Caught in the Middle: The State, NGOs, and the Limits to Grassroots Organizing Along the US–Mexico Border

NGOs across the world work on a daily basis to assist marginalized and working poor communities to meet their most basic needs. As NGOs take on the provision of many services that previously existed in the domain of the state, they enter into a contradictory relationship. As they work to improve these communities abandoned by the state, they can become the conduit whereby neoliberal state policy enters marginalized communities. Growing numbers of NGOs find that their primary sources of income come from donors and state agencies that share a propensity for neoliberal forms of governance. In the colonias, working poor Mexican communities, of the US Southwest, the triumvirate relationship among the state, NGOs, and grassroots leaders can create a disabling situation. I examine these cases, in which the neoliberal preference for self‐help projects and a focus on the fulfilment of individual needs can overshadow more collective forms of social change.     

Advocating Workers' Collective Rights: The Prospects and Constraints Facing ‘Collective Bargaining’ NGOs in the Pearl River Delta, 2011–2015

Labour struggles are frequent in China, but because workers’ organizational resources are controlled by the state, these struggles have been fragmented. Targeting this problem, a group of internationally connected labour NGOs emerged in the Pearl River Delta between 2011 and 2015. These organizations sought to advocate workers’ collective rights by helping workers organize outside the state system. Adopting a relational approach to the study of civil society, this article examines the impact of these NGOs. Based on ethnographic research and a unique data set, it argues that although the organizational skills shared by these NGOs could to some extent sustain workers’ collective actions, they could not be used to integrate the fragmented struggles. Due to the lack of institutional guarantees, activists’ interventions can generate more mistrust than solidarity. The preference of the key donor for a more confrontational and independent labour movement further widened the gap between NGOs and workers, and distracted the NGOs from channels that had the potential to influence policy. The study contributes to an understanding of social movements and NGO intervention by emphasizing the necessity of locating advocacy channels within the state, and the importance of recognizing and maintaining the complex ecology of civil society.     

Democracy,Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent

This article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will also be included. The article opens by looking at Garrett Hardin's (1968) three strategies to preserve the commons. It finds that democratic politics is compatible with both privatization and centralization as conserving strategies (although not necessarily successful). With the third approach—local control—democracy has at best a problematic relationship, for where governmental units are the relevant actors, there tends to be more interest in consuming than in conserving or preserving resources at the local level. Local user groups, however, do much better at common property resource management, because they can restrict membership and thus avoid free riders, and they can establish a close linkage in their members' minds between benefits and costs of participating in group discipline to maintain the resource.     

Constructing Indigenous Subjectivities: Economic Collectivism and Identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article uses a governmentality analytic to understand the efforts of indigenous leaders from the Ecuadorian Amazon to shape their organizations’ members over the past four decades, particularly efforts to promote collective engagement in market‐oriented activities. A close examination of one organization's history reveals that leaders’ subjectivity‐shaping efforts have been strongly influenced by collaborations with the state, NGOs and others. They have also been shaped by historical understandings of status and leadership. However, collaborative economic projects are also used by leaders as a tool for producing new kinds of indigenous citizens, ones that are actively engaged with larger communities of indigenous people beyond their kinship groups. Leaders see these new senses of citizenship as empowering, and as a critical precursor to planning land use and livelihoods. Thus, indigenous leaders are not simply conduits for the subjectivity‐shaping projects of the state and international development groups; nor are they simply acting in their own interest. Rather, they constitute and regulate new types of citizens to ensure the future viability of their organizations and political projects.     

Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.     

NGOs,Disaster Relief and Asset Transfer in the Horn: Political Survival in a Permanent Emergency

Famines have winners and losers. Conventional analysis has concentrated on the losers: what has been neglected is that famines can result from the conscious exercise of power in pursuit of gain or advantage by the politically strong. This article is an attempt to analyse the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive se the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy, the paper offers an analysis of political survival in the arc of crisis that runs from Sudan through southern Ethiopia to Somalia. The role of donors and NGOs is examined in terms of how they relate to the weak and the strong within the asset transfer economy. Donors are seen to have supported the strong whilst the position of NGOs is more contradictory. Although programme measures to protect assets have been developed, and the disjuncture between the rules of sovereignty and the protection of human rights has been highlighted, these measures have essentially failed. A review of trends since the end of the Cold War suggests that the chances of preventing the further consolidation of a transfer economy within the region are negligible. The position of those who gain from such a destructive process seems assured.     

