Nongovernmental Organizations (Ngos)
Nongovernmental Organizations (Ngos)
The term nongovernmental organization, or NGO, refers to a vast range of nonprofit organizations that are not a part of any government. They vary in size from a few people operating on a shoestring budget to huge globe-spanning organizations. Highlighted below are some crucial questions and controversies that are salient in shaping the political economy of NGOs as social actors, particularly in relation to their often assumed status as expressions of civil society; their relationship to social movements; and the ways they both constrain and enable progressive social change.
The number and visibility of NGOs have expanded dramatically since the 1970s, in part because neoliberal policies have reduced the role of the state in many areas. NGOs commonly work in numerous fields, including humanitarian and other social services; research, monitoring, and information provision; and advocacy around particular issues, such as the environment, health, the empowerment of marginalized communities, human rights, and the status of women and minorities. Many NGOs contract with states and intergovernmental organizations to provide services. During the early decades of NGO growth, they were celebrated as efficient providers of services and deliverers of empowerment. As a result, they became consultants to governmental and international agencies, particularly as representatives of the “grass roots.”
NGOs are sometimes called voluntary organizations, highlighting a presumption that social values, rather than profit or political power, are the primary motivators in the functioning of such organizations. These notions of values and voluntarism have led observers to see NGOs as expressions of civil society, similar to social movements, and to interpret their increased visibility as a strengthening of the influence of civil society in the affairs of the state and the economy.
QUESTIONS AND CONTROVERSIES
Since the mid-1990s, the popular perception that NGOs are potential agents for diffusing development and enabling empowerment has increasingly been subjected to critical scrutiny in academia and in the community spaces where NGOs operate. Critics have pointed out that it is incorrect to assume that NGOs are automatically accountable to the “target groups” in whose name they work. Indeed, some pseudo-grassroots, or “astroturf,” NGOs have been set up by business or political interests to provide a misleading impression of grassroots action to advance their own agendas. Often astroturf groups try to hide their status as a vested interest.
More generally, the NGO form itself can blunt its potential for social activism for several reasons. First, NGOs commonly have an organizational hierarchy with paid staff and offices, so they must raise funds, either from donors or through contracting to provide services. This financial dependency frequently renders NGOs accountable to their funders. It also promotes a tendency toward professionalization. These factors often create tensions with movement-based models of social change that rely on mass mobilization.
Second, when NGOs rely on donors for funding, it becomes difficult for them to support alternative visions and local initiatives. For instance, David Hulme and Michael Edwards, in NGOs, States and Donors (1997), ask whether the interests, values, methods, and priorities of NGOs have become so tied with those of northern-government donors and “developing country-states” that they have now been “socialized” into the development industry. Have NGOs gained so much leverage, Hulme and Edwards wonder, because “they now have the social grace not to persist with awkward questions and the organizational capacity to divert the poor and disadvantaged from more radical ideas about how to overcome poverty?” (p. 3).
Third, NGO structures and project funding often lead to increased standardization and constrain the spaces for NGOs to learn in response to local concerns, leading to major gaps between advocacy and practice. As states increasingly outsource their functions to them, NGOs find themselves in a race “to do” rather than to “reflect.” As David Lewis and Tina Wallace put it in New Roles and Relevance (2000), “Finding ways of becoming learning organizations—as well as finding ways to increase accountability at all levels—largely continue to evade NGOs, yet the successful search lies at the heart of NGOs’ ability to respond in ways that are truly relevant” (p. xiv).
These processes, through which organizations working at the grassroots level lose their connection with their prime constituency and support base, have been called “NGOization.” There is thus an implicit or explicit critique that NGOs and their ties with the state are significantly reshaping, or even replacing, community-based activism. For Arundhati Roy, such “NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in” (Roy 2004).
NGOization is by no means confined to the “Third World.” For example, Sabine Lang argues in “The NGO-ization of Feminism” (2000) that the NGOization of German women’s movements brought with it: (1) a structural emphasis on professionalized but decentralized small-scale organizations; (2) a turn from antihierarchical to more hierarchical structures; and (3) the partitioning of a complex feminist agenda of emancipation and equality into specific single issues with a state-oriented politics. While feminist movement-building prioritized the making of a new democratic counterculture, new feminist NGOs have aimed for issue-specific intervention and pragmatic strategies that have a strong employment focus.
On a global level, “gender mainstreaming” and “poor women’s empowerment” have been important features of NGOization, with issues such as violence against women, adult literacy, HIV/AIDS, and microcredit being addressed (in isolated forms) as significant priorities. At the same time, issues that had been prominent in women’s movements in the prestructural-adjustment era, such as price inflation of basic foods, women’s unions, and land reforms, have been pushed aside. Thus, the structure and social location of NGOs can situate them as diffusers of the hegemonic values, ideologies, and knowledge to people at the grass roots, rather than as challengers of existing hierarchies of power that advance broader visions of social change.
NGOs WITHOUT “-IZATION”?
In a context in which NGOs have increasingly been called upon to help manage the problems produced by neoliberal policies and to pacify those who have been hardest hit by such policies, many small movements have found it impossible to exist without engaging with donor agencies or local and national NGOs in one form or another. The challenge before such organizations is to find creative ways to support their political work while also maintaining their accountability and transparency before the people they work for and work with. Despite the countless challenges, resistance to NGOization continues in many small organizations.
SEE ALSO Accountability; Feminism; Human Rights; International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs); Marginalization; Microfinance; Minorities; Organizations; Poverty; Resistance; Third World; Volunteer Programs; Volunteerism; Women’s Movement
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hulme, David, and Michael Edwards. 1997. NGOs, States and Donors: An Overview. In NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort?, ed. David Hulme and Michael Edwards, 3–32. New York: St. Martin’s.
Lang, Sabine. 2000. The NGO-ization of Feminism: Institutionalization and Institution Building within the German Women’s Movements. In Global Feminisms since 1945, ed. Bonnie Smith, 290–304. New York: Routledge.
Lewis, David, and Tina Wallace. 2000. Introduction. In New Roles and Relevance: Development NGOs and the Challenge of Change, ed. David Lewis and Tina Wallace, ix-xvii. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.
Roy, Arundhati. 2004. Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire. Speech given in San Francisco, California, on August 16, 2004. http://www.democracynow.org/static/Arundhati_Trans.shtml.
Sangtin Writers, and Richa Nagar. 2006. Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
David R. Faust
Richa Nagar