The Perantau

State, Society, and International NGOs:

A Critical Assessment of Development Paradigms

Many development economists, political scientists and activists praise non-governmental organisations [NGOs] for their role in developing communities and empowering people, leading to the worldwide proliferation of NGOs and its expansion across the borders of nation-states, known as international NGOs [INGOs]. 

Critics argue, however, that INGOs are largely responsible for demobilising and depoliticising poor communities as they encourage them to look away from the structural conditions that have created their poverty. This essay agrees with this statement, where this essay argues that INGOs interfere with autonomous mass organising, that they are a tool of Western imperialism and that INGOs undermine the role of the state.

The Impact of INGOs on Local Activism and Mass Organising in Developing Countries

The incursion of INGOs into developing countries tend to diminish the potential for local activism and autonomous mass organising, creating an unsustainable dependency or often ineffective relationship between the target population and INGOs. The NGO-isation, transnationalisation and the professionalisation of activism, as Arundhati Roy (2014) suggests, has created a space where activism is closely tied to questions on funding and financial incentives, turning grassroots resistance into a paid occupation (McMillan & Kelley 2015).

Srila Roy (2015) argues, with the Indian Women’s Movement [IWM] as an example, that this phenomena of professionalisation has enabled women in the IWM context to practice feminism as a profession instead of politics, despite having little to no political commitments, where, as a result, only specialises in certain issues, such as microfinance or sexual harassment, in isolation and with disregard to the macro-level interrelatedness and complexity of patriarchal practices. Nation-wide NGOs, especially those that seek foreign or international funding, lose sight of their initial targets and purpose and instead align themselves to donor requirements, sacrificing operational efficiency and policy influence (Banks, Hulme & Edwards 2015).

The location which INGOs in particular are located are not defined by poverty or governance, but rather where donors are located, creating tightly clustered areas that have convenient access to donors, beneficiaries and elite goods (Banks, Hulme & Edwards 2015). The shifting priorities for INGOs to appease donors by presenting measurable ‘results’ and being financially viable incentivises a system that pursues their service delivery functions at the expense of their civil society functions (Banks, Hulme & Edwards 2015). There are, however, situations where INGOs do work together and utilise their international status to empower local community groups and solve localised issues.

In a study by Kumi and Elbers (2022) on women employment in Kenya’s horticulture industry, INGOs played the role of a) brokering relationships and enhancing the credibility of local NGOs; and b) linking local-level advocacy to international-level advocacy. Despite successful in lobbying for gender equality to a range of international stakeholders and creating a sustainable transnational flower sector, donor requirements and funding constraints resulted in constant staff turnovers and poor administrative efficiency, ultimately undermining the long-term impact from advocacy work as local NGOs shifted their priorities from actual project implementation to meeting the INGOs’ quarterly report requirements (Kumi & Elbers 2022).

The reliance of local NGOs on INGOs on international donors and beneficiaries decreases the autonomy they have on pursuing their roles as advocates for civil society, diminishing the effectiveness for autonomous mass organising on the local level that reverberates on a national scale.

INGOs and Western Imperialism in Development

INGOs often lack an understanding of the sociocultural norms and political landscape of their target population, and considering that the vast majority of INGOs are Western-backed, tend to impose ideals or standards that may not be compatible with local customs, thus acting as a tool of Western imperialism.

As McMillan and Kelley (2015) suggest, INGOs play a part in a soft power strategy approach by ‘imperialist’ countries, penetrating underdeveloped areas to create “favourable conditions for agribusiness for export, sweatshops, resource mines, and tourist playgrounds,” (para. 17) and, to an extent, profiting from the misery created by the World Bank-sponsored Structural Adjustment Programmes.

According to the OECD (Woods 2000), Sub-Saharan Africa was the region that received support from the largest number of European NGOs, with Latin America and the Carribean in second, followed by South and Central Asia and East and Southeast Asia. The majority of the focus was in developing education issues, with poverty ranking highest followed by democracy and human rights, operating with a budget of at least $7.3 billion per annum across the board (Woods 2000). Northern Uganda, for example, garnered a lot of attention from multilateral and bilateral organisations, INGOs and local NGOs alike, on the region’s violence and human rights abuses, where after USAID assessment in 1997 became an intense theatre of international peace-building intervention by the early 2000s, particularly in the Acholi sub-region (Omach 2021).

A study by Omach (2021) showed that INGOs had little to no respect to the local norms and customs practiced in Acholi, which furthered tensions between INGOs and the target population, criticising their cultural beliefs and practices as backward and attributing it as the cause to human rights abuses. By ignoring the local processes of peace-building and attempt to appeal to local values, this form of cultural imperialism instead diminishes the effectiveness in international peace-building.

There are instances, however, where even though certain INGOs do not actively pursue an imperialist agenda and do their best to assist local needs, legacies of Western imperialism have built high levels of distrust and frame them as invaders.

In the case of longstanding rumours within communities associated with aspects of development projects and practitioners in Guatemala, in particular concerns by older community members about lasting negative impacts on their children, stem from legacies of colonialism and human rights abuses by foreigners (Clouser 2018). The durability and pervasiveness of the rumours, as Clouser (2018) suggests, “demonstrate the necessity of rethinking how these neoliberal and technocratic approaches to development inform the practices and processes of practitioners at multiple scales,” especially in post-conflict settings where the existing power imbalances continue to prevail under current approaches to development.

