Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

Today the Hauser Center hosted Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam GB, to discuss his new book, From Poverty to Power.  Lant Pritchett, professor of the practice of international development, offered a response.

Some quick reflections:

Duncan’s thesis is that development is best achieved through (1) active citizenship and (2) effective states.  While instinctively we might place these two in opposition to each other, they can be compatible and complementary.  To be successful in alleviating poverty, the two must combine to redistribute power within markets so that poor people benefit:

The impact of markets on poverty and inequality depends on whether poor people can exert influence over the way they operate.

Working from his thesis, Duncan offered the following pressing issues for NGOs (this is my interpretation):

• Inequality vs. poverty.  NGOs should focus on inequality, which puts their focus on the imbalance of power that leads to poverty, and forces them out of the mindset that poverty is just about lack of income or assets.
• Religious blind spot.  Whereas most NGOs focus on secular policy, much development takes place through faith communities and the influence they hold on people’s lives.
• Focus on urban areas.  NGOs suffer from “peasant romanticism,” focusing efforts on rural villages and communities, when most poor people are now found in urban areas.
• Making states effective.  NGOs may be too small to have much influence on states and make them effective (which begs the question - then who?).
• Migration.  The NGO community is mostly missing on the question of making migration a humane, dignified experience.  They have yet to take a stand in the hot political environment.
• Accountability.  NGOs are often less accountable then the actors and institutions that they accuse of suffering from a lack of accountability.
• Emergencies vs. long-term development.  Emergencies - whether complex political emergencies or natural disasters - are “shocks” that offer significant opportunity for systemic change.  Yet during the brief opening in the aftermath of crisis, NGOs focus on providing and restoring services - putting on the ground experts in providing relief - rather than bringing in the expertise - the economists, the policy analysts and developers - to effect structural changes that lead to successful long-term development.  Time to turn that on its head.
• New global institutions.  This moment of global financial crisis may be one of the few real opportunities to create new global institutions capable of regulating and redistributing power.  Otherwise such processes typically experience enormous resistance and are agonizingly slow.
• Overselling globalization.  Most development remains at the national level.  NGOs may be focusing too much energy and advocacy on international campaigns.
• Understanding change.  NGOs need better models for understanding how change occurs and being able to track progress.

Much food for thought.  I was especially struck by the point that the aftermath of emergencies is an  opportunity to advance social change.  It rang true - the social and government structures are so often unsettled, and those in charge more willing to incorporate new ideas and policies, especially if such policies reduce the vulnerability that the crisis has brought into such relief.   NGOs might make relatively easy changes to their approach and have great impact doing so.

I’m sorry we didn’t get to explore the question of accountability more deeply.  How are NGOs less accountable than they purport?

What jumps out at you?

(I originally posted this on Tuesday 11/11/08 and it mysteriously disappeared, so I’m reposting.  Unless there’s been foul play from a new philanthropist acolyte, I can only chalk it up to a site glitch.  Apologies for the redundancy.)

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, at least by NGO leaders and international development policy experts, that U.S. foreign assistance is badly in need of modernizing and restructuring.   One reason is  excessive fragmentation: aid is distributed by the federal government out of 20 different agencies and 50 different offices.  As critics like to point out, this does not make for policy coherence.

There are myriad factors for this jumble, chief among them the steady disinvestment in USAID over the past two decades.  But there’s another reason that deserves more attention, since it reflects a similar trend among major private foundations and donors: the desire to measure and demonstrate impact.

As three past administrators of USAID point out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, the focus of many newer presidential initiatives or earmarks is narrowly defined on a particular issue, which is “politically appealing because they appear to have a direct, measurable impact on identifiable individuals.”  Here’s the problem: “… such a concentration on the short-term delivery of goods and services comes at the expense of building sustainable institutions that promote long-term development.”

It’s not enough to make drugs available to treat AIDS in a developing country.  To solve the problem requires a public infrastructure - education and training for clinicians, effective government agencies, appropriate public health education, sustained services - as well as a healthy civil society that will make the drugs less and less necessary by improving the overall health and stability of the affected community.

The current craze in philanthropy for assessing and quantifying impact presents a similar conundrum.   Focusing too closely on individual trees - because it’s easier to count the leaves - makes one run the risk of missing the forest altogether.  As Susan Berresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, remarked over a year ago, “Isn’t it possible that too much reliance on short-term plans can miniaturize ambition for justice and for progress on deeply entrenched problems such as racism, poverty and inequality?”

If the federal government were to develop a comprehensive U.S. development strategy, it could help - at least then the burden can shift to measuring progress on the broad aims of development in toto.  As most community organizers will tell you, rights-based development requires sustained, comprehensive investments in people and communities, and processes for developing local capacity and reforming social structures are messy and non-linear.  A commitment to improving human security - which a new Obama adminstration has put forward as an important element of its  approach to U.S. global engagement - requires a willingness to accept that some crucial elements of progress might be unquantifiable.  The political appeal of short-term results will have to give way to a more complicated, nuanced picture - and that would buck the prevailing winds in the sector.

Michael Edwards, who recently stepped down as director of the Governance and Civil Society Program at the Ford Foundation, explores similar issues in “Have NGOs Made a Difference?”*

He finds that development NGOs have been influential in getting the mainstream to address the negative aspects of globalization, commit to participation and human rights as basic principles of development, and grapple with the implications of critical global issues like climate change and poverty in Africa.

Yet he views their performance wanting on several fronts - mainly that they have not been innovative enough to fundamentally influence the political structures that perpetuate poverty and human rights abuses, nor change the power relations that define class, gender, and race.

