bulöw, m., brokers action transnational coalitions and trade agreements in the americas

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Brokers in Action:

Transnational Coalitions and TradeAgreements in the Americas

Marisa von Bülow∗

Prepared for delivery at the 2010 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association,

Toronto, Canada October 6-9, 2010

∗ Professor, Political Science Institute, University of Brasilia. I thank Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdamfor their comments on a previous version of this paper.



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Introduction

The protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting held inSeattle, in 1999, have been presented by many scholars, activists, and the media as acrucial moment in the history of transnational collective action or, as some would frame

it, as evidence of the emergence of a “global civil society”. It is seldom recognized,however, that these protests were not spontaneous, and that they were rooted in theprevious decade of contention around trade negotiations in the Americas. These regionaldebates and the civil society networks that sponsored them spilled over to the globalarena in Seattle and also impacted transnational campaigns on other issue areas, such asinvestments and the environment.

In fact, between the beginning of the 1990s and the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the Americas became a laboratory ground for the implementation of new ruleson global governance, through the negotiations of several bilateral and regional tradeagreements that went much beyond tariff and quota debates. These negotiations provideda sort of “coral reef” (Tarrow forthcoming 2011: chapter 11) around which an increasing

number and variety of civil society organizations (CSOs) coalesced. This process of mobilization was based on an unprecedented attempt to build enduring transnationalcoalitions across North-South, cultural, and political barriers in the hemisphere. It will beargued in this article that such a process cannot be understood without analyzing themediating roles played by specific actors.

Scholars of collective action and contentious politics have long been interested inthe role of brokers, or mediators, that are capable of crossing boundaries that separateactors. The literature on social movements has put front and center the mechanism of brokerage in studies about recruitment, mobilization, and leadership, even if the words“brokerage” and “broker” were not necessarily mentioned.1 In an article published in1982, Peter Marsden identified brokerage as a key mechanism in explaining powerrelations in social networks, “by which intermediary actors facilitate transactions betweenother actors lacking access to or trust in one another” (Marsden 1982: 202).

In recent years, the concept of brokerage has gained renewed attention as part of the discussion about mechanisms and processes in explanations about contentiouspolitics. InDynamics of Contention, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tillydefined brokerage as “the linking of two or more currently unconnected social sites by aunit that mediates their relations with each other and/or with yet another site” (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001: 26). This unit could be single persons, but also cliques,organizations, places, and programs. These authors argued that brokers could have amyriad of strategies and impacts, while establishing new connections among actors. As inthe analysis of the other mechanisms identified in that book, various examples of brokerage in action were provided, but in provisional terms that begged for furtherempirical research. In spite of the current interest, we still know little about why and howindividuals or organizations become brokers, the variety of strategies used by them, andthe circumstances in which actors may fail to mediate or, indeed, may use their mediatingpositions to purposefully demobilize.

1 A small sample includes Snow, Zurcher and Ekland-Olson, 1980, Klandermans and Oegema, 1987,Fernandez and McAdam, 1988, Gould, 1991, Diani, 2003.



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The main goal of this article, thus, is to help “unpack” the meaning of brokerage,understood as a purposive strategy undertaken by actors that entails a set of challenges(and not only opportunities) to which these actors respond in various ways. Thus, withthe DOC authors, brokerage is defined here in broad terms, as bridging initiatives thatlink actors (individuals, organizations or sectors) that are separated by geographical

distance, lack of trust, lack of resources, or simply because they are unaware of eachothers’ existence. However, this definition does not assume a complete disconnect amongactors that are only waiting for brokers to link them. As Ann Mische has argued, “in aSimmelian world, with multiple identities and relations in play, the existence of completely disconnected clusters is only a limiting case in relation to more commonlyoccurring partial forms of intersection and disjunction” (Mische 2008: 48). The relevanceof multiple ties is particularly true in the analysis of transnational collective action amongheterogeneous actors that often are linked through their co-participation in a myriad of different campaigns, events, or coalitions.

This article contributes to the task of empirically examining brokerage byfocusing on the roles of brokers in attempts to build enduring coalitions across civil

society sectors and national boundaries. Based on research on transnational networks of challengers of free trade agreements in the Americas,2 it seeks to analyze the differenttypes of roles brokers potentially play in collective action and their sustainability throughtime. It does so by bridging the literature on contentious politics, political brokerage, andsocial network analysis.

This analysis does not pretend to encompass all types of brokerage efforts,however. It focuses on specific mediating initiatives: those built among CSOs as part of their attempts to create enduring coalitions. This empirical choice is justifiable because itsheds light on what the literature has acknowledged as the hardest but also the leaststudied and potentially most interesting type of coalition-building at the transnationallevel (Tarrow, forthcoming 2011: chapter 11). Such coalitions are highly dependent uponwhat I call “institutionalized brokerage roles”: predefined political mediating tasks,which are recognized and accepted as such by others as part of the division of laborwithin transnational alliances. The analysis leaves out all kinds of informal mediations,for example those based on friendship ties. However, the typology of brokerage rolespresented below may be useful for future research that focuses on the roles of informalbrokers as well.