INGOs generally bring with them Western ideals of development and frame any other as lacking, disregarding the local contexts in which ‘under-development’ may occur and preventing them from the delivering the help that they preach.

The Complex Landscape of Funding, Governance, and Impact

The focus for INGOs to pursue funding, professionalisation and foreign-influenced agendas affect the effectiveness for local and national governments to formulate sustainable and tangible solutions. In the context of cooption of INGOs into the state’s body politic, they are not as non-governmental as the name suggests, receiving funds from overseas governments or work as private subcontractors of local governments, distracting the populace of systemic issues that are the root cause and instead focusing on unsustainable ‘self-help’ methods (Petras 1997). Privatising the distribution of essential goods instead strengthens neoliberal regimes by severing the link between local issues and groups with their national counterparts (Petras 1997).

Local NGO Acuica, a fish farmers association in Caquetá, Colombia, who taps into local, national and international funding, “hybridises grassroots membership-based characteristics with those of a development NGO seeking to address poverty and improve local livelihoods” (García & Fold 2022, p. 149) and sees technologically-driven success through securing development funding. Despite well-intentioned interventions, small-scale farmers welcomingly accept these technological innovations but reject government-sponsored community building and social relations, demonstrating how the farmers learned to navigate and utilise initiatives and projects to financially support them with disregard to government help (García & Fold 2022).

There are instances, however, where INGOs may prove to be more effective than national governments. The Mexican context questions how INGOs, or the lack thereof, define their relationship with the government. Mexico’s restrictions on international funding and visits to civic organisations in, for example, the Chiapas conflict zone, complicates the dependency between their target population and international support (Brysk 2000). As Byrsk (2000, p. 159) phrases it, “when domestic groups do not have the resources to mobilise effectively to articulate citizen interests, international resources may be needed to ‘level the playing field’ between citizens and the state.” Mexican NGOs, though politically autonomous from the state, have increasingly relied on foreign funding, where despite being able to resist the power of authoritarian regimes and by providing services to the poor outside government channels, are in threat of cooption and potentially serving the needs of the government just through alternative means (Miraftab 1997).While INGOs may be more efficient in attracting foreign investment and securing international aid, Jack (2001) argues that when donor-government relationships fail or government-backed initiatives are corrupt, INGO projects are effectively halted.

Outsourcing services valued by governments to INGOs thus carries an inherent risk of damaging civil society. The focus of INGOs still remain in tackling the ‘symptoms’, providing solutions to surface-level temporary problems instead of pursuing the cause of these systemic inequalities that both INGOs and national governments continue to propagate.

Conclusion

INGOs are largely responsible for demobilising and depoliticising poor communities as they encourage them to look away from the structural conditions that have created their poverty. The NGO-isation, transnationalisation and the professionalisation of activism – fuelled by INGOs – interferes with autonomous mass organising on a local level, which inadvertently impacts nation-wide movements to address inequality.

The international support for INGOs generally come from Western countries that bring with them Western-backed agendas and normative assumptions of, for example, human rights, that do not take into account local customs and norms, essentially performing as a vehicle of Western imperialism.

This incursion into often unfamiliar territory often disrupts local processes of dealing with the issues trying to be addressed, undermining the role of the state and potentially complicating government initiatives.

Although INGOs have proven their impact within certain contexts, the underlying theme of seeking funding hinders their own purpose, a threat not limited to INGOs but also to other forms of NGOs, stemming from the grassroots to the transnational.

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Reference List

Banks, N, Hulme, D & Edwards, M 2015, ‘NGOs, States, and Donors: Still Too Close for Comfort?’, World Development, vol. 66, pp. 707–718.

Brysk, A 2000, ‘Democratizing Civil Society in Latin America’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 151-165.

Clouser, R 2018, ‘Reality and rumour: the grey areas of international development in Guatemala’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 769-785.

García, NA & Fold, N 2022, ‘Take back your fish: questioning NGO-mediated development in Caquetá, Colombia’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 148-165.

Jack, W 2001, ‘Public Policy toward Nongovernmental Organizations in Developing Countries’, Policy Research Working Paper no. 2639, World Bank, Washington, DC.

Kumi, E & Elbers, W 2022, ‘How internationally funded NGOs promote gender equality in horticulture value chains in Kenya’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 9, pp, 2112-2128.

McMillan, S & Kelley, V 2015, The Useful Altruists: How NGOs Serve Capitalism and Imperialism, viewed 19th August 2022, <counterpunch.org/2015/10/20/the-useful-altruists-how-ngos-serve-capitalism-and-imperialism/>.

Miraftab, F 1997, ‘Flirting with the Enemy: Challenges Faced by NGOs in Development and Empowerment’, International Habitat, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 361-375.

Omach, P 2021, ‘International peacebuilding and local contestations of notions of human rights in Acholi in Northern Uganda’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 939-955.

Petras, J 1997, ‘Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America’, Monthly Review, 1-9.

Roy, A 2014, The NGO-ization of Resistance, viewed 19th August 2022, <massalijn.nl/new/the-ngo-ization-of-resistance>.

Roy, S 2015, ‘The Indian Women’s Movement: Within and Beyond NGOization’, Journal of South Asian Development, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 96–117.Woods, A 2000, Facts about European NGOs Active in International Development, OECD Development Centre, Paris, France.

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Originally submitted as coursework for the Master of Global Media Communication, University of Melbourne