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Is the world witnessing a global associational revolution spearheaded by development non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Is the relationship between states and societies being fundamentally redefined, even in remote, rural corners of the world? What role does the mushrooming of development NGOs play in this political-ideological process? And what about the NGO staff? Are they angels of mercy, government-paid development diplomats, propagandists for a triumphant West, instruments in a coming clash between civilizations, or what? This book will try to shed new light on these large complex questions. It aims in particular, to make studies and discussions of these topics more fruitful and better informed, and less influenced by the political rhetoric of the day and untenable myths about NGO achievements. It puts forward a strong critique of central theories and concepts which have dominated research and discourse on development NGOs. It also proposes and demonstrates some rather different analytical approaches.
One question is obvious: how is one to describe and interpret the way the aid landscape has been fundamentally changed during the last 15 years or so? In the 1960s and 1970s there were very few NGOs engaged in aid, and in many developing countries only a handful were working as part of the development aid system. The 1980s has been named 'the NGO decade' in development aid. It was, obviously, very important in exporting the growth in NGOs from Western welfare states to the world at large. The total funds transferred by and through 'Northern' NGOs (those from industrial countries) increased at twice the rate for international aid as a whole (UNDP, 1993a:88). About 4,000 development NGOs in OECD member countries, dispersing billions of dollars a year, were working with about 10,000 to 20,000 'Southern' NGOs (from developing countries) who assisted, it has been estimated, between 100 and 250 million people. The so-called NGO decade is over, but their heyday does not, apparently, belong to the past. High-placed advisers to the US government talk about an enlarged role of the NGOs in the future of politics. The Clinton Administration has given more and more support to NGOs in aid; during President Clinton's first term in the White House the support to NGOs was due to increase from 13 to 50 per cent of the USAID budget in 1996, according to Vice-President Al Gore at the 1995 Social in Copenhagen. As public spending on international affairs and overseas aid is gradually and sometimes radically being reduced in most donor countries, the relative importance of NGOs within the aid system will continue to grow. How can this growth be explained? How can NGOs be analyzed and understood? Or even more fundamentally, what really is an NGO? And what is the relationship between states and NGOs really represent the political future, or are most of them irrelevant when it comes to actual development processes? Should the proliferation of NGOs worldwide be hailed as an associational revolution that challenges global power relations? Or is the most important impact of the NGO system perhaps the fact that NGOs have played a very important role in bringing Western concepts of development and democracy to new elites in urban centres and to remote rural parts of the world? This book discuses these issues on the assumption that they are of interest both as an important aspect of modern global history and, more specifically, as central questions in the development aid field.
NGOs in aid are, of course, an aspect of the history of the country or region in which they work, but they are also an important but often neglected part of the donor country's modern history. The NGO decade has played an important role in recent Western ideological history. The line taken by humanitarian organizations in emergencies (the refugee exodus from Vietnam and the Boat-people in Indo-China in the 1970s,crises like those in the Horn of Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, the Rwanda horror stories of the 1990s) and in media coverage has been important in and attitudes. The NGOs have organized altruism and symbolized the 'good act' in a 'post-modern' world, elsewhere characterized by moral fragmentation. They have emerged as symbols of societal responsibility and global morality. The NGO channel ahs thus been important for Western images of 'the other' and 'us' because the reality of the poor and the relationship between donor and receiver are often filtered through it. This interesting aspect of the impact of NGOs would require a separate analysis, and is not dealt with in this study. The competition and cooperation among NGOs, their different relationships to the state, the amount of public funds transmitted through the NGO channel as compared with other institutions in society are focused on here, and have obviously affected the organizational landscape of donor countries in both institutional and political ways. This book therefore analyses NGOs not only in development aid in the narrow sense, but also as reflecting and impacting on the donor countries' history, because it is thought useful to try to understand the role of the NGO channel as a whole.
The rapid growth of NGOs has been enmeshed in different but powerful ideological currents. Particularly during the last decade or so a definite NGO-speak or NGO language has developed as a means for donors, NGO actors and researchers to communicate about NGOs role in development ('comparative advantage' 'flexibility', 'empowering', 'grassrooting', etc.) and about development and 'the other' at large. This language has had an impact on the way the aid relationship has become structured and apprehended, and has influenced analytical approaches and theories of social development and supported a research tradition which can aptly be described as NGO-activism by other means. Without some clarification and a more rigorous use of concepts and approaches it is thought impossible to analyze and discuss the channel in a rational way. It is necessary to try to get beneath the political-ideological slogans not only to analyze the past, but also to understand the present and the future. This book takes as a starting point the fact that researchers, politicians, administrators and NGO professionals have been strongly influenced by products (whether true or false) of scientific theory and speculation:
the ideas of economists and political philosophers... are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.(Keynes, 1936, 1946 quoted in Gellner, 1988:12).
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