The Respectable Politics of Climate Change: The Epistemic Communities and NGOs

Climate change is unusual compared with most environmental issues in the extent to which it has become accepted among orthodox policy institutions and public-and private-sector organizations. The authors explore the conditions that have led to the establishment of an epistemic community that brings together a broad array of actors, including the various NGOs, and the operational dimensions that define the participation of NGOs within the community. An epistemic community does not imply conformity of opinion or approach but allows for differentiation in terms of how its members construct the problem, and their objectives, core beliefs and favoured responses to climate change. Three broad styles of engagement through which NGOs contribute to this debate are identified: developing creative policy solutions, knowledge construction, and lobbying or campaigning. It should be noted that the authors refer primarily to development or environmental NGOs (ENGOs), though they do discuss business NGOs at a few points.     

Does It Pay for US‐based NGOs to Go to War? Empirical Evidence for Afghanistan and Iraq

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the ‘market’ of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying difference‐in‐differences approaches, this article analyses empirically whether the presence of US‐based NGOs in Afghanistan and Iraq improved their chances of external funding. While there are some indications that NGOs active in Afghanistan had better access to official funding, the authors do not find statistically compelling evidence that it pays for NGOs to engage where the United States intervenes militarily.     

The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children's rights

The civilization of the children of the "savages" in the colonial world was seen as a crucial issue from early on was an inherent part of the colonization project in Africa, America and Oceania in the 19th century. The idea of civilizing "the savages," today's South, through children has continued in the post-colonial era with the development of mass-schooling systems and various child-focused development projects. This has led to an export of internationally defined standards for a "good childhood" through various foreign funded development programs in South. While many NGOs, legitimizing their work on the basis of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are genuinely working for an improvement of children's conditions, they have also taken on the role as a second guardian in order to cultivate "proper" children and parents who can live up to the supposedly universal ideals of a "good childhood." The article adopts a critical view on the child rights movement by shedding light on the crucial role, which NGOs play as civilizing institutions in the South. The article specifically draws attention to the double-sided patronization of children and parents, and "infantilization" of nations in South, which implicitly lies beneath CRC and the child rights movement.     

Can the World Bank Enforce its Own Conditions?

In the 1980s, the World Bank stepped up policy‐based lending, making loans conditional on government policy and institutional reforms in the borrower country. In 2002, policy‐based lending (or adjustment loans) accounted for 64 per cent of total commitments. Some critics have argued that conditionality has failed because borrowers do not comply with conditions, and that borrowers do not comply because donors do not enforce the conditions, due to their own institutional incentives to lend. Accordingly, they argue that conditionality should be abandoned in favour of selectivity, a strategy in which donors would lend to governments that already have good policies and institutions in place. This article reviews the evidence that has been offered for this ‘enforcement critique’ and finds that it is not sufficient to support the argument. Although the critique is often asserted, and although there is ample evidence of lending pressures, no studies have attempted to determine whether borrower non‐compliance is a serious problem, or whether Bank failures to enforce are the principal reason for the failure of borrowers to meet conditions; nor have any studies been carried out to show whether lending pressures are the main reason for the Bank's failure to enforce.     

The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa

This article traces the evolution of development non–governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa, and suggests that their role represents a continuation of the work of their precursors, the missionaries and voluntary organizations that cooperated in Europe's colonization and control of Africa. The authors maintain that the work of the NGOs today contributes marginally to the relief of poverty in Africa, and significantly undermines the struggle of the African people to emancipate themselves from economic, social and political oppression. Development NGOs have, unwittingly or otherwise, become a part of the neo–liberal system that has resulted in widespread impoverishment and the loss of the authority of African states to determine their own agenda. NGOs could, and some do, play a role in supporting an emancipatory agenda in Africa, but it involves breaking with the 'missionary position' by disengaging from their paternalistic role in development.     

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.     

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.     

Humanitarian encounters: Biafra,NGOs and imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967–70

This article examines the influence of the Biafran humanitarian crisis on British and Irish conceptions of the Third World. Drawing on evidence from non-government organizations (NGOs) in both countries, it argues that the explosion of non-governmental activity in this period, combined with the unprecedented attention afforded to the relief effort, crystallized a popular vision of the Third World that was rooted in western internationalism and the legacies of the imperial world. The model of humanitarian action pursued by Oxfam, Save the Children, Africa Concern and others transformed non-governmental actors into key mediators between the west and the Third World. Yet, this article argues, the image they presented and the tactics they pursued can only be understood as part of a broader adjustment to a decolonized world. From very different beginnings (British postcolonial responsibilities versus a strong anticolonial narrative in Ireland) considerable similarities emerged between British and Irish NGOs. The response to Biafra was an extension of the missionary and colonial service ethos, and generated a model of relief that privileged humanitarian action over local political and human agency. That paternalistic approach further reinforced traditional attitudes to the Third World through renewed emphases on donation, dependency, expatriate volunteers and western concepts of ‘needs’ and ‘development’. This article concludes, therefore, by arguing that Biafra played a vital role in the shift from imperial humanitarianism to neo-humanitarianism and the rise of liberal humanitarian governance. The vision of an inclusive ‘common humanity’ the NGOs espoused was in practice rooted in a very western understanding of humanitarian responsibilities and a very western image of the Third World.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

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.     

Non-governmental Organizations in Africa: Can They Influence Public Policy?

As non-governmental organizations (NGOs) accumulate experience at implementing development projects, they sometimes attempt to increase their influence by engaging in policy advocacy. This article analyses the organizational conditions under which national NGOs in Africa have been able to influence the formulation of agricultural and rural development policies. Case studies are presented of three African NGOs that have sought, with varying degrees of success, to represent the ‘voice’ of the rural poor to policy-makers. Comparative analysis of these cases leads to the conclusion that policy advocacy is most likely to be effective in organizations that have several key characteristics: an homogeneous membership, a federated structure, a focused programme, informal ties with political leaders, and a domestic funding base.     

