helping to facilitate their actions (Deveaux, 2021; Garbe, 2022). At the same time, this literature acknowledges how solidarity can be rooted in and sustain inequality, by reproducing the power of the privileged as standing above those they supposedly ‘stand with’. Literature, therefore, points to the need for deep reflection among the privileged on the nature of the relations (Garbe, 2022; Wilson, 2017). At the same time, whether assumed constituencies would see the role of CSOs in terms of solidarity, and if so, what kind, remains an open question.
Both representation and solidarity may be impacted by power inequalities between CSOs and supposed constituencies and can even reinforce these (Alcoff, 1991; Garbe, 2022). But, while representation is hardly taken up in the development sector or development studies, apart from the critique mentioned above, solidarity is widely embraced and hardly problematized. It is particularly in settings where ‘outsiders’ frequently come in to ‘work with’ marginalized groups that the examination of relations with constituencies deserves to be undertaken, which is what we seek to do here.
Capacity
CSOs often build their advocacy roles by drawing on the information and knowledge they can bring to the table. While this is not commonly discussed as such in the literature, it is relevant when trying to understand how CSOs construct legitimacy for their advocacy. Literature shows that CSOs conduct and report on research that provides data and analyses to policymakers, media and the wider public. They provide entry to local knowledge, representing this knowledge in political arenas or connecting knowledge holders with other actors. They often have expertise on various issues that they can use in the development of problem analyses, advocacy agendas and policy solutions, as well as awareness raising and capacity strengthening of other civil society actors, actors from the state and the private sector. They also have connections that can bring various actors together, through their convening power. When it comes to advocacy legitimacy, thus far analyses of these capacities primarily discuss these as bases for influence and the role of evidence in the building of legitimacy for advocacy. This then seems to be primarily geared towards building credibility, convincing advocacy targets such as policymakers (see, e.g., van Wessel, 2022), rather than legitimacy in the eyes of constituents. In this article, we will consider whether and how capacity figures in constructions of legitimacy in relation to constituencies.
III. Case and Method
The state of Jharkhand was selected because nearly 40% of this state’s population belongs to marginalized communities (Adivasis (i.e., indigenous groups) 26%; Dalits (‘oppressed’ castes), 12%, according to the 2011 Census), and 78% live in rural areas. Moreover, Jharkhand is among the country’s poorest states, ranked second worst among 28 states in the third edition of the Sustainable Development Goal India Index 2020–21, where hunger is highly prevalent, being a grave development challenge and a daily burden on large sections of its population (Sharma et al., 2023). Widespread poverty and the large presence of marginalized groups constitute important drivers for CSO advocacy, and these conditions may also play into the potential legitimacy of CSOs’ advocacy, making Jharkhand a suitable case setting for this study.
Marginality, in the context of this study, is primarily conceived in terms used by CSOs included in this study, and we make this choice given our focus on CSOs’ own constructions of legitimacy, requiring a centring on their understandings and perspectives. Their usage is, however, informed by established constructions of marginality by the Indian state and societal actors. These groups, also called ‘underprivileged’ in India are, in Jharkhand, for an important part, indigenous groups that the state and societal actors in India classify as Tribals. This is a colonially rooted term that places these groups outside of the mainstream and has connotations of primitiveness. 2 Given the realities of oppression, ‘Adivasi’ is a more dignified term for such groups in India, and that is the term we will use in this article. Adivasis in Jharkhand include diverse groups such as Oroan and Munda, some of which have been classified as ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups’ by the state. Other marginalized groups CSOs work with are Dalits, including diverse communities, such as Bhuyian, Ganjhu and Paswan, women and girls, Muslim women and children. The CSOs engage with these groups’ marginality as constituted by their poverty, lack of access to resources such as food, credit and education, lack of voice and power, isolation and denial of rights and entitlements (e.g., provisions through the public distribution system; labour through an employment guarantee scheme). Organizations work on a wide range of issues affecting marginalized groups, such as poverty; education; health; financial inclusion; access to benefits through government programmes; rights, including legal, civil, economic, political, social and religious rights for diverse types of groups; food security; migration and gender-based violence. They typically do so from human rights-based approaches, emphasizing empowerment as a main objective. While discrimination of groups is not explicitly addressed, strengthening the voice of groups, their exercise of their rights and respect for those rights by other societal groups and state agencies are common starting points. Addressing conditions sustaining marginality is central to the work. Advocacy is an important strategy, including awareness raising, movement-building, advocacy capacity strengthening, networking and policy influencing. Some organizations are also involved in service delivery.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with staff of 13 CSOs and interviewed 3 individual activists associated with social movements. This being an exploratory study, the CSOs were selected seeking variety in terms of the marginalized groups organizations worked with such as Adivasi communities, women, children, Dalits and migrants. Organizations were partly identified locally and through snowball methods, and partly through the national web portal