Institutionalized brokerage roles do not emerge out of thin air, but are part of openended processes of negotiation of differences and the development of commonunderstandings. In emphasizing the constructed and often provisional roles of actors thatperform such roles, we coincide with Roger Gould and Roberto Fernandez when theyargue that brokerage is not “an activity thrust upon actors in social systems by chance oraccident but rather as a role that may be purposively sought or avoided…” (Gould andFernández 1989: 104). Such an analysis requires a dynamic approach to brokerage, as a

2 This research was done in two rounds. Between May 2004 and September 2005, 123 civil societyorganizations (CSOs) answered a social network questionnaire, in Brazil (28), Chile (24), Mexico (30) andthe United States (41). Dozens of semistructured and in-depth interviews with key civil societyorganization members helped to clarify and make sense of the network data uncovered. The second roundof interviews was conducted between January and August of 2008. For more details about the research anda complete presentation of its results, see von Bülow, forthcoming.



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mechanism that unfolds through time in specific contexts. It answers SuzanneStaggenborg’s call to see mechanisms in action, that is, to go beyond identifyingmechanisms to explaining how they work and the particular effects they might have indifferent cultural and political contexts (Staggenborg 2008: 342-343).

The article begins with a proposal to establish a “ladder of brokerage”, based on

the differentiation among a hierarchy of brokerage roles and tasks. It goes on to presentan empirical analysis, based on my research on the creation of transnational coalitions of trade agreement challengers in the Americas throughout fifteen years. The main part of the text focuses on two specific experiences of “institutionalized brokerage”, one based inMexico and the other one in Brazil. Through the analysis of the cases of the MexicanAction Network on Free Trade (RMALC) and the Brazilian Network for the Integrationof the Peoples (REBRIP), it exemplifies the dynamic character of brokerage and thevarious possible outcomes of attempts to perform similar mediating tasks in differentpolitical and societal contexts.

I. Toward a Typology of Brokerage Roles

In general, the literatures on social networks and on contentious politics havetended to assume the positive impacts of brokerage, for brokers themselves and/or forcollective action, because brokers accumulate more social capital (which, in turn, leads tobetter access to knowledge and creative ideas) (Burt 2005), because they contribute tomobilization by creating new collective actors (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), and/orbecause they help to undermine ideological differences among actors (Diani 2003: 107).

While brokers may have these impacts, it is not possible to conflate their positionsin networks with specific outcomes. The theoretical framework used in this article movesaway from a structuralist approach that correlates actors’ roles with their networkposition, and toward an agentic or relational view of mediating positions as a product of actors’ choices, negotiations, and learning processes. It assumes that the formal mappingof actors’ positions is only a point of departure for an analysis of brokerage roles. Morerelevant analytical questions are: how did actors get there? Are these positionssustainable through time? What kinds of brokerage roles are performed by actors insimilar positions?

In other words, we cannot take for granted that an actor in position to facilitateinteractions will faithfully and always do so. The literature on political brokerage hasmade this point clearly, by analyzing brokers as part of clientelist relations.3 Thus, in thisarticle it is assumed that “… skills in mediation can work in two contrasting directions. They can be directed toward overcoming differences, inducing mutual understanding, andbuilding new forms of collaboration. Or they can aim at cementing competitive positions,increasing bargaining payoffs, and winning allies for power struggles or ideologicaldisputes” (Mische 2008: 48-49). Efforts to present a typology of brokerage roles are

3 See, for example, Javier Auyero’s analysis of political brokers and clientelism in Argentina (Auyero,1999), Charles Tilly’s concept of “brokered autonomy”, by which “rulers grant formal recognition to a trustnetwork, which retains distinctive rights and representation in exchange for negotiated payoffs goingdirectly to the regime” (Tilly, 2005), and Sidney Tarrow’s analysis of the roles of mayors as politicalbrokers in Italy and France (Tarrow, 1977).



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essential to better understand the different impacts brokers may have while positionedsimilarly in networks.

Actors in charge of institutionalized brokerage roles in transnational coalitions areexpected to create, sustain or recover connections within domestic spaces and acrosslarge geographical spaces, political and cultural cleavages. These brokers have at least

four political roles that they may play: the role of translators, who produce and diffuseinformation within and across boundaries;coordinators, needed to organize thedistribution of resources, responsibilities and information;articulators, who bridge acrosscleavages to bring together actors and negotiate common positions, and the role of representativesof a wider group in events and meetings. Table 1 presents some of themain tasks associated with each of these roles.

This typology builds upon two previous contributions from the literature. It isinspired by the one proposed earlier by Roger Gould and Roberto Fernandez, whodistinguished among five types of social roles, based on the positions that actors couldoccupy in networks of resource flows.4 However, it differs from it on fundamentally threeaccounts. First, as Ann Mische has pointed out, Gould and Fernández still presuppose

that brokerage occurs across completely separate actors or groups of actors (Mische2008: 378-9). Second, the authors conflate the position of actors with their impacts, anapproach that has been criticized above. The assumption that “brokerage is inherently andinextricably tied to structural position in transaction networks… and is consequentlyindependent of the specific content of the transaction involved” (Gould and Fernández1989: 94) does not allow us to understand how brokers in similar positions may playdifferent roles. Third, it is a static approach to brokerage, which does not illuminate theways in which actors may change their intermediating roles through time.

The second important contribution in the literature toward a typology of brokers isthe one proposed by Ann Mische, who distinguished among four types of brokers, basedon the discursive aspects of mediation.5 The differentiation among brokerage rolespresented in this article borrows from it, but it is based on a broader approach tobrokerage that includes a more diverse set of tasks.