Scaling up Civil Society: Donor Money,NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania

Tanzania's pastoralist land rights movement began with local resistance to the alienation of traditional grazing lands in Maasai and Barabaig communities. While these community–based social movements were conducted through institutions and relationships that local people knew and understood, they were not co–ordinated in a comprehensive fashion and their initial effectiveness was limited. With the advent of liberalization in the mid–1980s, they began to gain institutional legitimacy through the registration of pastoralist Non–Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Registered NGOs provided community leaders with a formal mechanism for co–ordinating local land movements and for advocating for land rights at the international level. The connections of pastoralist NGOs to disenfranchised communities, and their incorporation of traditional cultural institutions into modern institutional structures, resonated with the desires of international donors to support civil society and to create an effective public sphere in Tanzania, making these NGOs an attractive focus for donor funding. In spite of their good intentions, however, donors frequently overlooked the institutional impacts of their assistance on the pastoralist land rights movement and the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. NGO leaders have become less accountable to their constituent communities, and the movement itself has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities that can be justified in donor funding reports. A political movement geared towards specific outcomes has been transformed into group of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.     

Influence of Son Preference on Contraceptive Method Mix: Some Evidences from ‘Two Bengals’

Although the people of Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India share common cultural practices, they differ in contraceptive adoption and practice. The use of modern contraceptive methods among women and couples of the two Bengals differ from each other. The use of natural method is significantly higher among women and couples in West Bengal compared to that of their counterparts in Bangladesh. The study analyses data from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) using sequential logit models. Results show that greater reliance on natural methods among women of West Bengal is related to higher preference for sons compared to that in Bangladesh.     

The Promise of Patronage: Adapting and Adopting Neoliberal Development

Abstract:  Much of the literature on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and development suggests that a top-down process is underway which leads to the dispersal of neoliberal ideals. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research in Rajasthan, India, this paper examines how a poverty alleviation project "fits" into competitive  and  co-operative socio-economic relations already operating on the ground. It argues that in contradiction to neoliberal notions of empowerment espoused by project policies, both NGOs and their constituents have an interest in establishing and maintaining patronage networks that stabilize relationships of dependency. The paper concludes that neoliberal development projects serve to enable patron–client relationships between NGOs and villagers, and enroll the state in the continuing provision of benefits beyond those planned by the project.     

Common Counsel,Common Policy: Healthcare,Missions and the Rise of the ‘Voluntary Sector’ in Colonial Tanzania

Analysis of the voluntary sector in sub‐Saharan Africa has tended to focus on the role of the NGO, and the types of relationships this institution establishes and maintains with donors, national governments and the communities with which they work. The voluntary sector in Africa is therefore usually defined through, and often treated as synonymous with, the institution of the NGO. As a result, the boundaries of understandings of the ‘third sector’ space occupied by the vast number of NGOs — its origins, the nature of the relationship of voluntary sector actors to the state, the types of organizations that characterize the sector — have tended to reflect a narrow concern with the NGO type and its experiences. This article suggests that this view is too narrow in its gaze. The voluntary sector was not a creation of a post‐colonial (and especially post‐1970s) development crisis. It emerged from an evolving relationship between colonial‐era non‐state (voluntary) actors and governments determined to demonstrate that they were meeting their commitments to the welfare of Africans under their charge. Missions and mission welfare services, expanding across much of rural sub‐Saharan Africa by the beginnings of the twentieth century, and increasingly coordinated from the late 1920s and early 1930s, created the foundations for the emergence of sub‐Saharan Africa's formal voluntary sector as it exists today. This matters for more than just historical accuracy. To understand the constraints, challenges and opportunities faced by NGOs, we need to move beyond a narrow focus on the institution of the NGO itself, and look in addition to the environment in which it operates: its history, its evolution and the shifts that created those conditions.     

Twenty Years of Mobilising around AIDS in China: The Main Actors and Influences behind Organisational Growth

AIDS-related work and advocacy is one field that has spurred considerable activity among Chinese NGOs in the past two decades. This article explains processes leading to institutional changes that are necessary for allowing more NGOs to emerge and operate, and shows how international, domestic and local actors and influences have steered developments leading to organisational growth. The article applies new institutionalism theory and highlights differences between formal and informal institutions in explaining change and continuity for NGOs and their relations to state and government in this particular field.     