Interviews explored constructions of legitimacy in a broad manner, while centring on the ways in which relating to constituencies came in here. During fieldwork, our theoretical framework was still limited, working with Maia’s (2012) conceptualization of representation to explore ways of relating. It was in a later stage of the research that our wider conceptualization turned out to be more useful for understanding constructions of legitimacy. Interviews were conducted in Hindi, all by the second author, who has Hindi as his native language. He also translated the interviews into English, seeking to capture original meanings and including Hindi phrases where translation ran into limits. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. The data were analysed qualitatively, involving a stage of initial open coding to identify key themes regarding working with communities. Subsequently, data, grouped in themes, were further coded and analysed further to refine understanding and identify patterns in the data. Positionality is a relevant factor here. The first author is from the Global North, engaging with the research from the perspective that the debate on power inequalities needs to move beyond North–South relations, centring the Global South, also to inform development policy in the Global North. The second author is from India and has worked in the region before. Having some familiarity with Jharkhand’s local context and surroundings and being aware of his social identity markers and academic privilege, he constantly reflected on his approach and assumptions around CSO culture and social relations while collecting the data.
IV. Findings
Representation
While organizations ‘fight for people’s rights’, also in their engagement of state actors, interviewees did not conceptualize these in terms of representation. They rather brought in that they sought to advance marginalized groups’ self-representation, underlining groups’ (potential) agency that the CSOs’ emancipatory work was to advance. An overarching understanding that emerges from the interviews is that organizations, while seeking to represent issues, communities and groups, based on a deeper and engaged relationship with constituencies, feel that they cannot be termed as their ‘true representatives’ since they are only ‘participating’ and contributing based on their expertise, connections and ability to represent. CSOs conceptualize their role as supporters of empowerment. During the interviews, the slogan ‘ We are here to help and provide some support. You cannot expect us to fight for them always. We are there to guide from where to start and how these people can carry forward their struggle, but ultimately, it is their struggle. We work with them for a short period, like three–four years. So they need to learn how to stand on their own and fight for their rights. We are like facilitators.
While the above expresses encouragement for people to lead and represent themselves, the distance between CSOs and marginalized groups is also a part of the construction of the relations. Mostly this is implicit, as in the quote above, as a self-evident reality. However, interviewees were sometimes also explicit about it. As an interviewee from a social movement reflected:
It is true that people are putting a lot of efforts to strengthen local communities and many NGOs are active in this field. But still, there is this feeling of us versus them. It is like:
Beyond distance, differences also figure in understandings of the relations. They show up in political and cultural clashes, further limiting the applicability of representation as a notion applicable to relations between the CSOs and the people they work with in the case under study here. Interviewees recognized that CSOs and the Adivasi groups that they work with may not agree on agendas and can also be in confrontation with each other, based on cultural or political differences. Such issues may concern matters like the position of women in society, witch hunting or caste discrimination. As in an activist’s experience of working on women’s issues like property rights: ‘when we stood for property rights of women, several Adivasi leaders were against it’. An activist talked about challenges they faced working with Adivasi and minority communities, discussing how cultural or religious ideas of a community can raise tensions between them and the community. She shared:
I have witnessed the essence of patriarchy among them. Sometimes it becomes an obstacle for us to organise and manage women’s participation. A woman is always bound by her conditions, family values and much more. We must navigate very carefully these social barriers.
