NGO Collaboration: Limited or Limiting?
Posted on 20 September 2010
By Sarah Stroup
In her September 6 post, Sherine Jayawickrama argues that “the advancement of the missions of [NGOs] requires much greater coordination and collaboration.”
This got me thinking about my most recent homework project – I’ve been reading up on studies of international NGOs from the 1970s and 1980s to understand continuity and change among relief and development NGOs.
In 1977, John Sommer wrote in Beyond Charity: US Voluntary Aid for a Changing Third World that NGOs “should seek ways to overcome their traditional tendency to act alone and instead collaborate more constructively with each other and with local organizations in recipient countries.”
In sum, it’s a little depressing to think that experienced NGO analysts have been calling for greater NGO collaboration for decades with seemingly little change.
Sherine notes several transnational initiatives like the Sphere Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership as evidence of greater collaboration. Yet the HAP initiative is evidence that the best intentions behind collaboration are not enough.
The original intention behind HAP was to hold NGOs accountable to aid recipients through the establishment of an independent ombudsman that could report and act on instances of “bad” humanitarian assistance. This proposal had problems: why were NGOs, rather than states, responsible for their citizens’ suffering, and what sorts of penalties would be assessed to NGOs? Today, HAP is instead a voluntary certification system that tries to educate member agencies and recipient communities about accountability to aid recipients.
HAP is refreshingly frank and fairly new, so I’ll set aside questions of its long-term effectiveness. Ultimately, HAP reinforced the Sphere Project’s goal of defining a single set of best practices, but disagreed on (1) whether an ombudsman was the best way to achieve that goal and (2) how to assign responsibility for failure in fragile and complex environments.
The HAP story offers insight into the limits of other attempts at NGO collaboration. First, I see fundamentally different understandings of how to best alleviate poverty at major Northern INGOs. Should NGOs put political pressure on donor governments and international organizations to change global trade rules or intervene in civil wars? Or should NGOs focus on small, intensive and local aid projects? Different INGOs have different answers to these questions. Second, as noted elsewhere on this blog, it is difficult to measure the impact of NGO actions, complicating attempts to actually identify “best practices.”
NGOs want to avoid working at cross-purposes. Point taken. But why is collaboration the answer? Why isn’t specialization a viable alternative? If NGOs think there are different ways to address poverty, why not pursue those in different ways at different levels?
Collaboration tries to overcome the two formidable obstacles mentioned above – NGOs may disagree on both where they are actually going and how to get there. Specialization capitalizes on these differences among NGOs and on the comparative advantage that NGOs have vis-à-vis states: their small size.
Small, differentiated agencies may be able to experiment, to innovate, and to work at many different levels of the “change process.” Of course, for either collaboration or specialization to work, there has to be a mechanism (like OCHA’s cluster system or ALNAP) for exchanging information and learning from mistakes.
The picture I’ve painted of specialized NGOs is pretty rosy, I admit, ignoring powerful forces like donor preferences. But I’m wondering why many practitioners speak of creating shared standards and coordinated campaigning rather than of dividing up the formidable task of combating poverty around the globe.
Going back several decades, the call for greater collaboration has yielded imperfect results. Where would a call for specialization by NGOs get us?
Sarah Stroup is visiting assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College and is currently working on a book on humanitarian and human rights INGOs.
4 responses to NGO Collaboration: Limited or Limiting?
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Very good point. Moreover, apart from the mandate and expertise, the cost of collaboration is rarely taken into account.
Central to real effectiveness through specialisation can only happen is the real time information on who does what and donors should start donating based on results (through expertise) instead of just spreading the money.
Any system based on meetings is in a fast environment like humanitarian assistance doomed to be too little, too late. The project elements should be standardised and shared real time.
Let me start with a disclaimer at the outset that English is not my first or second language.
There are three concepts presented in contrasts: regulations (self or otherwise), collaboration and specialistion.
My first point is that they are not mutually exclusive.
Specialisation: whether at national or international/global space NGOs do have a fair degree of specialisation- in terms of geography (where they work), themes or sector (their specific priority areas), partnership (who they work with, methods and approach (think tanks only, service delivery only, advocacy or both; rights based or not; campaigning or not). This is not to say that we have one big NGO for one specialisation. It is true that Development and Humaniatarian sector for its obvious broad and complex remit have many more NGOs than human rights or environment sectors- even though there is an increasing overlap between these secotrs.
COllaboration: NGOs converge a lot more at policy level whether at sub-national, national, continental or international and global level. This is where collaboration, competetion and contradiction plays out more. There are many examples of joint policy and campaigning between northern INGOs and between northern INGOs and southern NGOs. Problem comes when there is competetion for the media space and contradiction in terms of counter policy position due to different worldview and political (or even ideological stance.
Thus my second point is that there is a fair amount of policy advocacy and even campaign level collaboration at national and international level among those INGOs and NGOs who have the similar political positions but it can improve. The area where there is really low collaboration is in the area of operational programming knowledge and methods– and there are plenty of reasons and excuses for that.
My third point: Regulations- Regulatory enforcement by INGOs on INGOs over so many national legislative boundaries is tricky if not impossible unless they are voluntary and or self-regulatory. Governmental systems as in Europe can to a great extent. Take example of INGO Accountability Charter, it is voluntary and it has established Ombudsman and independent and credible complaints committee.
Very interesting point. It is my personal observation that specialisation may sometimes go a longer way and allow organisations to build expertise. With specialisation it is also easier to search for complementarity
Thank you for these thoughtful comments.
I admit that my initial post depicted collaboration and specialization as mutually exclusive, which Mr. Singh points out is not true in practice. My point was that collaboration suggests robust cooperation – information sharing and cost-sharing – by NGOs to pursue shared goals, and this in practice seems pretty rare. I agree that collaboration on campaigning is more common, but some INGOs are more involved in global campaigning and take regular leadership roles in these “collaborative” efforts – campaigning specialists, we might say. Perhaps provocatively, I wonder whether specialization, which capitalizes on the competitive aspect of the INGO sector, might be a more effective way to “advance the mission” of poverty reduction.
Of course, as Mr. Gardner points out, there are a number of preconditions necessary for effective collaboration OR specialization. Without greater transparency and support from donors, either model will fail.
Finally, I completely agree with Mr. Singh’s point that regulatory enforcement is elusive in a world where NGOs are governed by different states. But perhaps it is not just that states watch over INGOs in different ways but also that INGOs pursue different goals with different strategies that makes the establishment of a global standard difficult.