The typology proposed also offers an additional twist to the previous debate byspecifying the hierarchy of brokerage roles. In fact, the order in which the brokerage rolesand tasks are presented in Table 1 is not random. Borrowing loosely from SherryArnstein’s idea about the “ladder of participation” (Arnstein 1969), the brokerage rolesare arranged in terms of the increased degree of difficulty that they entail for actors. Thetasks of translators are more easily accomplished and sustainable through time than theones undertaken by coordinators, and so on. The tasks of articulators and representativespresuppose the previous negotiations of common positions. More specifically, being ableto carry out the role of representative of others is most difficult, especially in the longterm, as will be argued below.

4 These were: the local broker or coordinator, the cosmopolitan or itinerant broker, the gatekeeper, therepresentative, and the liaison (Gould and Fernández, 1989: 92-93).5 These were: the articulators, who “negotiate alliances between partially segmented subgroups”, theamplifiers, who “help to expand a movement through indirect ties that enable flows of ideas and resourcesacross partially overlapping sectors and milieus”, the coordinators, who “work to distribute resources andresponsibilities across the relational cleavages created by strongly overlapping subgroups”, and thesymbolic bridgers, who “enable the convergence of heterogeneous subgroups by serving as multivalentembodiments of larger collectivities” (Mische, 2008: 177).



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Table 1 The Brokerage Ladder

Type of Brokerage Role Main Tasks

TranslatorKnowledge production and diffusion (publications;

websites; workshops; seminars).

Coordinator

Division of labor among members.Reception and distribution of resources, responsibilities,and information.Reach out to new potential participants.Reach out to international contacts.

Articulator

Promotion of dialogue to build consensus with domesticand foreign allies.Capacity-building.Monitoring of negotiations.

Representative

Interviews to the press.

Declarations.Speak in the name of others in civil society events.Speak in the name of others in official meetings.Contacts with negotiators, government officials,international organization officials.Occupation of seats in committees, councils, publicaudiences, and negotiating tables.

The brokerage tasks that are associated to the various brokerage roles may beplayed simultaneously or separately, within and/or outside national borders. As actors

move up the ladder, they involve increasingly complex processes of continuousnegotiation. Sometimes such mediation has positive impacts in terms of recruitment andmobilization; other times it may lead to the deactivation of ties, and to attempts to replacebrokers or to sidestep them. The remainder of this article gives examples of bothoutcomes.

II . Trade and Collective Action in the Americas

At the end of the 1980s there was a glaring lack of collaborative action amongcivil society organizations across the Americas, especially (but not only) action thatcrossed North-South boundaries.6 Furthermore, there were few blueprints available for

coalition-building that could bring together the myriad of social movements, NGOs,small business associations, and labor organizations interested in challenging regionaltrade agreement negotiations. Previous transnational arrangements in the hemisphere

6 When the debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began, networks amongU.S., Canadian and Mexican civil society organizations were very restricted. Previous ties existed, butthese were limited to a relatively small group of organizations and individuals in specific issue areas. Seevon Bülow, forthcoming, chapter 4.



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were in the main specific to categories or types of organizations, such as internationallabor or religious organizations, with scarce intersections among them.

The literature on transnationalism has highlighted the difficulties of buildingenduring forms of coalition across borders, especially those across North-South arenas. Ithas also underscored the rejection by actors to the creation of hierarchical and centralized

organizations. Accordingly, it has placed a positive emphasis on the tendency fortransnational collective action to be organized loosely, preferably around campaigns thathave a limited life span, in which common goals are narrowly targeted (Anheier and Themudo 2002; Smith 2005). However, little has been written about attempts toinstitutionalize brokerage roles in initiatives that are neither loose campaigns nor areproduction of hierarchical and centralized forms of transnational coalition-building.7

The case of trade-related coalition-building efforts in the Americas, between 1991and 2006, sheds light on this kind of initiative. The next section briefly summarizes thestory of the creation of a new transnational coalition, the Hemispheric Social Alliance(HSA). More specifically, the article focuses on the institutionalized brokerage rolesperformed by two of its national chapters.8

a) The Hemispheric Social Alliance

The HSA was created at the end of the 1990s, in the context of the negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It innovated as an hemisphericorganization that sought to be an enduring coalition based on common goals andprinciples sustained by a wide variety of CSOs. Because of its broad membership,reaching across various civil society sectoral domains as well as the North–South divide,it has been considered an example of “the possibility of broader alliances built around thelarger issue of democratising economic governance” (Anner and Evans 2004: 40). It wasdefined by its members as an “open space,” a “forum of progressive social movementsand organizations of the Americas, created to exchange information, define strategies andpromote common actions, directed at finding an alternative and democratic developmentmodel.”9

In terms of its organizational structure, the Alliance did not conceive itself “as anorganization with structures and hierarchies of any type, but as an ongoing process underconstruction,” but it admitted the creation of “minimum and flexible coordinationinstances at the hemispheric, regional, national, local, sectoral levels.”10 It did not have itsown office spaces, nor permanent staff. It did create a rotating Secretariat, a CoordinatingGroup, thematic working groups, and a Hemispheric Council that took the mostimportant decisions, in which all affiliated organizations could participate.11 It was based