Similarly, another interviewee, working on the legal rights of women and girls, shared:
if we challenge the claims, which are religious in nature, then we are told that we cannot force them to go beyond their religion. And there is always a political angle in such suggestions. They justify their action through the personal law mentioned in the constitution. Our main concern is the best interest of the girl, and religious or political ideas should not hinder the development of the girls. We work by managing many different entities and keeping our ideals in mind.
Some field workers from NGOs reflected on the stereotyping of Adivasi communities in Indian society, including civil society, as an important dimension of some of the distancing that happens. As a field worker said, ‘We all have some perceptions of tribals, but we need to overcome the popular understanding of these communities. There is diversity in every society, and CSOs need to acknowledge it before we start working for them’. Such stereotyping was reflected in the statements of an interviewee who lamented his dependence on Adivasi intermediaries that did not perform as expected, ‘because of alcoholism’.
He also degraded the community more broadly, arguing for the practice of taking Adivasi children out and into boarding schools in order to ‘take them out’ (of their context). This has been a practice in many societies that is now often denounced as oppression and cultural violence. At the same time, the interviewee professed his capacity to lead change based on his ‘understanding of community needs’, and the experience that ‘it is so difficult to get a leader from the community’. While other interviewees did not speak of the people, they ‘work for’ in such terms, patronizing and othering terms came from several other respondents too. They reflected characterizations of Adivasi people common in India, that qualify Adivasis as ‘simple’ or ‘primitive’. Almost all interviewees also referred to Tribals rather than Adivasis. Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, some interviewees mentioned that there can be mistrust in CSOs’ motives and operations, which can work against obtaining the community support they need to be able to perform their roles.
Representation is thus not necessarily a coveted source of legitimacy for CSOs. CSOs rather negotiate their relations, in diverse ways, concerning their perceived responsibility towards the community, organizational objectives, their own understandings of issues of marginal groupings and sometimes ambivalent and interwoven understandings of communities as ‘close’ and ‘different’ as well as ‘leaders (to be)’, and ‘in need of our guidance’. Rather than necessarily ‘acting on behalf of’ people, for CSOs people may also need to be ‘won over’ to understand and accept what is right. Differences in perspective are seen as challenges to be faced rather than reasons to change course and ‘align’ more with communities.
Solidarity
While interviewees did not use the term ‘solidarity’, their constructions of legitimacy involved claims to be driven by value-based propositions of working in support of others, based in empathy and ideology. These claims to legitimacy refer to organizational will to We work for the welfare of the women who are not able to secure justice for themselves. The issues can vary like human trafficking, domestic violence, divorce, etc. If there is a need, we will try to include it. If we receive a demand from women, we will fight for them. We have to work according to the needs of women who raise voices and demand justice. If demands or requests come from their end, it is always better. We believe, women should be represented in accordance with their voices.
At the same time, CSOs often seek to ‘enlighten’ marginalized individuals and groups facing specific issues, such as violence. One NGO staff member spoke of his organization’s work on women’s rights. For this organization, it started with a process of sensitizing, first, individual women, then also communities (including men and boys) on domestic violence as violence. Subsequently, they would bring in legal teams and police and build women’s political leadership through training and political support. In addition, policy advocacy took place at the state level for the implementation of existing laws protecting women. The rights-based approach taken here is often one of projecting rights on offer to them from the Indian government, and seeking to mobilize around these. As one interviewee put it:
They need to think about their own rights in terms of their own entitlements. It should be our work to raise awareness in the community about their rights to these services and to enable them to articulate these.
Moving forward from awareness, CSOs work towards facilitation and working together, standing by the groups they work with in support. One of the activists said, for example:
Ultimately then, much of the work is to result in the building of the ‘voices’ of marginalized individuals and groups, so that they can claim their rights and entitlements as already, formally granted by the state.