Geopolitical boundary narratives, the global war on terror and border fencing in India

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the 'global war on terror' by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the 'enemy other' in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders.     

Non-Governmental Organizations and Poverty Alleviation in Bolivia

Through the 1980s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) became increasingly involved in implementing development projects in Latin America. In Bolivia, NGOs have played central roles in efforts to alleviate the poverty associated with structural adjustment, the consolidation of neoliberal economic policies, and the resulting reorganization of the state. International donors have shown enthusiasm for working through NGOs, particularly in the area of poverty alleviation. However, it is not clear that NGOs are more successful in overcoming poverty than state agencies. More importantly, there is evidence that the combination of state reorganization and the emergence of NGOs as implementers of development assistance has contributed to undermining grassroots organizations representing the interests of poor people.     

Progressive Patronage? Municipalities,NGOs, CBOs and the Limits to Slum Dwellers’ Empowerment

Efforts aimed at urban poverty reduction and service delivery improvement depend critically on slum dwellers’ collective agency. Adding to a long history of community participation approaches, there is a now growing incidence of so‐called ‘partnerships’ between municipal agencies, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and slum organizations. Such approaches require a fair representation of a majority of the poor by local community‐based organizations (CBOs), the potential and interest of both poor men and women to organize pro‐actively in collective action, and a CBO leadership that works for the common good. This article puts some key assumptions underlying grassroots‐based strategies under scrutiny. That relations amongst the urban poor are unequal and that they are divided in terms of income, gender and ethnicity has been well documented, but there has been less attention for the fact that the poor, facing conditions of scarcity and competition, rely on vertical relations of patronage and brokerage which may hinder or prevent horizontal mobilization. Rather than being vehicles of empowerment and change, CBOs and their leadership often block progress, controlling or capturing benefits aimed at the poor and misusing them for private (political) interests. Presenting evidence from community‐based projects in the slums of three large Indian cities, the article argues that municipal agencies, donors and NGOs cannot easily escape the logic of patronage and often themselves become part of a system of vertical dependency relations.     

Creating Spaces of Resistance: Development NGOs and their Clients in Ghana, India and Mexico

Development NGOs have been accused by some of being new instruments of control, domesticated by the neoliberal project. For others, they elaborate and pursue alternative dreams. In this paper, we argue that, although the majority of NGOs have been co‐opted to serve hegemonic development agendas, they nevertheless present a fluid, contradictory web of relations, within which a significant minority seeks to make spaces of resistance, and where even the most neoliberal NGOs are used by some clients to create new associational spaces. Drawing on work with NGOs in Ghana, India, Mexico and Europe, we explore various strategies deployed by this minority of "independent thinking NGOs". We argue that there is an important production of Melucci's submerged networks or latent social movements, however limited their political impact to date.     

Creating social spaces for transnational feminist advocacy: the Canadian International Development Agency, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women and Philippine women's NGOs

The postauthoritarian democratisation process in the Philippines saw the rise of 'state feminism', which emphasised gender mainstreaming in government development planning. Various international development agencies, particularly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played an important role in harnessing the social capital of women's movements and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for gender and development (GAD) programs in the post‐Marcos era (1986–2002). This period was marked by a decline in the CIDA's direct assistance to women's NGOs in the Philippines and its shift to institutional capability‐building of government agencies, particularly the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). The article examines how local women's organisations have interpreted, engaged and negotiated transnational discursive practices on 'development', 'social capital', 'capacity‐building' and 'gender mainstreaming.' The CIDA‐funded Women NGOs Umbrella Project and Canadian aid to the Negros Occidental province are used as case studies to illustrate issues and problems in transnational linkages between Philippine women NGOs, national and local governments and Canadian development agencies. Such transnational linkages, embodied in the interesting mix of 'gender mainstreaming' and 'critical engagement' between states, donor agencies and women NGOs, show the interpenetration of the 'global' and the 'local' and the blurring of boundaries between 'state' and 'civil' societies in the course of gender advocacy. At the same time, transnational processes and demands may concurrently create better understanding, as well as conflicts and tensions between state machinery, NGOs and social movements, thus defeating the original intentions of development projects sponsored by international donor agencies.     

