The Strengths and Limits of the NGO Women’s Movement Model: Shaping Nicaragua’s Democratic Institutions
Author(s)
Ewig, Christina
Abstract
Using a historical institutionalist perspective, this article will examine the political interaction in Nicaragua between NGOs in civil society that form the basis of the feminist movement and government institutions, including government health services as well as health policy and policymaking bodies. This article is divided into three parts. The first will provide a brief historical background of the post-Sandinista Nicaraguan feminist movement and the circumstances that encouraged it to establish an NGO social-movement base. The second section will evaluate the strategies and success of the Nicaraguan feminist movement in shaping state institutions in the area of Nicaraguan health policy. I will argue that the NGOs forming the organizational basis for the post-Sandinista feminist movement in Nicaragua have shaped state institutions on local and national levels. Finally, the third section will draw on the experience of the Nicaraguan feminist movement to outline important limitations of the NGO-based social-movement model. These limitations include barriers to changing state policy when key government officials are unsympathetic to movement goals, placement in the contradictory position of substituting for state services while advocating expansion of state services, and dependence on unstable financial support. Moreover, the questionable degree of democracy operating within the feminist movement is weakened by the NGO structure of the movement, thus tempering rosier views of the democratic potential of NGOs and social movements.