Marginalized groups like Adivasi communities and Dalits in Jharkhand commonly have little access to services, resources and institutional support. Such limitations confine their growth, curtail their participation and lead to their exclusion from practices of inclusive development. All the CSOs in our sample claimed that they seek to mobilize marginalized groups and create opportunities to advance their rights to obtain benefits they are entitled to. Solidarity is, thus, often a question of engaging with the state looking for opportunities to create spaces for conversations, influencing state officials and working with state agencies in the implementation of policy. ‘Help’ and support towards empowerment can take the form of capacity strengthening, organizing, counselling, mediation, advocacy, accompaniment, and facilitation of access to justice and state agencies to be able to claim rights and entitlements.
Claims to legitimacy also then involve the capacity to engage state actors effectively, with CSOs functioning as stepping in to help overcome marginalization and abuses and denials of rights that marginalized groups face. This may also involve the capacity strengthening of state actors, regarding rights of specific groups. CSOs also take up roles as facilitators of state policy, reading, interpreting and communicating issues to the state to find solutions, rooted in their legitimate roles as organizations that understand the context and have the linking capacity, while also supporting the state in achieving its policy objectives. Indeed, interviewees from diverse organizations stated that the state regularly ‘takes the help’ of CSOs in their engagement with marginalized groups. One senior executive from a well-known CSO in Ranchi said: ‘all of us have worked with the state in the past. Reasons may be different for all of us. You cannot avoid working with the state’. A general view was that CSOs can ‘do their [the state’s] work’, and ‘get projects’ for themselves this way, which help to sustain their operations and contribute to their objectives, if aligned.
Advocacy, then, while rooted in the CSOs’ self-chosen thematic focus, approach, resources and capacity, exists alongside empowerment activities. It is also claimed to be at least partly informed by community priorities and perspectives, typically sought through what interviewees commonly described as ‘meetings’, collecting opinions. Much of this advocacy concerns the implementation of existing laws and policy programmes, promotion of norm change and in some cases also policy change or policy innovation, all in the service of marginalized groups’ rights.
The CSOs in our sample are mostly made up of professionals who are not necessarily close to the people they represent in terms of background. Socio-economic factors such as caste, cultural capital and geographic background often put them in a different stratum of society than the people they work with. While this does not have to undermine their work or disqualify them, the discourse around the relations with groups regularly involves othering and patronizing language. This is also a theme of contention with some interviewees who problematized the upper-caste, urban-educated and middle-class leadership of CSOs. They pointed out that members of marginalized groups themselves may be working as programme coordinators or supervisors, but are rarely put in leadership positions in CSOs. As one respondent said, ‘even in the NGO sector, upper caste people are in positions of power, and it reflects the larger power structure or hierarchy in our society’. Another explained:
Right from the recruitment to the leadership, you will see an upper caste person. Although the sensitivity towards women’s engagement has increased and they are hiring women for different projects. I think we need to develop an inclusive approach by including people from different backgrounds. I have not seen Dalits in leadership positions; however, there are a lot of people in the field, working as field workers, at least this is my experience. You might find a Dalit or a tribal person working as a project leader or as a project supervisor, but you would not see him in the ranks of leadership.
For many CSOs then, groups are to be ‘uplifted’ rather than recognized in the agency and perspectives they already have. In addition, the intermediary roles sought often contribute to state policy implementation rather than more transformative change. For example, the rights addressed often do not touch upon structural issues sustaining the oppression of groups such as access to land or other natural resources, central to the political agenda of Adivasi movements.
Thus, defining and delimiting the potential for overcoming marginality and apparently also failing to recognize existing leadership and possibly alternative agendas emerging from them, rights-based approaches of CSOs in Jharkhand can be a complex affair. They tend to reflect the social and cultural hierarchies of Indian society, while at the same time being rooted in a will (‘passion’) to facilitate emancipation and fight the everyday injustices marginalized groups face. Rights to be addressed often appear to be kept within relatively ‘apolitical’ limits, centred on entitlements and existing legal provisions that CSOs help them gain access to, rather than addressing more structural root causes of marginalization the communities face or even confronting the state as such. This would turn the CSOs into more political actors—a risky affair not easily entertained.
