In contrast to far-reaching expectations assigning NGOs the role of a “fifth pillar” (next to legislature, jurisdiction, ex-
ecutive and media) within a system of "global governance" (Messner, 1998), the potential of NGOs to promote democ-
ratization seems to be restricted to create transparency, publicity and counter-publicity and to feed public debates
with alternative expertise. As alternative elites NGOs could constitute one element next to others in an international
system of “checks and balances" of different interests. Further expectations, however, are unrealistic - at least for
now. (Wahl, 1996)

According to numerous authors, it is not even desirable to assign NGOs a more outstanding role because from a de-
mocratic point of view there is also a dark side to the NGO-phenomenon: the lack of democratic legitimacy compared
‘to governments based on fair and free elections. There is a broad consensus that NGOs have restricted legitimacy and
therefore operate in a vacuum of legitimization. (Messner, 1998). Elements of their restricted legitimacy are howev-
er: feedback by members, the potential to mobilise donors and supporters of political campaigns, roots in social
movements and acceptance proofed by opinion polls. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this cannot substitute the legit-
imacy of parliaments and governments which are democratically elected by the sovereign.

On the other hand, the lack of legitimacy should not be overrated. Serious NGOs never claimed to substitute govern-
ments or change the system of a representative democracy simply into a partizipative democracy. Nevertheless, the
Participation of NGOs - and not only NGOs- could be a democratic element complementary to the mechanisms of a
Tepresentative democracy. Besides, the argument of lacking legitimacy is often used to generally deny NGOs any right
of participation. However, in reality the rules of representative democracy do not work in the ideal way as they are
presented in the school-books neither, and they are challenged by vested interests - in particular powerful economic
interests. Therefore NGOs, whether scarcely legitimised or not legitimised at all, are certainly not the predominant
threat to democracy. NGOs needn't be defensive as long as for instance small group of business without any democ-
fatic legitimization whatsoever, are able to influence important political decisions and affects society far more effec-
tively than all NGOs combined.

Another problematic aspect of NGOs with regard to democratic principles are the internal structures of NGOs. On one
hand, the ties to members are an element of (restricted) legitimacy, on the other hand this kind of legitimacy is only
given when the membership is very large. Most NGOs however, have no more than a few hundreds of members, many
have less or no members at all.

THE GRASSROOTS PHASE

The preparatory meetings for the UN Conference on Environment and Development 1992 in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED) -
there were four so-called PrepComs (preparatory committees), each of which being a conference with some hundred
participants - and UNCED were the first time for NGOs to have a major appearance at a world conference.

The situation was new both for the governments and the NGOs. The NGO community was more or less unstructured at
the time and underwent a long and difficult process of self-organisation trying to build a horizontal network based on
grassroots elements. The idea was to enable as many NGOs to participate and to be heard.

All in all the process strongly resembled to similar processes of self-organisation in the early phase of the student
movements in the late 60s. Evidently there was a strong need for a democratic regulation of the internal relations of
the NGO community, as shown by the discussion about the draft of an NGO “Code of Conduct”. (Roy, 1992) Even the
problem of the different access to resources was taken into consideration (at least regarding the North-South-rela-
tion). For example, the treaty on NGO cooperation and division of resources, which is part of a package of around 30
alternative texts to the Agenda 21, intended to “share at least 1 % of our annual budget with other members of the
NGO community"

GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY |S FALLING APART

In the course of the Rio process this approach was more and more abandoned. Instead, a more pragmatic approach
was pushed through, which did not reflect the NGO community's internal problems with democratic principles any

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