These Are the People Who Are Going to Save Us?

an inside account on the terrifying inept world of climate NGOs

Recently, I had the chance to interview someone who had a job once helping a confluence of NGOs and “professional organizers” to set up a countersummit in protest of one of the COP events – the yearly conferences established by the Paris Agreement supposedly to deal with the climate crisis (the link is to an article I wrote that demonstrates how the official approach actually increases emissions, rather than decreasing them).

I definitely couldn’t turn down the opportunity, because it puts the full spectrum of NGOs on display. Inside the Conference of the Parties, you have some of the biggest, most influential and established NGOs rubbing shoulders with scientific boards, world leaders, investment funds, and other corporations. Outside protesting, you have the NGOs and organizations that brand themselves as radical, critical of the system.

The criticism has been made many times, and with good reason: NGOs and charities on the whole constitute an important component of counterinsurgency as well as the privatization of government responsibilities.

Regarding counterinsurgency, it’s the idea that the nature of society under the State is conflictual and antagonistic. Resistance will never go away, so the State bases its power on learning how to manage resistance permanently. NGOs play a major role in this by offering bandages and ignoring or misrepresenting the size and nature of the wound; dividing up complex problems into a single-issue approach that avoids the deeper roots and entangled nature of the problems; buying some people off with high-paying jobs managing rather than truly addressing the problem, and thus inviting them onto a (very low) rung of the upper classes, inducting them into the oppressive mindset that entails; exhausting many well meaning people as exploited volunteers; giving the middle class a way to periodically clean their conscience; spreading the idea that social problems should be dealt with by experts rather than examined collectively…

As for privatization, NGOs brand themselves as helpful actors providing necessary services, but these are services that according to the mythology of a social contract, governments are supposed to provide. Think of it like this: government means war, regulations, taxes, land theft, prisons, support for rich people and horrible corporations… so if a government isn’t even going to provide access to housing, food, and healthcare, why the hell should we put up with a government?

For a longer critique of the non-profit industrial complex, check out The Revolution Will Not Be Funded and for a little rant, my earlier newsletter, “The Death of Abolition”

This week’s interview is additional material for my ongoing series on the failure of the official climate movement. The only reality-based response to the ongoing ecological crisis requires a revolutionary transformation of our society. I provide a very basic description of that in this In These Times article. I’ve promised y’all a Part II of notes demonstrating how all these proposals are feasible. However, aside from various life-difficulties slowing me down, I’m taking my time with Part II to be able to send you something more detailed and elaborate, rather than just a page full of hyperlinks. It is coming, though!

Ani is a long time anarchist and an immigrant in the country where she resides. I’m not mentioning the year and the city of the conference so she can keep her anonymity: it’ll just be “COPxx” (instead of COP12 or COP30) and “the City” (instead of Nairobi or Belem).

Ani, tell us about your experience.

I was hired towards the end of their preparation process, maybe a month before the summit in the City. I’d never done anything like this before, but they realized they needed someone to sort out issues of accountability and diversity. Somebody told them I handled this really well for a big anarchist event in another city where some of the countersummit organizers were from. They got in touch, I was really broke, soooo… I said yes. I did think that it was quite late in the game for them to start thinking about accountability and diversity, and it was weird that they were contacting me: my work experience at that time was all manual labor. The COPxx gig was my first paid job that involved a laptop. I moved to the City for this job and honestly, it was probably the worst culture shock I ever experienced. The organizers of the COPxx Coalition were, nearly without exception, posh Europeans, mainly English. It was weird, because they all basically landed in the City, with no knowledge of the specific neighborhoods or the city itself, no knowledge of the country they were in, and no knowledge of local activists: nothing. It took my anarcho-radar approximately 20 minutes after arriving to scan the city and find the local anarchist bar, so I went there and damn: the locals weren't happy with the situation, to put it mildly.

COPxx Coalition organizers also appeared to have zero organizing skills. This was another weird thing because they were basically the elite of the NGO world: directors, “Lead organizers” and all that. Still, I have never, ever seen this level of incompetence and unreliability in my entire life. They printed tens of thousands of posters and flyers for their events and demos and didn't bother to distribute them. The main march route they planned was, I believe, created entirely on Google Maps, apparently by someone with zero knowledge of the City. If you needed to speak with any of them and booked a meeting, you could bet on them not actually turning up. They didn't think it was a good idea to make links locally: a week before they planned a 150 thousand person demo, nobody in the City knew about it. They did not think it was necessary to arrange appropriate accommodation for people who were coming in from other places: instead they created some kind of AirBnB-style platform that was basically a safety nightmare. At one point, I spoke with a 17-year-old girl who came to volunteer with them, and this platform got her a room in some house where the owner, an old guy, insisted on sleeping in same bed with her. I also met some other kids who were complaining about being scammed, feeling unsafe, etc. Additionally, there were a lot of Indigenous people, representatives of Indigenous groups who were invited by the COPxx Coalition, and they traveled across the world only to find out that there was nowhere for them to stay. Some of them slept in a park. In November. In temperatures that put them at risk of hypothermia.