Capacity
While solidarity is rooted in ‘fellow feeling’, it is also rooted in a sense that the CSOs have something to offer to groups, and that this legitimizes their role. Indeed, interviewees often constructed the legitimacy of their advocacy roles by referring to organizational qualities that make it possible to act as an intermediary between constituencies and the state—connecting marginalized groups and government agencies, raising people’s awareness of entitlements and articulating issues and needs. Such capacity concerns expertise, such as legal expertise, expertise regarding government policies and programmes, or expertise on interventions like microcredit or education. Bigger CSOs may work on a wide range of such forms of expertise. Beyond domain-specific expertise, such constructions of legitimacy also refer to organizational capacity more broadly, such as advocacy skills and the ability to obtain funding. Finally, CSOs develop their perspectives drawing on their knowledge of local conditions, internal dynamics of a community and the interconnectedness of issues, with reference to regional and national debates. ‘We can help’ is then indeed an important foundation for legitimacy.
CSOs’ conceptions of their roles as experts were diverse. First, working with communities as experts can involve the integration of expert knowledge and local embeddedness. For example, an interviewee from a CSO working on legal rights explained that it is good to know community members’ views but, at the same time, one cannot expect legal expertise from the local people; it is a highly skilled profession. However, the organization trains community members as paralegals help to present cases of the community in the courts. A combination of expertise and local connectedness helps this organization thus to develop its legal work. Second, perspectives are developed keeping in view how local people describe the situations from their own standpoints and in what ways organizations can combine perspectives to project a claim. This can involve building connections between governance levels and policy domains, based on expertise. For example, an interviewee from one of the largest CSOs in the state worked with different stakeholders in the state to draft a law on human trafficking and migration. Their advocacy on this topic drew on their understanding of this issue involving diverse aspects such as unemployment, operations of illegal agencies and lack of legal support for migrants and domestic workers within the state, while relating to communities as well as different governance levels.
Third, some interviewees claimed that they are assisting the groups based on the needs of that community. They sometimes then argue that the perspectives of the marginalized groups they work with are deficient, and the role of CSOs is to develop these perspectives: Adivasis need to gain knowledge in order to be able to see where their interests lie. As an interviewee from a large CSO stated:
Our idea is to connect them [Adivasis] with a wider thought process. Along with developing the necessary infrastructure we also have to work raising the social consciousness of the Adivasi community. Only by providing them with food and home would not work until they [Adivasis] themselves are not self-motivated.
Fourth, interviewees sometimes classified constituents as ‘lacking consciousness’ or complained about the marginalized groupings they worked with (Adivasis) ‘not being interested in their own development’ or not having the capacity to act in their own interest. A primary role for CSOs, as these interviewees see it, is therefore to support as still-needed superiors. As one interviewee said:
Only law cannot protect a woman; we need awareness, social consciousness. A law is helpful only when an incident takes place, but we should try to make people aware, make them sensitive.
CSOs thus work to support marginalized groups, while at the same time often seeking to move to a situation in which they can represent themselves, something ‘they still cannot do’, is the argument. While CSOs can be more or less cognizant of groups’ own perspectives, assumptions of groups’ capacity deficit underlies several CSOs’ understandings of their own ‘needed’ leadership, building ‘closeness’ from a stance of superiority. As one experienced interviewee explained, stressing his readiness to interact with people of low caste:
Connections needed to be built. Trust-building is important. You have to be one of them to build a relationship based on trust. We are thinking for you (Tribals) and your issues/problems. There is no use of arranging and providing loans or establishing industries. It is about being with them, among them. You need to establish connections with them, adopt their culture. For example, if you do not eat with Dalits [referring to untouchability], how will they consider you as a part of their community or will accept you? We need to develop that essence of awareness, consciousness, and responsiveness…. We need to figure out the issues such as liquor, violence, and trafficking by organising meetings. We collect information, discuss with them, and build a network with agents. Building strategies according to the issues is the most important task for us.
