Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

Recently the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, in partnership with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, hosted a seminar exploring the extent to which international NGOs are influencing world politics.  

As part of the panel, Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College and an associate at Weatherhead, posed two questions:

Have NGOs been able to make the weak more powerful?

Have they been able to make the poor more wealthy?

These are provocative questions, and ones that those in the NGO community must view somewhat ruefully. The ultimate answer is “no” - or, at least, “only in the most limited way.”  

His point, one well taken, was that world politics is still state-centric, and any state wishing to remain outside the reach of global civil society is able to do so. Witness the Balkans in the 1990s, Rwanda in 1994, and now Darfur, Zimbabwe, even the recent barriers to disaster relief imposed by the regime in Myanmar. NGOs have been mostly powerless to put a stop to situations when governments choose to be oppressive or intransigent; only other states have the power to intervene effectively.  

While this might be true, I wonder whether these are the right questions. NGOs don’t necessarily aspire to the level of influence and power that states wield, nor need to in order to be influential within the international political system.

It’s true that NGOs have been unable to stop what’s happening in Darfur, for example, but would the public and even other governments know as much about it and view it as a crisis without NGOs having worked to bring it to the world’s attention?  And would the affected people be surviving as well without NGO assistance? The counterfactual seems just as easy to answer as Prof. Paarlberg’s questions: those in Darfur are better off due to the humanitarian action of NGOs that are active there.

Interesting questions seem to fall somewhere in between.  What do NGOs bring that states do not?  Do their actions sometimes relieve state responsibility, and inhibit the strengthening of local governance?  And as NGOs partner more often with states, and are increasingly asked to be part of influential fora where international policy is developed - indeed, as their private resources begin to rival that of the official development assistance provided by governments, as discussed earlier - how do they retain their independence, and their credibility with and accountability to the poor?  

Tags: Darfur, Hauser Center, Myanmar, Robert Paarlberg, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Wellesly College, Zimbabwe

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.