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Sidney Tarrow has contributed to this debate by proposing a typology of transnational coalition buildingthat includes both short-term and enduring coalitions (Tarrow, 2005, esp. chapter 9). For a discussion abouttypes of transnational coalitions, see also von Bülow, forthcoming, chapter 2.8 Other types of organizational repertoires were also created, most importantly specific campaigns, such asthe Continental Campaign Against the FTAA, were launched during this period. For an analysis of thedifferences among these coalitions, see von Bülow, forthcoming, chapter 7.9 See http://www.asc-hsa.org, accessed March 1, 2006.10 Ibid.11 Initially, the intention was to create a more sophisticated organization, with hemispheric-wide thematicworking groups, but only two were active up to 2005: the group in charge of monitoring the FTAA



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on a dual affiliation entrance: existing regional coalitions or national chapters of the HSAcould become regular members. Its decision making was by consensus. It did not collectfees from its members, but, instead, raised funds from international foundations andNGOs to pay for its small organizational structure, meetings, and publications.

As one of the Chilean founders of the HSA explained, there was general

agreement among participants on the need to define rules of coexistence that would allowfor plural transnational collective action:

“We had in common this critique, that is related to the construction of a newsubject, that we needed to work in an efficient way, linking the international withlocal impacts, but without these false, modernist representations of largeconglomerates, and [the creation of] representations that are often fictitious.”12

In spite of this emphasis on horizontality and consensus, however, the HSAcannot be characterized as an “open space” accessible to all. Individuals and autonomousorganizations could not apply directly for membership, and thus actors that were not

members of regional coalitions, and/or did not wish to become members of nationalchapters, were in practice excluded (von Bülow, forthcoming: chapter 7).In 2006, the HSA had eighteen national chapters organized across the hemisphere.

These were themselves organized as coalitions, seeking to bring together a wide varietyof domestic actors. They were created across the hemisphere with specific brokerageroles in mind. Applying the typology presented above, they were expected to do thetranslationof the technical language of trade agreements and analyses to civil societyactors and the population in general, to fill the need for coordination in collective actionon trade among these heterogeneous actors, to bearticulatingpolitical spaces for thenegotiation of common positions across ideational, sectoral, and national boundaries, andto do therepresentationof a broader set of actors in domestic and transnational eventsand civil society meetings.

These national-level initiatives were not simply spaces for convergence of movements, such as the World Social Forums. At the same time, they attempted not toimpose a rigid and hierarchical decision-making structure that limited the autonomy of members (REBRIP 2007). However, as will be seen in the next sections, the balancebetween institutionalization and autonomy remained a moving target and a key challengethroughout the period studied.

The main common organizational characteristics of these national coalitions were:a) they were affiliation-based (social movement organizations, NGOs and civil societycoalitions became regular members, although in some cases individuals also wereallowed to participate); b) they were multi-sectoral; c) decision-making was made byconsensus by an elected coordinating group and/or by general assemblies; d) there was aninternal division of labor, whereby specific individuals and/or member organizationswere in charge of brokerage tasks; and, of course, e) they were thematically-oriented, i.e.,they focused primarily on trade agreement negotiations. Beyond these common

negotiations, and the Gender Committee. Interview with Gonzalo Berrón, HSA Secretariat, São Paulo,April 2005.12 Interview with Coral Pey, then Executive Director of the Chilean Alliance for a Just and Responsible

Trade (ACJR), Santiago de Chile, June 2005.



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characteristics, however, these coalitions sponsored somewhat different arrangements,which, it will be argued, is important when considering their ability to play brokerageroles.

Two of the most active national chapters of the HSA, up to 2006, were theBrazilian Network for Peoples’ Integration (Rede Brasileira pela Integração dos Povos -

REBRIP), and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (Red Mexicana de Acciónfrente al Libre Comercio– RMALC). Both REBRIP and RMALC were founded bysocial movements, labor unions, NGOs and other types of civil society organizations.However, while the Secretariat of the Brazilian coalition was headquartered in a long-standing NGO that provisionally lent part of its offices and staff for this purpose, theMexican one became a distinct organization, with its own permanent space, greaterdependence on fundraising from nonmembers, and a larger staff. The following sectionscompares these experiences, highlighting common challenges and different outcomes.

b) The Case of RMALC in Mexico: from gateway to gatekeeper?

RMALC was created in 1991 as a meeting space with a life span that was linkedinitially to that of the debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)negotiations.13 Fifteen years later the coalition still existed. By then, however, itpresented a very different organizational and political profile. While during its first yearsRMALC was administered by volunteers and temporarily occupied part of the space of the offices of the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Auténtico del Trabajo - FAT), in 2005the coalition had six paid staff,14 and occupied a larger portion of the FAT building inMexico City, on a permanent basis. When the HSA was launched, RMALC became itsnational chapter.

In spite of this increased organizational capacity, RMALC became less powerfulthan it was in the beginning of the 1990s in terms of its ability to play brokerage roles. Ithad fewer active members than when it was founded,15 and fewer of those were member-based organizations. Important mobilizations held in Mexico in the first years of the2000s, such as the multitudinous protests of agricultural workers and family farmersagainst the liberalization of trade under NAFTA, were not organized through RMALC,nor did RMALC have an important role in them.16 The main reasons for this decliningcapacity had to do with its internal governance decisions, the specific political context inwhich the coalition was embedded, and the characteristics of Mexican civil society.