The ‘closeness’ sought by this interviewee maintains a sense that the connection to be made is with an ‘other’ whose issues are to be teased out through CSOs’ capacity to ‘relate’ to ‘issues’ inherent to the communities’ ‘differences’ rather than, for example, the oppression and injustice they may face, or an agenda emerging from them. Notably, not a single interviewee referred to Adivasi movements in Jharkhand, which have been around for decades (see, e.g., Jairath, 2020) fighting for their rights, for example, to land, engaging powerholders of various kinds.
CSOs also portray their capacity to address issues as the result of interaction between the organization and constituents that involves learning on both sides, through sustained engagement. For example, a CSO working on advancing and protecting legal rights helps victims seek justice based on laws against domestic violence. In turn, affected women in those areas develop a sense of trust in the organization, an interviewee claimed. Based on these relations, this organization’s work with women on their cases in turn provides them information about the conditions of the women and their surroundings, societal structure and lack of legal infrastructure to protect their rights.
It is this trust and close association which, in the view of interviewees, enables their CSOs to build standing as interlocutors for the state, complementing the state’s effort to reach a wider audience and mediating different issues seeking support either from the state or other organizations. For example, an interviewee from one of the leading NGOs from Ranchi, says:
Once you have worked for a long time, you recognize different issues and problems. Your interactions with a particular community over time inform you about their conditions. Your experience in the field informs you about the practicality of different laws, their implementation, and about the different stakeholders involved. We utilize our expertise and experience. We, as an organisation, also have come a long way from where we had started; with time and experience we evolved.
Relations thus build capacity. CSOs develop their perspectives and strategies drawing on their knowledge on local conditions, internal dynamics of a community and the interconnectedness of issues, with reference to regional and national debates. This, in turn, confers legitimacy, interviewees suggest. In the eyes of an interviewee: ‘Whatever we have built in the last two decades, it is built on the trust and a sustained relationship with the community’.
A Negotiated Position
Constructions of legitimacy emerge through CSOs’ navigation of constraints and opportunities when it comes to claiming legitimacy based on their relations with the people they work with, their capacity as experts, and their values, ideologies and track records as actors standing in solidarity, also in the eyes of other CSOs contesting this very legitimacy, while manoeuvring the political context and funding trends. An important factor here is their relation with the state. The intermediary roles CSOs take up often contribute to state policy implementation rather than more transformative change. CSOs perform a cooperative role by complementing state functions and are impacted in their work by prioritization of issues by the state or donor agencies. Maintaining good relations with government officials is crucial for organizations’ survival, and in line with this, all the interviewees reiterated that their organization is apolitical. By taking a non-confrontational approach, CSOs can seek to maintain a flow of funding and help ensure access to state mechanisms. However, approaches vary, and CSOs learn and adapt in securing funding and support. But tension between the organizations and the state is not always avoided. Citing the example of a protest in a mob-lynching case, one interviewee said that ‘playing safe is not always an option’—stressing the importance of standing with communities as an ally to strengthen connections with them while at the same time articulating concern with the risk of antagonizing state authorities. Another interviewee, stating that it is their duty to safeguard the rights of people, argued that to prove the association with communities, CSOs willingly work for the community despite probable chances of confrontation with the state. Taking a stand helps organizations to be credible and legitimate in the eyes of constituencies who can then see the CSO as standing for the community. In such ways, CSOs construct their legitimacy as deeply dependent on their relations with constituencies. This legitimacy is not only an asset that helps organizations perform and obtain new resources but also a foundation that needs protection in the face of threats. This can be complicated by state surveillance of CSOs that can make CSOs feel vulnerable, which can get in the way of challenging the government.
