Vol. 29 No. 23 · 29 November 2007
pages 14-16 | 4050 words
In a Faraway Pond
David Runciman
- BuyNon-Governmental Politics edited by Michel Feher
Zone, 693 pp, £24.95, May 2007, ISBN 978 1 890951 74 0
On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets. He committed a future Conservative government to spending $1 billion a year to fight malaria and insisted that rich countries should stop luring the brightest and best medical staff from poor countries to work in their hospitals. All in all, it was a sensible speech, but almost nothing Cameron said was reported in the British media or anywhere else. What received all the coverage was the fact that he was in Rwanda, talking about the problems of Africa, when his own parliamentary constituency was under three feet of water.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 24 · 13 December 2007
From Chris Greenwood
David Runciman’s observation that charities are hamstrung by demands for transparency while the business of governments remains opaque should be repeated to every gathering of trustees and in every charity boardroom across the UK (LRB, 29 November). Runciman deals mostly with charitable activities in the international context, but these aren’t the only ones that suffer disabling scrutiny. The difficulties involved in making clear that a donation to a children’s charity directly helps a child drive UK charities into pathological introspection. Promoting the need to end cruelty to children, for example, butts up against the need to prove that that is precisely what one’s organisation is trying to achieve.
I would, sadly, warn Runciman against any optimism. Polling evidence that the company I now work for has been generating for a decade shows that in 1998 two thirds of the UK public was unable to name an organisation that existed to protect the environment. In late 2007 the number was exactly the same. Polled in the same study last September, 63 per cent of the respondents were extremely or very concerned about ‘charities being open and fair, honest and legal in their fundraising’, as against 45 per cent being extremely or very concerned about ‘climate change’.
Chris Greenwood
nfpSynergy, London EC1
From Richard Marsh
Charities choose to be increasingly transparent and accountable not just as a result of government regulation, but because to exist and legitimise themselves they need to maintain the confidence of both their beneficiaries and those who make resources available. This increasingly collaborative and transparent space is much more likely to encourage the sort of political engagement that grapples with the problems addressed by charities than the opaque and unaccountable institutions to which we have become accustomed.
Richard Marsh
ImpACT Coalition, Institute of Fundraising, London SW8