For many Mexican actors, after NAFTA passed trade became a marginal issue intheir agendas. Few civil society organizations had staff dedicated to following tradeagreements, in contrast with better financed organizations in countries such as the UnitedStates. Critics of RMALC argued, however, that the decline in participation was not due

13 Interview with Bertha Luján, former Executive Coordinator of RMALC, Mexico City, August 2005.14 Interview with Maria Atilano, Executive Coordinator of RMALC, Mexico City, August 2004. In 1995RMALC got its first fax and computer, hired its own secretary, and was able to diminish its financialdependence on the FAT (see Massicotte, 2004: 255).15 It started with forty-two affiliated organizations; this number grew during the NAFTA debates to overone hundred, and was in 2006 close to sixteen.16 A coalition of rural workers’ organizations (El Campo no Aguanta Más) organized various protests inMexico City and in the border between Mexico and the U.S. from 2003 onward. See von Bülow,forthcoming, esp. chapter 6, for an analysis of rural workers’ organizations and trade debates.



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to the lack of interest of members, but rather to a centralization of activities in a handfulof individuals that took decisions without due transparency and that did not have thelegitimacy to play brokerage roles.

Those Mexican organizations who still thought of RMALC as strategic politicalspaces in the 2000s saw its greatest strength not as coordinator, articulator, or

representative, but as translator, or a site of knowledge production and diffusion. Itremained the most important domestic reference for CSOs looking for a critical analysisof trade agreements and their impacts, one that presented issues in terms that theirmembers could easily understand, and that linked international negotiations to localrealities.17 However, RMALC was largely unable to sustain the coordination, articulationand representation roles that it was supposed to play. In fact, its knowledge productionskills contributed to solidifying its profile only as a translator in the eyes of other civilsociety organizations.

A strategy designed to broaden participation was to create parallel meeting spacesfor coordination, oriented toward specific issues or events, which did not necessarilyconvene in RMALC’s offices, nor were necessarily led by that coalition’s Coordinating

Group. Througout the period studied, for example, CSOs launched the MexicanCommittee of the Continental Campaign against the FTAA, the Committee of MexicanCitizens on the European Union-Mexico Agreement, and the Coordination of thePeoples’ Forums, in preparation for the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests inCancun. However, these spaces were provisional, and thus unable to generate the kind of sustained brokerage roles that the HSA depended upon.

In order to capture RMALC’s ability to play the brokerage role of coordinatoracross scales, Mexican civil society organizations were asked how they would reach outto U.S. organizations in the case of a trade event being organized in that country.18 Almost half of the CSOs that answered said they would contact counterparts throughRMALC (see the meanings of the abbreviations in the Annex to this article). However,only one of them would use RMALC as its exclusive gateway. Most would directlycontact specific U.S. counterparts, and/or use other brokers, such as the HemisphericSocial Alliance secretariat, regional-level sectoral organizations, and other Mexicanorganizations (see graph 1). Similar answers were given when the same actors were askedabout how they would contact counterparts in Brazil and in Chile (see von Bülowforthcoming).

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Several of the Mexican interviewees highlighted the important intellectual role of RMALC in knowledgeproduction. Between 1991 and 2003, RMALC published or co-edited twenty-three publications, besidesnumerous popular education materials and bulletins (Massicotte, 2004: 289).18 Twenty-five Mexican civil society organizations answered this question, during a series of interviewsconducted in that country in 2005: “Suppose the next Ministerial Meeting of the FTAA will be held in theUnited States and you need to discuss a strategy for participating in it with U.S. organizations. Do you: a)get in touch with them directly; b) get in touch with them through coalitions such as RMALC; c) get intouch through other Mexican organizations; d) get in touch through regional coalition; e) don’t know.”Respondents could choose more than one option. For more details about the questionnaire used and theresults obtained, see von Bülow, forthcoming.



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GRAPH 1

Gateways Used by Mexican CSOs to Reach U.S. CSOs

ANEC

CAPISE

CentroPro

CECCAM

CEE

CEMDA

CIEPAC

CILAS

CIOAC

CTM

CENCOS

CNOC

COMIEDES

DECA

FAT

FDC

FHBoll

GEA

MCD

MujeresD

Oxfam

SemChicanos

SME

STRM

UNORCA

Direct ties to U.S. CSOs

Other brokers

RMALC

• Civil Society Organizations Gateways used to contact allies in the U.S. before an FTAA meetingSource: Interviews with representatives of civil society organizations.

As two of RMALC’s members explained, since the NAFTA debates there hadbeen a multiplication of transnational ties, and a diminished dependence on the coalitionas the single gateway to reach out to organizations in other countries:

“At first maybe the door was RMALC, but now we have a series of relationshipsthat have been built. … The process has spilled over to other issues, peoplebecame specialized, bilateral contacts were made. Now there are other levels of relationship.”19 “RMALC has contacts and a considerable weight at the international level, butdoes not really bridge the national and global levels. They make the contacts, butthe information is not shared. … thus we do not feel represented by it, and do not

consider it useful. You begin to build ties by yourself…”

20

While this fragmentation represented a challenge for RMALC, it also indicated a

vitality of the field of trade challengers that did not exist before in Mexico, a point thatwas emphasized by one of the founders of the coalition:

19 Interview with Brisa Maya, CENCOS, Mexico City, August 2005.20 Anonymous interview with a participant, Mexico City, August 2005.



