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?  

The effort to provide relief to survivors of the Myanmar cyclone and the Chinese earthquake resurfaces questions of how to effectively mobilize and deploy charitable contributions in an international emergency. People across the U.S. interested in making contributions want to know that their gifts, large or small, are being put to good use. And as Lucy Bernholz points out in this post to her blog, Philanthropy 2173, media companies like Google are beginning to make recommendations about which organizations to support, raising questions about accountability and potential conflicts of interest.

Many European countries and others like Japan, Australia, and Canada have what are termed “joint appeals,” which promote one unified fundraising campaign for a particular emergency and then share the proceeds among a consortium of organizations. A donor makes a contribution to one place, secure in the knowledge that she is supporting organizations with the capacity to respond effectively and that those organizations are cooperating – not competing – for gifts.  The donor can be confident that her gift will be deployed fairly, in accord with pre-agreed criteria.  For the donor, the focus is on efficiency rather than choice.

The Disasters Emergency Committee in the UK is the oldest and arguably most successful of the joint appeals. Through significant partnerships with the BBC, ITV, and British Telecom, the DEC has become a known and trusted brand in the UK. It has raised approximately $750 million since 2004 just for the southeast Asia tsunami.

There have been serious conversations within the NGO community about creating something similar in the U.S., but the challenges are compounded by the larger number of NGOs that provide international relief and our fragmented media market. Most joint appeals consist of no more than a dozen organizations, making it reasonable to manage governance and fund allocations.  The mechanics and politics of who’s in, who’s out, by what standards, and how to share the money get complicated when 30-40 organizations might stake a reasonable claim.

Most joint appeals also have one or two media companies that provide instant access to the majority of their public. In the U.S., four (five?) national networks and myriad cable channels make it difficult to line up enough media support to ensure it would be value-added – and that’s just television.

There is no hard research that shows U.S. donors would give up choice to reward cooperation and efficiency in a crisis situation, though the Bush-Clinton fund raising in the wake of hurricane Katrina (more on that in the next post) seems to support the notion. But it’s an attractive proposition to have a centralized mechanism, with high levels of transparency and accountability for the use of funds and with the capacity to distribute the money quickly to organizations with the capacity and reach to provide relief effectively. This would seem advantageous to having multiple companies like Google choose and promote their own recommendations, which – while providing a bit more direction – doesn’t necessarily make donors’ choices easier, especially if different companies are recommending different organizations.

NGOs have been working to coordinate the delivery of their services on the ground and develop best practices through efforts like the Emergency Capacity-Building Project. Working together on fund raising would bring them together on the other side of the proverbial “coin.”