Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

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.