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“There is a positive side to this, which is that the range of organizations involvedin trade issues has broadened. It is still far from ideal… the most importantnational movements react to the local and national agendas, very rarely do theyreact to the international agenda, or make the connection between the nationaland the international agenda… In spite of this, though, there has been a growth of

what was before something that was very centralized in the RMALC, and that nowincorporates many other organizations.”21

Although the group of Mexican actors interviewed cannot be considered as arepresentative sample of the challengers of trade agreements, they included the mostactive organizations in the debates about NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of theAmericas (FTAA). Together with the information provided by in-depth interviews, thedata shows that, in Mexico, the weakening of RMALC was cause and consequence of agreater multiplication of ties, but, as argued above, this was also a positive process of creation of new direct transnational ties.

Challenges to RMALC’s brokerage tasks became even more explicit when there

was debate about a representational role that needed to be fulfilled at the transnationallevel. Tensions were enhanced with the creation of the Hemispheric Social Alliance(HSA), in 1997, because national chapters such as RMALC were expected to be able torepresent its members. For example, when the HSA Hemispheric Council met in 2005, ithad resources to pay for only one person from each chapter to attend. In Mexico, thedebate was: who should go, someone who had been following the debates in the agendaof that specific meeting most closely, but that had attended many similar meetings before,or someone new? Those who argued the first were criticized for claiming issueownership. In turn, those who argued the latter were criticized for creating efficiencyproblems. As one of the RMALC critics argued:

“We were sent an e-mail from someone who thought[s/he] was the adequaterepresentative, because[s/he] was following that specific issue. I was very criticalof it, because there are other organizations that have been following the issue aswell, and we are not stupid.”22

In sum, in the period considered RMALC remained influential in terms of itscapacity to play the role of translator and, to a much lesser degree, in its capacity to helpcoordinate domestic and international action. The expertise of individuals that had formany years been following trade negotiations closely was a continuous source of respect.However, it was unable to secure the brokerage roles of representative at the domesticand transnational levels and of articulator of common positions across sectoral andideological cleavages.

c) The Case of REBRIP in Brazil: similar challenges, different outcomes

21 Interview with Héctor de la Cueva, CILAS, Mexico City, August 2004.22 Anonymous interview with a member of a Mexican civil society organization, Mexico City, August2005.



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In contrast with the case of RMALC, in Brazil the national chapter of the HSAsponsored a somewhat different institutionalization path. Instead of creating a neworganization, the Secretariat of the coalition remained headquartered in a previouslyexisting NGO, the Federation of Organisms for Social and Educational Assistance(Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional - FASE), with a small

structure, and less dependence on specific individuals and on external fundraising. FASEis an organization with a long history of collaborative work with allies overseas on issuesrelated to development, human rights, poverty, and the democratization of internationalorganizations.

This coalition was more successful than its Mexican counterpart in maintainingthe participation of a larger number of actors, many of which represented some of themost important member-based organizations in these countries. This outcome seems toreinforce Suzanne Staggenborg’s argument that, if coalitions can be maintained withoutcreating a formal organization, it has a positive impact because resource strains onmember organizations can be minimized. The same author also argues that coalitions aremore likely to succeed if they include established organizations which are in a position to

facilitate the interaction of coalition members (Staggenborg 1986: 384-388). However, asargued for the Mexican case, to understand the ability to play brokerage roles it isimportant to consider the characteristics of the field of challengers of trade agreements ineach country.

In Brazil, collective action on trade only became an important part of most civilsociety organizations’ agendas after the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)negotiations had begun, in the second half of the 1990s. REBRIP was created formally in2001, a full decade after RMALC.23 Thus, it was born already as part of a hemispheric-wide debate around the FTAA negotiations and as a member of the HSA.

In this context, not only REBRIP’s participants knew about RMALC’s problems,but they actively sought to avoid them by creating an internal governance structure thatrelied less on the role of external resources and of individuals, and more on openingchannels for the incorporation of key civil society organizations. The launching of REBRIP’s thematic working groups was important to secure the participation of some of the most important social movement organizations in the country, which gathered tocreate agreement on a specific agenda. As one of the interviewees recalled:

“In 2001, REBRIP was a group of five or six individuals that were active… agroup of friends… The Working Groups completely changed this configuration,because they enabled REBRIP to grow roots in civil society”.24

The example of the Working Group in Agriculture is a good one, because itunited key member-based organizations that would not normally collaborate amongthemselves (such as the Landless Workers’ Movement – Movimento dos TrabalhadoresSem Terra - MST and the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture –Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores em Agricultura- CONTAG), together withinternational NGOs like Oxfam and Action Aid. These active Working Groups led to a

23 Interview with Fátima Mello, REBRIP Secretariat, Rio de Janeiro, March 2005.24 Interview with Adriano Campolina, Action Aid, Rio de Janeiro, March 2005.



