Multi-taskers: Montse Balaguer

Over the last few posts I've been asking if civil society can be bought or simulated. The case I've taken up is that of a plebiscite held in Barcelona in early May. Citizens were given three options on a significant local planning issue: two options were advertised by City Hall and loudly endorsed by a raft of organisations. (See, for example, this op-ed piece in the local edition of the Spanish daily El País.) Turnout was low--under 12%--and 80% of those who bothered to vote opted for the half-hidden third option, that of leaving well enough alone. My example today is that of a civil society aggregator, an umbrella organisation ostensibly speaking on behalf of the whole of third sector in Barcelona: the Consell d'Associacions de Barcelona, or Barcelona Associations' Council.

The CAB is funded by City Hall (in 2009, of 228282 euros of income, 216060 came out of municipal coffers) and housed is a city building. It's hard to gauge real membership, as member organisations are themselves umbrella groups representing smaller associations. All told, the membership list stands at twenty-one, and some of the members are clearly political in orientation.

The CAB's server lodged a website--http://ladiagonal.cab.cat/--which pushed the very message City Hall was pushing in its own pre-plebiscite blanket advertising, though couched in different word. As I mentioned in another post, the CAB signed a manifesto in favour of the very two options favoured by City Hall: of the signatories, four are also members of the CAB, meaning that they signed the manifesto twice.

Montserrat Balaguer i Bruguera, the president of the CAB is--and has been, in a different guise--herself a municipal worker in Mataró, whose governing coalition is led by the same party as is the Barcelona council. She now has a job for life as a "socio-cultural animator".

The association has its own ethical code of conduct, which it recommends to members and to the city's third sector. The code has its own web domain--http://www.codietic.cat--and an office, apparently staffed. (The code's home page is not much more than a news feed, and none of the news has a specifically ethical focus.) The tenth and final item of the summarised code is "an arms-length relationship with government". The CAB echoed its paymaster: the arms invoked must be very short.