Apart from relations with the state, also relations with international donors complicate the position that CSOs may take, as they seek to connect with the agendas of such donors to gain contracts, while such agendas may or may not resonate with the organizations’ own mission. Negotiation also emerged in interviewees’ way of undermining the legitimacy of other CSOs, thereby inadvertently underlining tensions involved with the legitimacy criteria discussed above. One argument concerns capacity limits such as lack of knowledge of the issue, lack of good contacts or capacity to communicate well with the marginalized group involved or to articulate their needs or aspirations. Another argument concerns a lack of authenticity in values, passion and commitment to a cause. Interviewees lamented this perceived situation, accusing organizations of going for self-enrichment rather than ‘selfless’ work for the community, arguing, for example, that they are ‘not working for the tribals’, presenting the existence of such behaviour as ‘the bitter truth’, at least partly in line with the delegitimization of wide sections of civil society by the Hindu-nationalist state. Some interviewees accused other CSOs of opportunism, lamenting CSOs’ practices of taking up issues in fashion in the aid sector rather than conviction or need, disqualifying the funding-driven mission drift commonly reported in the NGO literature as morally corrupt. A few were also critical of government welfare schemes supported by CSOs that they saw as disconnected from ground realities.
V. Conclusions
The first main insight emerging from this study is that CSOs construct the legitimacy of their advocacy roles by referring to organizational capability to
Second, representation appears of little relevance in constructions of legitimacy. These constructions regularly underline privilege and differentiation from groups involved. Moreover, CSOs do not seem to draw on, or seek to support, the building of groups’ own political agendas. They also do not seem to seek confirmation for their agendas and approaches through interaction with constituencies, as representation literature (e.g., Saward 2010) would have it. The interactions with constituencies that support legitimacy appear oriented towards learning, to be able to carry out supportive roles and strengthening people’s capacity to stand up for themselves in the context of battles for the rights and entitlements on which CSOs work. This raises questions regarding the viability of the concept of representation in this context as a source of legitimacy from the perspectives of CSOs working in Jharkhand in supportive advocacy roles that are grounded in organizational capacities and perspectives.
The third insight is that ‘local voices’, articulated and advanced by ‘local CSOs’ to support ‘marginalized groups’ from ‘rights-based approaches’, need close attention and examination rather than flat-out embracement as the mainstay of legitimate CSO advocacy. Many interviewees’ accounts suggest CSO roles that sustain hierarchical relations. The discourse and practices brought in to legitimize, rights-based as they are, centre on ‘upliftment’ and ‘help’, from benevolence and ‘knowledge of people and their plight’. Claims to the legitimacy of CSO advocacy roles rest on the capacity and passion to fight the everyday injustices marginalized groups face. However, this solidarity can be delimited in its emancipatory quality, given the stance of superiority that is often taken, the othering and stigmatization that can be involved, the apparently limited engagement with constituency perspectives and leadership, and the negotiated positioning that may seek to harmonize organizational, constituency and state interests. These concerns are much in line with other literature on solidarity that problematizes the power differences that can be involved with solidarity which can reproduce and reinforce inequality. We add to this literature the insight that these power differentials can be an integral part of constructions of legitimacy for CSOs rather than only a structural limitation and that power differentials are an evident and often unproblematized feature of the CSO universe in Jharkhand.
This is not to suggest that the CSOs in this study do not take up valuable roles in support of marginalized groups’ rights. This article also does not do justice to the diversity of CSOs in Jharkhand, the context-specificity of the work they do or how the legitimacy CSOs construct for themselves is connected to that. Our sample also has clear limits, not including CSOs led by marginalized groups themselves (which do exist in Jharkhand). But there is a broadly relevant lesson here for development actors seeking to support civil society advocacy grounded in local ownership and leadership. The lesson is that ‘local ownership’ and other ideas celebrating ‘local’ CSOs in development may obfuscate power dynamics when they do not zoom in on CSO–constituency relations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank all the interviewees for sharing their experiences and perspectives. We also thank Nandini Deo, Richard Toppo and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and feedback on this paper.
Data Availability
Given that the interview materials include information regarding organizations that were shared confidentially and can be strategically sensitive, data have not been made publicly available.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Approval and Informed Consent
The authors declare that given that no data on individuals are collected or used for this study, ethical approval was waived by the university. Participation in the study was based on verbal informed consent.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grant Number: W 08.311.104).