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decentralization of some of the brokerage tasks listed in Table 1, such as capacity-building and knowledge production and diffusion, along sectoral lines.25

In the first years of the 2000s, REBRIP was probably the HSA national chapterwith greatest capacity to bring together a broad range of civil society organizations. Moreso than in the case of the Mexican national chapter, REBRIP was able to continue

performing brokerage roles. However, there were other organizations that did not rely onit to mediate resources, contacts, or information, and that did not recognize it as eithertheir gateway to international coordination, nor as their representative. REBRIP was notthe single meeting space for coordination and articulation of positions around tradeagreements.

The launching of the National Campaign against the FTAA, in 2002, broughttogether an even more heterogeneous group of actors around the circumscribed goal of defeating that specific agreement. Among those, some did not participate actively inREBRIP, such as church groups, some labor unions, individuals, and members of political parties, both at the national level and in a myriad of local “popular committees”(Midlej e Silva 2008). Contrary to REBRIP, this Campaign did not seek to build an

enduring coalition.When asked how they would reach allies in the case of an FTAA meeting held inthe United States, Brazilian organizations were divided. Few (four out of twenty-seventhat answered the question) would contact U.S. organizations directly, but also a fewwould make contact exclusively through REBRIP (only two), without also going througheither the National Campaign Against the FTAA, and/or other brokers (see Graph 2, andthe list of abbreviations used in the Annex). Similar results were obtained when thequestion was asked about the gateways used to reach out to Chilean and Mexicanorganizations. These data suggest that, as in the Mexican case, Brazilian challengers totrade agreements rejected the national chapter of the HSA as their single gateway, andtended to also rely on direct ties, or on the direct ties that other allies have. However,there was a greater tendency for different gateways to be used in addition to tradecoalitions, and not instead of them.

Even among REBRIP’s own members, not all rely on the coalition to performbrokerage roles, especially those related to articulating and representation tasks. As thecoalition’s Coordinating Group recognized in a document produced in 2007, many of itsown members were larger (in terms of social base and political capacities) than thecoalition, which meant that their positions were not decided primarily within the coalition(REBRIP 2007). Member organizations such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)and CUT saw REBRIP as an important space for access to knowledge and coordinationof actions around specific goals and issues, but not as an arena to build common bindingpositions. At the same time that these CSOs participated actively within the coalition,they maintained their own sectoral decisionmaking arenas, domestically andinternationally.

25 However, in the debates previous to its fourth Assembly, members of REBRIP’s Coordinationrecognized that this descentralization had led to a defficient flow of information across Working Groupsand between those and the Coordination (REBRIP 2007).



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GRAPH 2Gateways used by Brazilian CSOs to Reach U.S. CSOs

ABIAIDS

ANDES

ActionAid

Cáritas

CEPIS

CGT

CNB

CNM

CONTAG

CUT

FASE

IBASE

IBRADES

INESC

ISP

InstEqüit

MAB

MPA

MSF

MST

Oxfam

PACS

PO

SOF

SPM

UNE

Unafisco

Direct ties with U.S. CSOs

REBRIP

Other brokers

Campaign Against the FTAA

• Civil Society Organizations Gateways used to contact allies in the U.S. before an FTAA meetingSource: Interviews with representatives of civil society organizations.

REBRIP’s members were also aware that there needed to be an internal balancingof power, if the coalition was going to avoid the problems that plagued its Mexicancounterpart. Participants agreed that REBRIP’s strength was at least in part due to theability of social movement organizations and NGOs to work together. This ability wasnot born with REBRIP, but was built through at least thirty years of collaboration amongsome of the coalition’s key members.26 Even so, as a participant from the country’s mainworkers’ federation, the Unitary Workers’ Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores -CUT), explained, to find equilibrium between large membership-based organizations andNGOs remained a challenge:

“There is the risk of REBRIP being transformed into an NGO, given the strengthof the NGOs in it, but it depends a lot on the participation of the socialmovements. For example, if we[CUT]participate with a low profile, there is agreater risk of a more NGO-face; if we participate with too high a profile, thealliance explodes.”27

26 For example, FASE, the Secretariat for REBRIP since it was founded, is an NGO that helped to foundtheCentral Única dos Trabalhadores– CUT, in the beginning of the 1970s.27 Interview with Rafael Freire, CUT-Brazil’s International Relations Secretariat, São Paulo, May 2005.



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As the person in charge of REBRIP’s Secretariat in FASE explained, the ability toplay brokerage roles in such heterogeneous organizational environments entails acceptingto have a low profile:

“We don’t do anything[that is trade-related] as FASE… There is a group of

NGOs in Brazil that knows its roles and limits, and that does not want torepresent or to take the place of social movements. I think that after decades of working together, we now have the maturity to recognize each organization’srole. This is FASE’s prime commitment in terms of its relationships with others:we privilege the participation of social movements in all we do. We are againstexclusive articulations among NGOs.”28

In spite of these efforts, tensions between NGOs and member-based organizationsarose when there was a representational role to be fulfilled. For example, when REBRIPdiscussed whether to send a representative to follow global trade negotiations in Geneva,member unions opposed sending someone from the NGO that had made the proposal. In

the end, the compromise reached was to send two representatives: one from a labor union(CUT’s Steelworkers’ Confederation) and a second from the NGO.29

Concluding Remarks

Civil society actors are still learning how to deal with the challenges of coalition-building across borders. The analysis presented in this article did not pretend to offer afull theoretical framework for studying these challenges. However, by focusing on theexperience of attempts to build enduring coalitions in the Americas, it allows us to maketwo important arguments. First, that studies of transnational collective action profit bestfrom research that takes a longer term look at processes of coalition building, goingbeyond the study of events or short-term campaigns. Second, that processes of transnational mobilization, even in those cases of the construction of enduring coalitions,are still far from generating a global (or, in this case, hemispheric) civil society.

