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Taiwan's NGOs need organized leadership

There has been much talk recently about the place of NGOs in Taiwan: Several months ago there was the first nationwide NGO conference; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has made much of "NGO diplomacy;" and the new government has spoken often of the valuable place NGOs could assume in Taiwan. All of this sounds great. Regrettably it does not reflect the reality of the NGO community in Taiwan.

Taiwan's NGO community suffers from four major practical problems that threaten its survival.

My comments are directed to the human rights/judicial reform segment of Taiwan's NGO community with which I am familiar. These comments, although commonly seen, are not true of all Taiwanese NGOs, all the time.

First, there are too many different NGOs in Taiwan. The NGO community in Taiwan is plagued by what I term "one-person, mini-NGOs." They are literally one or two person operations, usually with a grand sounding name, nice business cards, sometimes a Web site but in reality they are nothing more than a "mom and pop" NGO. There are hundreds of these mini-NGOs nominally present in Taiwan, diffusing what few resources, namely money and talents, the Taiwanese NGO community does have. Public goodwill as expressed in financial support and the very limited number of experienced NGO workers is divided among an excessive number of NGOs. The end result of all this is diluted organization.

Such dilution makes each individual NGO weaker, poorer and less skilled, making the community as a whole far less effective.

The reason for the excessive number of NGOs connects up with the second major problem; petty politics. I define "petty politics" as infighting within the NGO that is not truly related to a policy issue but rather is really about personalities and who is going to be the boss. My personal term for it is "laoban-itis." "Laoban" (老板) is the Chinese word for "boss." Much time, money and effort is lost in playing petty politics and it is an epidemic in the NGO community.

The end result of petty politics is that the loser leaves the NGO, sometimes along with his or her supporters, and forms another NGO that ostensibly does the same thing as the original one. Hence the duplication of NGOs in Taiwan.

The third major problem follows from the second. Many NGOs suffer from a lack of focus or a purpose which is over and above the personalities in the NGO. Many times the focus of the NGO is on the personalities not on the issues. Personal relations, personal connections, who is "in" and who is "out" supplant the real work on the issues. For an NGO to survive, for it to function effectively there must be some specific goal or purpose to which it strives. If the NGO is in reality not much more than a social club or a fan club devoted to a single person then that NGO will either fold or fail.

The final major problem -- indeed plague -- is government regulation. Contrary to the government's press releases, the government does not provide a very NGO-friendly environment. The various statutes and regulations governing NGOs are vague, conflicting and onerous. The NGO community usually solves this problem by simply ignoring, or to use the California term, "blowing off" the law.

In theory, Taiwan's NGO community could provide much value both domestically and perhaps internationally. Until certain problems are addressed and until certain "mentalities" are changed, however, much of the effort of the NGO community will be wasted "spinning its wheels."

Brian Kennedy is a member of the board of Amnesty International Taiwan and the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
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