In global campaigns on issues like landmines, trade, medicines or small arms, international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) face dilemmas of control. How much of the management and publicity of a campaign should they keep and how much should they give away?

While global civil society is still nascent, the international NGOs behind these major and very visual campaigns look more like epic colonial film makers - directing great oriental crowd scenes in which large groups of colourful local actors wave fair trade banners on cue and synchronise their demonstrations for prime time news slots around the time zones of the world.

These global campaigns have a Lawrence of Arabia feel - more David Lean than Nelson Mandela.

The risk of over-shadowing civil society in INGO reporting and advocacy is another dilemma thrown up by NGO power.

Interational NGOs (INGOs) are often the intellectual originators of campaigns. They are also some of the few global organisations with the requisite money, sophistication, media expertise and brand recognition to run a global campaign. For efficiency's sake, they need to drive global campaigns.

For brand purposes, they need to take the credit for them. As a result, INGOs always showcase civil society partners in their global campaigns and also overshadow them at the same time - still more the puppet-master.

Despite an ideology of partnership, much INGO marketing not surprisingly feels it necessary to claim the results of civil society work. In doing so, they often identify civil society organisations as their own product.

SECOND CLASS CITIZENS

In countless NGO communications, civil society heroes from Asia and Africa are presented as dependent second class citizens, defined primarily by their relationship to the international NGO.

Pioneering local campaigners are introduced as an "Oxfam partner" or a "CARE project". There is a colonial echo here in the implication that it is really INGOs who are saving the situation as the primary movers and shakers.

Part of the reason for this kind of post-colonial choreography by INGOs is because they are still required to be the visual mediators of the poor world to the rich world.

In Western society, our INGOs are inter-cultural gatekeepers. They know both worlds and report the one to the other.

This presents them with many representational dilemmas with their own publics and their own civil societies "back home".

If anyone helps to build a global civil society in the next 20 years, it will be INGOs.

However, at this stage, the process involves some inevitable simplifications in which stereotypes are hard to avoid.

Until different members of the world's many civil societies really know each other personally around the world, INGOs will be a major source of story-telling between them.

This is very obvious in Western societies where INGOs and foreign correspondents remain the two main sources for most people's stories and images of Africa and Asia.

YOUNG WHITE NURSES

Throughout the post-colonial period, disasters and wars have been the two main points at which people in the poor world were most visible to western publics. Such visibility was usually mediated by INGOs.

The young white INGO nurse talked passionately on television beside starving children.

Outraged rock stars called for money from the stage so they could give it fast to NGOs who were "on the ground".

Sophisticated NGO analysts (policy staff) were filmed calmly in television studios or "down the line", discussing the detail of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

In this way, INGOs and the media control the public gaze. Between them, they shape how the global public sees the global poor and suffering.

Many large INGOs have made real and determined efforts to ensure dignified and "positive imaging" in their communications work which gives a rounded picture of courageous local activism and real local wickedness alongside extreme suffering.

But time is often against them in their brochures and their news stories. Most NGO accounts of Africa and Asia still have traces of colonial imagery and discourse.

In many cases, the eyes and ears that hear and see these stories continue to be primed for colonial messages which makes the INGO task even harder.

But the new post-colonial demography in many INGO home societies may be cause for hope that the north-south story could soon change. Countries like Britain, France and America - the founding societies of several of the big eight NGOs - now have significant populations who come from Africa and Asia. New generations of Black Britons, Asian-Americans and Arab French people are bound to know and tell a different story.

THIRD GENERATION

This story may not be their priority at the moment as the second generation is rightly pre-occupied by what it means to be Arab and French, Asian and American, Black and British.

But the third generation may well engage with their grandparents' countries once again.

It is happening in film-making and hopefully it will happen in mainstream politics too.

INGOs need to be in close touch with this third generation as it emerges and share the way they look at rich-poor, black-white stories of war and disaster across the world.

It is this generation which may have a new story with which to change the post-colonial public gaze.

This is the fourth in a series of blogs by Hugo Slim. Read the others:

White Toyota, white aid

What happens to governments when aid agencies are around?

Do aid agencies pull too many strings?

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