The money-wasting was just astonishing. They basically had zero budget restrains, so they were taking taxis everywhere, booking nice places for themselves to stay, they paid each other pretty crazy wages, rented a nice office, etc. What they did not have money for were things like accessibility.

Pretty much all these professionals were doing was: 1) reassuring each other how amazing they are 2) getting ready for Greta to turn up, planning her every move, who's gonna have a photo with her when, etc. etc.

What's worse, they were also complicit with the authorities in ways that were pretty shocking. One example: on day one of the job, I walked the main march route and came back to their office to share my thoughts. I mentioned that the march route went past the offices of a major energy corporation, which I considered a good thing. Another thing I reported back to them was that when I got lost during my walk and needed to ask some teens for directions, they told me to turn left after, as they said, “the racism monument.” Speaking with them further, I found out that what they call the racist monument is a fountain in the city center that features an old head of state from the colonial era at the very top of a column. Below are stereotypical depictions of people from colonies bearing produce and resources. It's pretty bad. It’s not officially called “racism monument,” this is just what the neighborhood kids call it. It was in the years when racist monuments were being toppled all over the world. The kids I spoke with were aware of this and were pretty up front saying this monument should fall, too. I told the COP people about the energy company and the monument and that hopefully the protest would be a good opportunity for these two things to be acted upon. The reaction of these supposedly radical organizers was: oh no, we need to contact the police and tell them about these risks. This was, basically, the end of me telling them anything.

There were countless other problems. They nearly got evicted from their office because the cleaners were complaining about how rude they were. At some point I found out that the reason the local activists were so pissed off with them was that, apparently, the Coalition went through a great effort to make sure they were not involved, in some cases going so far as to request certain people be fired because they were “too radical.” Eventually, I helped some local anarchos to squat a building for a convergence space, and after the Coalition found out about my involvement, they asked to have words with me and seeing where it was headed I quit and went hiking for a few weeks.

Thanks for sharing all that. Is there anything you’d like to add?

To be fair to Greta, I should say that when she turned up, she made it absolutely clear she wanted nothing to do with the Coalition and instead just hung out with the local kids. She did her strike and it was, I think, she who managed to pull off this massive demo in the end. The media tried to make a big deal out of her using the f word too frequently, so she told them she would phase out swearing by 2030. And that was the end of her.

The end of her?

Oh, she just stopped having anything to do with the NGO activists. After that, she wouldn’t give them the time of day, instead she spent all her time hanging out with the local kids, getting to know them.

Apparently, the ridiculous performance of these highly paid professional activists was exactly what their donors expected of them. They all kept their jobs. Immediately after the experience Ani describes, they took their traveling circus on to the next country, to start preparing next year’s countersummit.

In all my research, observations, and conversations, I think what Ani describes represent clear patterns. Here are the conclusions I think we should take with us, regarding the non-profit industrial complex. There are smaller organizations that are technically NGOs that successfully fight against these dynamics, but they are the exception, not the rule.

• For the NGOs, diversity is a marketing tool, accountability is an empty process, and accessibility is an afterthought, a box they want to check off and not something they actually want to provide

• Environmental NGOs treat Indigenous people like props, they exploit them and misuse them, and don’t have a problem with putting them in danger

• Through willful apathy and disengagement, these organizations don’t want to address sexual or gendered violence, and they are okay with facilitating it or ignoring it (other experiences show us they are willing to weaponize accusations of violence against enemies, but without providing meaningful support to people who were harmed or doing the work to bring about a cultural shift)

• NGOs readily exploit the labor and experience of people who have participated in struggles and movements for a long time. These people are typically more radical, often anarchists, but the NGOs contain and erase radical perspectives from their outreach and publicity materials, from their press releases, and from their organizing methods

• NGOs intentionally arrive like an occupying force and cut out local organizers so they can assert power over a movement

• NGOs are systematically complicit with oppressive institutions like the police and the media, even though that puts people in danger

• NGOs favor a completely unrealistic organizing strategy that favors pandering to the media, capturing attention and donations, without thinking about creating real change

• (Many) NGOs and other professional activists are often complete fuckwits, incompetents, and self-indulgent morons. They fully represent and embody the values of the ruling class.

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