Awareness and Action: The ethno-gender dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the modus operandi in the development arena at this juncture. Many, including feminists, place much faith in these actors for creating a progressive space for social, political, and economic activities to be undertaken. This article employs fieldwork evidence from eastern Sri Lanka, carried out in 1998–1999 and early 2004, to challenge this simplistic reading. The primary social group that was studied during the fieldwork period was female-headed households. This article argues that there are different types of NGO working in multiple ways in the region, and it is important to distinguish between these differences. NGOs that primarily execute development-oriented projects without considering the ethno-nationalist and gender politics are culpable of the violence of development. It is only when NGOs are in local communities for the long haul that they are able to develop a commitment to reassess and evaluate the social transformative potential of their activities. Using a feminist political economy perspective this article argues that it is important and necessary that NGOs confront social, political, and economic structures, including ethnic identity politics, if their activities are to lead to transformative feminist politics. In other words, NGOs would have to do more than pay lip service to gender mainstreaming, as is more often the case. These actors need to recognize and understand the potency of ethno-nationalist politics, social structures, social exclusion, and social injustice in order to create social spaces that are enabling of women's agency in the local communities within which they work and operate.     

The Decline of Gangsters and Politicization of Violence in Urban Bangladesh

Contrary to the Weberian ideal of a central state monopolizing the means of violence, political order in many societies requires a balance of interests between diverse ‘violence specialists’. In urban Bangladesh, gangsters have been identified as powerful actors, closely linked to politicians and the state. Often called mastan, they are portrayed as mediating access to work and public services, as running extortion networks and providing political muscle. Since the early 2000s Dhaka has seen radical change, largely undocumented to date: these gangsters are in significant decline. Many of the roles associated with these gangs continue, but now under the direct control of lower‐level factions associated with the ruling political party — a transition that has brought a greater degree of stability to the urban context. These arguments are developed through ethnographic research from a large marketplace in the centre of Dhaka, examining the rise and fall of an infamous local gangster. In developing this case, it is argued that closer attention should be given to changes in the organization of violence within societies.     

Mapping Common Futures: Customary Communities,NGOs and the State in Indonesia's Reform Era

The post‐Suharto ‘Reform Era’ has witnessed explosive revitalization movements among Indonesia's indigenous minorities or ‘customary’(adat) communities attempting to redress the disempowerment they suffered under the former regime. This study considers the current resurgence of customary claims to land and resources in Bali, where the state‐sponsored investment boom of the 1990s had severe social and environmental impacts. It focuses on recent experiments with participatory community mapping, aimed at reframing the relationship between state and local institutions in planning and decision‐making processes. Closely tied to the mapping and planning strategy have been efforts to strengthen local institutions and to confront the problems of land alienation and community control of resources. The diversity of responses to this new intervention reflects both the vitality and limitations of local adat communities, as well as the contributions and constraints of non‐governmental organizations that increasingly mediate their relationships to state and global arenas. This ethnographic study explores participants’ experiences of the community mapping programme and suggests its potential for developing ‘critical localism’ through long‐term, process‐oriented engagements between communities, governments, NGOs, and academic researchers.     

Helping the enemy? Why transnational Jewish philanthropic foundations donate to Palestinian NGOs in Israel

ABSTRACT. This article asks why transnational Jewish donor organisations have been increasingly providing financial support to Palestinian social movements and NGOs in Israel when many of the main recipients are strong critics of the Jewish character of the state and act to promote Palestinian national claims within Israel. The article evaluates a number of plausible explanations, some generated by interest‐centric theories while others are driven by ideational underpinnings. The study concludes that the donors do not view the interests of the Jewish state and the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel (PAI) in zero‐sum terms. Having internalised liberal values of minority rights and pluralism in their countries of residence (mainly the United States), donating foundations believe that the development of the PAI is both normatively desirable and strengthens Israel as a whole because it facilitates the minority's integration into Israel's society and bolsters its civic culture, and therefore, it also contributes to the country's security. These findings are theoretically significant because they demonstrate how the interpretation of communal interest is strongly related to the normative social environment in which transnational activists operate.