The Jubilee 2000 campaign serves to underscore the importance of how a campaign is framed. This example illustrates the possible costs of failing to deploy frames that could have come to underpin widespread support for systemic approaches to tackling debt.
The campaign split over whether debt should be framed as ‘unpayable’ or as ‘illegitimate’. Framed as ‘unpayable’, the campaign tended to reinforce the elite governance frame: Northern governments had lent money to the South, and it was their right to cancel this debt. Framed as ‘illegitimate’, the debt was seen as having been accrued through deals between government elites; it was neither in the interests of the poor that the debt was taken on, nor was it accrued with their consent. This approach rejected the elite governance frame, and argued, in applying a participative democracy frame, that the debt was illegitimate.
Jubilee South campaigning
Over 21 million people from 155 countries had signed the Jubilee 2000 petition bythe time it was submitted to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. This was a very impressive campaigning feat, especially on an issue like debt, which is more global and abstract than issues such as children’s rights or species extinction.
By 2000, rich countries had promised to write off US$110bn of debt, 20 countries were promised some debt relief, and the campaign disbanded – as it had promised to do. But the campaign itself acknowledged that the success was only partial, both because the “debt relief so far agreed will only provide an average 30 per cent cut in repayments for the countries concerned” (Jubliee 2000 Coalition, 2000:3), and because this debt relief came with strings attached: governments were obliged to sign up to specific policy pledges in order to be granted debt cancellation.
Several Southern movements had for some time requested that the Jubilee 2000 campaign move beyond its argument that debts were ‘unpayable’. They wanted to challenge the legitimacy of the system that leads to debt creation in the first place. They argued that Northern governments must acknowledge their partial blame for promoting loans for strategic or commercial gain, via institutions that they controlled. If debt cancellation announcements ignored this issue it could jeopardise public perception of debt relief in the South. It would also fail to capitalise on the opportunity that the campaign offered to insist that future debts must be contracted in the interest of Southern people, and with their consent.
However Jubilee 2000 wanted “disciplined support for our principled position on the cancellation of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries”. This approach aimed to unify diverse groups and make it easier to approach the G8, IMF and other powerful bodies. This refusal to challenge the system that led to the debt created tension within the campaign. Ultimately, some Southern groups split away and ran their campaign under the banner of Jubilee South. Jubilee South mobilised under the slogan ‘don’t owe, won’t pay’ and aimed to reframe debt as illegitimate, but few Northern campaigners chose to follow this approach.
Of course, we cannot know what would have happened if more Northern campaigners had adopted the position of Jubilee South. But Jubilee 2000’s own self-assessment recorded: “[O]ne of the most profound lessons from the Jubilee 2000 campaign is this: the unpayable debt will not be cancelled in full until we have changed the process whereby debt cancellation is agreed. Future campaigns,therefore, will have to tackle the deep structural injustices of international financial relationships” (Jubilee 2000 Coalition, 2000:7).
It is informative to look at what happened where Northern campaigners campaigned on the basis of these structural injustices. For example, Norwegian campaigners responded to the call of Jubilee South, and ran a ‘dictator debt ’public campaign, which drew attention to loans that had been provided to rulers known to be illegitimate, for purposes other than development. They also highlighted how their government had used export credits to bail out Norway’s shipping industry, selling ships to be used in conditions for which they were not at all suited and often soon broke down. The approach adopted by these campaigners was vindicated. After years of public campaigning and advocacy the Norwegian government agreed to cancel the remaining shipping debts of five countries. It did this unilaterally and unconditionally, accepting “co-responsibility” for what it admitted had been “a development policy failure” (Eurodad, 2006: 2).
The Jubilee 2000 campaign had many successes. But it accepted, and therefore risked reinforcing, prevailing assumptions in order to build political traction for its specific campaign objectives. It side-stepped the larger challenge of framing its work as part of an effort to change the official discourse on debt, and to transform economic structures and power relations. It left the South-North debt movement divided, compromising efforts to monitor debt cancellation and to prevent the subsequent bad lending that is leaving some countries as indebted as they were 15 years ago.
This case study was originally published in Common Cause, and was written by Alex Wilks.
