Advocacy in the age of authoritarianism: adjustments of all sorts in Egypt

The focus of this paper is on the top-down introduction of advocacy in the Egyptian context in the 1990s as part of the bid to promote democratisation in the Arab world. The paper argues that in authoritarian contexts, participatory advocacy is contrary to the inhibitive policy environment and the nature of the political culture in place. In fact, often advocacy NGOs are disembedded from the wider context due to a focus on the policy influence arena where they are expected to elicit change. Insufficient incentives to mobilise a constituency as well as a politically restrictive environment means that sometimes advocacy oriented initiatives or organisations ignore prompts from citizen groups engaged in contentious politics. Similarly, many advocacy NGOs engage in an elite way which impacts negatively on policies and on downward accountability towards a weak or nonexistent constituency.

The paper looks at a series of case studies involving donor-state-civil society interfaces in supporting advocacy and tracks the transformations that took place in order to convert advocacy into a government-friendly form of engagement and reflects on the inherent tensions for donors backing a politicised form of development that clashes with their foreign policy.  

The paper concludes the following:

• for 50 years, the government endorsed a political culture in which NGOs’ principle role is framed to be apolitical service delivery
• political repression inhibited opportunities for building a constituency although its impact varies from one type of organisation to another
• in authoritarian regimes, the political cost of NGOswider engagement could well be their existence
• when advocacy is considered one of the ways of donor’s strengthening of civil society, and the latter is subject to the direction of the foreign policy pendulum, it is difficult to gain much long term credibility
• it is difficult for advocacy campaign organisers to plan, design, and devise strategies against the state security apparatus when it acts as “an invisible power”
• international efforts should press the government for more political space for civil society, while strengthening local activists’ ability to engage in their own campaigns

As a result, the paper indicates that the real challenge is how to find channels for preventing advocacy depoliticisation, while simultaneously acknowledging that backdoor lobbying and negotiation may be more appropriate.