Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

One thing about taking in more money and becoming responsible for a larger share of international development assistance: you get noticed.

Foreign policy experts have begun to include NGOs in their analysis.  First comes a mention in Foreign Affairs by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he analyzes changes in geopolitical power and includes humanitarian and development NGOs among the list of entities wielding influence.

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy, a trio from the New America Foundation - Michael Cohen, Maria Figueroa Kupcu, and Parag Khanna - call NGOs this era’s “new colonialists.” Their thesis is based on the view that NGOs are providing services and assuming responsibilities that governments in many developing countries are unable to perform, a role formerly played by “colonial masters or superpower patrons.”

I suppose equating NGOs with colonialists is meant to be provocative, but it doesn’t work, even if the role has switched hands.  It’s like calling the Prius the new Hummer.  They both get you from here to there, but the goals and values behind the design are completely different.  And goals and values matter when it comes to colonialism, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “acquiring control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

The authors have, however, fingered a critical issue for the field:

Seeing jobs that need to be done, the new colonialists simply roll up their sleeves and go to work, with or without the cooperation of states.  That can be good for the family whose house needs rebuilding or the young mother who needs vaccinations for her child.  But it can be a blow to the authority of an already weak government.  And it may do nothing to ensure that a state will be able to provide for its citizens in the future.

This is undeniably a dynamic that most responsible NGOs recognize and strategically try to address.  It can be precariously difficult to provide high-quality, life-saving services while acting as a catalyst for a more responsive and capable government to take over, rather than creating a cycle of dependence.

But the authors conflate different types of situations and actors in the examples they cite (Booz Allen Hamilton and Save the Children have differing priorities, to say the least) and dismiss out of hand the notion that NGOs are truly committed to strengthening and encouraging governments to rise to the responsibility, simply because they find it “difficult to find examples where these groups have pulled up stakes because the needs they seek to address are no more.”

I don’t think examples are hard to find.  In Afghanistan (where one of the article’s case studies is located), CARE set up and ran a water system in Kabul that they successfully lobbied Karzai’s government to pick up.  In India, they began an integrated health and nutrition program in 100,000 villages throughout 10 states for which the state governments ultimately assumed full responsibility.  These are just two examples out of several for one organization.  There are also cases of NGOs leaving significant money on the table because they felt strongly that the project should be government-led or might weaken local governance and capacity.

It’s true that the danger exists of advantaging self-perpetuation or self-interest over a commitment to constituents and mission, and certainly a few NGOs exhibit opportunism above all else.  But the problem is not so much NGOs paying lip service to their pledge of working themselves out of a job - it’s the tricky strategic challenge of getting the balance right of different imperatives. In fact, some portion of the growth of NGOs could well be attributable to whatever halting success they’ve experienced in building local capacity and transitioning out.  It’s an attractive selling point.  It’s not like anybody else has a better track record.

It’s nice to be noticed.  It’s nicer if the nuances could be more fully developed.

PS.  The online version of the Foreign Policy article lists “The World’s Most Powerful Development NGOs.”  No mention of who picked it or the criteria used.  How does it compare to your list?

While I have some qualms about the methodology behind the data, it seems clear that private resources for international development are growing rapidly, and are beginning to rival official development aid (ODA).

This could portend a shift in the relationships between NGOs and the governments and key multi-lateral institutions that traditionally set the framework for how development aid works. As I mentioned in the previous post, increased scale means power to influence an agenda.

These private resources are dispersed among different sets of groups. There are private grantmaking foundations, NGOs, church missions, and faith-based organizations. The Gates Foundation alone is responsible for a significant portion of the growth, and the interests of other mega-philanthropists in reducing extreme poverty could quickly add up.

Whether there exists enough of a common perspective and agenda among these groups to put them in the driver’s seat of development remains to be seen. Is there a day coming when governments will see themselves as trying to leverage the money being made available through private sources, rather than the other way around?

Complicating matters is the entry of new players.  While historically ODA has been the domain of the 22 OECD countries, middle-income countries are increasing the amount of development assistance they are making available.

China, for instance, is investing significant sums in Africa.  What does this mean for the western philanthropic dollars and NGOs at work there?  Especially when China’s money has fewer strings attached (theirs is not an anti-corruption or strengthening local governance agenda) and they’re happy to invest in basic public infrastructure that is sorely needed.

Development aid is becoming an increasingly fragmented, competitive marketplace while more money enters the system.  The interests of a wide array of donors and influential actors are jockeying for position.  Harnessing this and using it to improve the impact on people’s lives in developing countries will be a challenge indeed.  NGOs should seek to play a leadership role as these shifts occur, but to be a positive force will require collaboration as well as taking risks that give voice to the aspirations of the people they are serving in the poorest communities around the world.

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.

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?