In spite of the different political contexts in Mexico and Brazil, there aresimilarities worth highlighting in RMALC and REBRIP’s experiences. One importantchallenge to actors’ capacity to perform coordinating, articulating and representationroles in both cases were related to decisions regarding the internal governance of thesecoalitions. A general unsolved question is how to provide effective channels for theparticipation of organizations from outside the major urban areas, especially localorganizations with small budgets.30 Although this problem has not been ignored bycoalition builders, no good solutions have been found yet. This is a challengeacknowledged by the literature on coalitions, but it is even harder to address when multi-level brokerage around a complicated issue is involved, as in the case of trade in theAmericas. Most participants of both REBRIP and RMALC were located in large urban

28 Idem.29 Interview with Fernando Lopes, Secretary-General of CNM/CUT, São Paulo, March 2005.30 In the Argentinian case, similar complaints weremade by civil society organizations located outside theBuenos Aires area (see Herkenrath, 2006).



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areas, and they were the ones with greater access to funding, information, links to alliesin other countries, links to trade negotiators, and to legislative authorities.

A related challenge was that, through time, fewer organizations relied exclusivelyon domestic trade coalitions to perform brokerage roles. The literature on transnationalcollective action has shown that there is a general tendency toward the multiplication of

ties among civil society actors across borders. The case of challengers of tradeagreements in the Americas reinforces this finding, which has relevant consequences interms of our analysis about the roles of brokers in transnational coalitions. On the onehand, multiplication of ties may lead to less dependence on specific actors to mediatecontacts, funding, information, and ideas. On the other hand, it creates new difficulties interms of coordination of resources, the construction of common demands, andrepresentation tasks.

To the extent that actors that are supposed to perform institutionalized brokerageroles are replaced by others, this tendency puts into question not only the potentialsurvival of these brokers, but also the whole structure of enduring coalition-buildingacross the local, national and hemispheric scales that had been set in place. However, if

other gateways are used in addition to trade coalitions, as in the Brazilian case, thissuggests a potentially positive process of multiplication of brokers, and not a tendency foractors to shy away from transnational collective action and sustained coalition-building.Given these challenges, this article shows that brokerage roles are extremely hard tomaintain through time in transnational coalition building efforts. It is specially hard tomaintain high levels of acceptability of the role of specific actors as representatives inhighly heterogeneous coalition-building initiatives.



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Annex – L ist of Abbreviations Used in Graphs 1-2

ABIAIDS - Brazilian Interdisciplinary Aids Association (Brazil)ANDES - National Association of University Professors (Brazil)ANEC - National Association of Rural Producers’ Trading Firms (Mexico)

CAPISE - Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Research (Mexico)CECCAM - Center for Studies for Rural Change in Mexico (Mexico)CEMDA - Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Mexico)CENCOS - National Center for Social Communication (Mexico)CEPIS – Center for Popular Education – Institute Sedes Sapientiae (Brazil)CGT - General Workers’ Confederation (Brazil)CIEPAC - Center for Economic and Political Research for Community Action (Mexico)CILAS - Center for Labor Research and Consulting (Mexico)CIOAC - Independent Confederation of Farmworkers and Peasants (Mexico)CNB - National Confederation of Bank Workers (Brazil)CNM - National Steelworkers Confederation (Brazil)

CNOC - National Coordinator of Coffee Producers (Mexico)COMIEDES - Mexican Council for Sustainable Development (Mexico)CONIECO - National Council of Environmental Industrialists (Mexico)CONTAG - National Confederations of Agricultural Workers (Brazil)CTM - Confederation of Mexican Workers (Mexico)CUT-Brasil - Unified Workers’ Central (Brazil)DECA - DECA People’s Team (Mexico)FASE - Federation of Organisms for Social and Educational Assistance (Brazil)FAT - Authentic Labor Front (Mexico)FDC - Peasants’ Democratic Front of Chihuahua (Mexico)FHBoll - Heinrich Boll Foundation (Mexico)GEA - Environmental Studies Group (Mexico)IBASE - Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (Brazil)INESC - Institute of Socio-Economic Studies (Brazil)InstEqüit - Equït Institute (Brazil)ISP - International Public Service (Brazil)MAB - Movement of Dam-Affected People (Brazil)MCD - Citizen’s Movement for Democracy (Mexico)MPA - Movement of Small Agricultural Workers (Brazil)MujeresD - Women for Dialogue (Mexico)MSF - Doctors without Borders (Brazil)MST - Landless Rural Movement (Brazil)PACS - Alternative Policies for the Southern Cone (Brazil)PO - Workers’ Pastoral (Brazil)SemChicanos - Permanent Seminar for Chicano and Border Studies (Mexico)SME - Mexican Electrical Workers Union (Mexico)SOF - Feminist OrganizationSempre-Viva(Brazil)SPM - Migrants’ Pastoral Service (Brazil)STRM - Mexican Telephone Workers Union (Mexico)UNE - National Union of Students (Brazil)



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UNORCA - National Union of Autonomous Regional Rural Organizations (Mexico)

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