He worries that their increasing reliance on government funds and concern about “market imperatives” - such as fundraising and brand identity - make them crowd out the participation and voice of indigenous and Southern-based civil society, even while increasing it is a stated goal.

An interesting aspect of this analysis is the apparent contradiction that the growth in NGO scale and capacity over the last 20 years has allowed them to be credible participants in influential policy debates - yet has also created organizational pressures that complicate (or, as Edwards argues, dilute) relationships with constituents and affect the willingness of NGOs to undertake certain strategies.

This is not a theoretical issue.  As Peter Bell, former president and CEO of CARE USA and a senior research fellow at the Hauser Center pointed out during “Are NGOs Changing World Politics?”: NGOs have evolved from being proudly apolitical and recognize the need to influence policy and governance, but they are often up against well-financed, organized lobbies.  Look at the difficulty in changing the U.S. Farm Bill, which has a significant impact on world food markets and global food security.  Scale, scope, and credibility help one compete.

They may also change an organization’s appetite for risk and make it more careful about protecting its viability and reputation.  Scale can tempt NGOs to be less of an alternative — less willing to advocate radical change or push constituents to the front of the debate — and more mainstream.

What’s an NGO leader to do?  Edwards points to the potential of strengthening relationships between NGOs and social movements.  In the U.S., NGOs helped incubate the ONE Campaign.  Even here, the need to improve public education about the complexities of development and guard against the urge to oversimplify are real.  Partnering with and building the capacity of social movements in developing countries is a long-term process, and critical policy decisions are moving forward now.

Peter Bell points to value of NGOs working in collaboration.  This holds promise for increasing influence but is unlikely to increase the “alternativeness” of the proposed solutions.

Much of the nonprofit literature on “scaling up” is concerned with how to do it.  While the possibility of mission drift is always mentioned in treatises on growth, I think we’d benefit from far more analysis about the changes in perspective that an organization is likely to encounter, and the mission-related strategic opportunities and pitfalls that “going to scale” might bring — and how to maximize the former while avoiding the latter.

* from Can NGOs Make a Difference? The Challenge of Development Alternatives, edited by Anthony Bebbington, Samuel Hickey, and Diana Mitlin.

On Monday, the Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program at the Aspen Institute released Mobilizing Change: 10 Nonprofit Policy Proposals to Strengthen U.S. Communities.  Full disclosure: I helped edit the paper and wrote much of the introduction, and its recommendation for FEMA to create a high-level coordinating body to better integrate community-based nonprofits in disaster relief derives from a paper I authored on the local nonprofit response to Katrina.  

That recommendation stems in part from the experiences shared by international humanitarian organizations like Mercy Corps and IRC.  For many of them, Katrina was the first time they responded to a domestic emergency.  In an international setting, they are accustomed to working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and were mystified to find that neither FEMA nor any other group was focused on coordinating the multitude of local nonprofits working heroically to provide relief.

This is just one example of how comparative analysis between our domestic response architecture and the international system might result in suggestions and improvements.  What can the U.S. learn about disaster preparedness from Bangladesh, which in 2007 experienced a cyclone as strong and as damaging as a 1991 storm that killed 138,000 people - but in 2007 had fewer than 10,000 deaths?  Still tragic, yes, but a vast improvement in safety and response.   

The Mobilizing Change report also points out the growing reliance on U.S. nonprofits by government at all levels, to provide services and implement programs.  The report calls for a high-level commission to explore this relationship and propose public policies that would help government strengthen nonprofit impact, rather than focus exclusively on oversight.  

I support such a commission, since I sense that most policymakers do not understand the nonprofit sector very well, even while they are turning more and more of their attention toward it. Yet what are the implications for the nonprofit sector of an increasingly intertwined relationship with government? Can nonprofits retain their independence and hang on to the characteristics that make them uniquely successful?  The unintended consequences deserve further exploration.

This is analogous to concerns raised about NGOs in the newly published Can NGOs Make a Difference?  The Challenges of Development Alternatives. As the editors - Anthony Bebbington, Samuel Hickey, and Diana Mitlin - flatly state in their introduction: “There are serious doubts regarding how far NGOs in the North are able to do anything that is especially alternative to their host countries’ bilateral aid programmes.” More on that later.

While both the Homi Kharas/Blum Brookings summary and the Index of Global Philanthropy focus solely on quantity, the Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index (CDI) attempts to incorporate aspects of aid quality.  Since ”aid is about more than money,” the CDI rewards donor selectivity and penalizes tied aid, project proliferation, donor fragmentation, and lack of coordination. 

Trying to integrate measures of quality alongside quantity is - it seems to me - critical, however difficult, and puts the conversation where it needs to be.  It would be interesting to systematically apply similar standards to private funds.  How would NGOs fare?  I often encounter the implicit assumption (and am guilty of it myself) that funds are better deployed by NGOs and private philanthropy than government agencies, but it would be good to use benchmarks to compare. 

Like the Index of Global Philanthropy, CDI also recognizes that “development is about more than aid,” and so it incorporates six other components: trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.  Since its mission is to compare national governments in their commitment to development, it measures the impact of a country’s public policies on these factors. 

This means that the U.S. scores fairly low on the migration component, since its policies admit legal immigrants and refugees at low rates relative to other countries.  I think this more accurately gauges U.S. involvement than the absolute dollar amount of remittances used by the Index of Global Philanthropy.  But it also means that the CDI only estimates the impact of tax policies in the U.S. in stimulating private giving, nowhere accounting for the recent phenomenal growth in private aid described so well by Kharas, Brookings, and the Index of Global Philanthropy that might have significant long-term implications for the aid endeavor.