Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

(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.