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.     

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.     

Geographies of state failure and sophistication in maritime piracy hijackings

Many analysts are concerned about territories subject to state failure becoming safe havens for terrorists. In this article, I apply this logic to maritime piracy syndicates and their ship hijacking operations, and argue that a focus on the geographies of state failure can help us explain why pirates' behavior varies between failed and weak states. Analysis of a dataset of hijacking incidents suggests that state failure is associated with less sophisticated attacks, while state weakness encourages more sophisticated attacks. Through case studies of the process by which pirates carry out their attacks in East Africa and Southeast Asia, I argue that it is the differences in political and economic landscapes that influence how pirates embed their operations across territory, and thus how they carry out their operations. Notably, because they do not have to worry about enforcement, pirates in failed states can engage in time-intensive kidnappings for ransom, while only weak states provide the markets and transportation infrastructure necessary for operations where ships and cargo are seized and sold for profit. These findings suggest that weak states might actually be more problematic for international security in some respects than failed states.     

Examining the Potential of Indigenous Institutions for Development: A Perspective from Borana,Ethiopia

This article examines an institutional approach to development in which indigenous institutions are viewed as a resource for achieving development. It concentrates on indigenous natural resource management (NRM) institutions which have been seen by some development agencies to be a means to address the needs of people and the environment in a way that is also participatory. Using material from Borana, Ethiopia, the article describes the indigenous NRM institutions and examines the outcome of one attempt to work with them. In the process, it shows that partnerships between development agencies and indigenous NRM institutions are often fragile, and tend to dissolve when they fail to meet the preconceptions of the developers. Through an examination of this approach to development, the article also examines the usefulness of recent broad approaches to institutions.     

Creating Civil Society? The Emergence of NGOs in Vietnam

Based on recent research in Hanoi, this article examines the emergence of NGOs in Vietnam, and relates their development to the civil society discourse which is used by elements of the international donor community to predict the growth of pluralism and democracy. After examining the social and political environment of post-reform Vietnam, it does not appear evident that these organizations fit into any definition of civil society which stresses independence from the state and opposition to state ideology.     

Mission without end? Peacekeeping in the African political marketplace

Since the mid-1990s the UN, in tandem with major western powers, has embarked upon an ambitious effort of peace support operations in Africa. The results of what we may call the 'Annan experiment' are not yet in. But there are good reasons to fear that, in many African countries, such peace operations have defend normative outcomes that are beyond realistic expectation, so that they can never hope to 'succeed'. This article examines the political and economic functioning of fragile African states using the lens of a 'political marketplace' in which local elites seek to obtain the highest reward for their loyalty, over short time horizons, within patrimonial systems. In such systems, political institutions are incapable of managing confect, which means that standard peacemaking efforts and peacekeeping operations do not align with domestic possibilities for settlement. To the contrary, external engagements can so distort domestic political markets that they obstruct national political bargaining and result in an open-ended commitment to peacekeeping in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.     

If You Don't Count,You Don't Count: Monitoring and Evaluation in South African NGOs

Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are increasingly challenged to demonstrate accountability and relevance, with reporting, monitoring and evaluation arguably having become development activities in their own right. Drawing on interviews and observation research, this article examines the impact of intensified monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements on a number of South African NGOs. M&E — and the types of expertise, vocabularies and practices it gives rise to — is an important area that is usually neglected in the study of NGOs but that significantly impacts on NGOs’ logic of operation. By focusing on three areas — data that are considered appropriate to conduct M&E, staffing and organizational cultures, and NGOs’ reformist relationships with other civil society organizations (CSOs) — M&E is revealed as a central discursive element in the constitution of NGOs appropriate to neoliberal development. By engaging a neo‐Foucauldian framework of governmentality, M&E practices are thus understood as technologies through which governing is accomplished in the trans‐scalar post‐apartheid development domain.     

The Influence of Elite Philanthropy on NGO Development in China

Scholars have explained the rise of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in China since the period of reform and opening in terms of a changing political and economic environment, NGO policy, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), and the influence of communications media and the Internet. This article proposes a new explanatory factor: the philanthropy of China’s new wealthy. Four cases are used to analyse the influences of the philanthropy of the wealthy on NGO development. The article proposes not only that the philanthropy of the wealthy provides funding and intellectual support for NGOs but also that the wealthy use their influence and social networks to increase the autonomy, capacity, sustainability and impact of NGOs in China.     

Competing entanglements in the struggle to save the Amazon: The shifting terrain of transnational civil society

Transnational civil society has often been conceptualized as a third sector, buffered from the power politics of nation-states and global capital. The relative autonomy of this sector has been seen as key in empowering the voices of marginalized peoples and in advocating new counter-hegemonic agendas on the world stage. Recent research, however, has begun to explore power imbalances within the transnational civic sphere, and how different transnational NGOs' modes of articulation with political institutions and market actors inform those power dynamics. We suggest here that the concept of “entanglements,” recently introduced within political geography, can offer a useful spatial imagery in assessing the effects of these varied lines of influence. The article first traces the evolution of the Amazon Alliance, a transnational network of environmental and human rights NGOs and Amazonian indigenous federations. It then examines a countervailing nexus of governmental and corporate entanglements that have been drawing conservation NGOs away from indigenous eco-political engagement in recent years. To understand the waning salience of the eco-indigenous conservation agenda, we argue, requires analysis of the shifting terrain of civil society, and of the articulation of different NGOs with institutions beyond the frontiers of the third sector.