NGO Management

The Earthscan Companion

Alan Fowler, Chiku Malunga, Alan Fowler, Chiku Malunga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781136539213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The task environment of NGOs is changing rapidly and significantly, making new demands on their management and leadership. This Companion discusses the complexities involved. It illustrates how NGOs can maintain performance and remain agile amidst increasing uncertainties. These factors include the position of NGOs in civil society, their involvement in governance and coping with the effects of the securitisation of international aid. Complementing The Earthscan Reader in NGO Management, selected contributions and specially commissioned pieces from NGO thought-leaders and practitioners, provide the reader with insights on the emerging thinking, competences and practices needed for success in managing and leading tomorrow's NGOs.

Part I

Retro-perspective: NGO-ism in a Changing World Order

1

Have NGOs ‘Made a Difference’? From Manchester to Birmingham with an Elephant in the Room

Michael Edwards

Introduction

In 1991, David Hulme and I found ourselves in a bar at the University of Hull enjoying a post-conference beer. The conversation turned to a mutual interest of ours – the role and impact of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in development – and after a few more pints we hit on the idea that eventually became the first ‘Manchester Conference’ on the theme of ‘scaling-up’, later to be summarized in a book called ‘Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World’ (Edwards and Hulme, 1992). 15 years on, the NGO universe has been substantially transformed, with rates of growth in scale and profile that once would have been unthinkable. Yet still the nagging questions remain. Despite the increasing size and sophistication of the development NGO sector, have NGOs really ‘made a difference’ in the ways the first Manchester Conference intended, or have the reforms that animated the NGO community during the 1990s now run out of steam?

In this chapter I try to answer these questions in two ways. First, through a retrospective of the Manchester conferences – what they taught us, what influence they had and how NGOs have changed. And second, by picking out a couple of especially important challenges in development terms and assessing whether NGOs ‘stood up to be counted’, so to speak, and did their best in addressing them. These two approaches suggest somewhat different conclusions, which will bring me to the ‘elephant in the room’ of my title.

It is obvious that making judgements about a universe as diverse as development NGOs is replete with dangers of over-generalization, and difficulties of attribution, measurement, context and timing. I suspect my remarks may be particularly relevant for international NGOs and to larger intermediary NGOs based in the south. So with these caveats in mind, what does the last decade and a half tell us about the role and impact of NGOs in development?

The Manchester Conferences: A Short Retrospective

As Table 1.1 shows, the theme of the first Manchester Conference in 1992 was ‘Scaling-up NGO impact on development’. ‘How can NGOs progress from improving local situations on a small scale to influencing the wider systems that create and reinforce poverty?’ (Edwards and Hulme, 1992, p7). The conference concluded that were different strategies suited to different circumstances, specifically: (1) working with government; (2) operational expansion; (3) lobbying and advocacy; and (4) networking and ‘self-spreading’ local initiatives.

All of these strategies have costs and benefits, but the implicit bias of the conference organizers, and most of the participants, lay towards institutional development and advocacy as the most effective and least costly forms of scaling-up, what Alan Fowler later called the ‘onion-skin’ strategy for NGOs – a solid core of concrete practice (either direct project implementation or support to other organizations and their work), surrounded by successive and inter-related layers of research and evaluation, advocacy and campaigning, and public education. To varying extents, this strategy has become standard practice for development NGOs in the intervening years.

Buried away at the end of ‘Making a Difference’ was the following statement: ‘The degree to which a strategy or mix of strategies compromises the logic by which legitimacy is claimed provides a useful test of whether organizational self-interest is subordinating mission’ (Edwards and Hulme, 1992, p213). For reasons that I will come back to later in this chapter, that has turned out to be a prescient conclusion.

Fast forward to the second Manchester Conference in 1994, in a context in which NGOs had begun to ‘scale-up’ rapidly in an environment in which they were seen as important vehicles to deliver the political and economic objectives of the ‘New Policy Agenda’ that was being adopted by official donor agencies at the time – deeper democratization through the growth of ‘civil society’, and more cost-effective delivery of development-related services such as micro-credit and community-driven development. As a result, many NGO budgets were financed increasingly by government aid, raising critical questions about performance, accountability and relations with funding sources: The key question for that conference was as follows: ‘will NGOs be co-opted into the ‘New Policy Agenda’ as the favoured child, or magic bullet for development?’ (Edwards and Hulme, 1995, p7). And if so, what would that do to NGO mission and relationships? Will they, as another of the conference books put it, become ‘too close to the powerful, and too far from the powerless’ (Hulme and Edwards, 1997, p275)?

At the time, our conclusion was that such problems were not inevitable. Whether they arise depends on the quality of the relationships that develop between actors, and on how each NGO uses its ‘room to manoeuvre’ to control the costs of growth and donor-dependence. Therefore, negotiation between stakeholders is vital, requiring innovation in performance-assessment, accountability mechanisms and relations with funding agencies. ‘The developmental impact of NGOs’, we concluded, ‘their capacity to attract support, and their legitimacy as actors in development, will rest much more clearly on their ability to demonstrate that they can perform effectively and are accountable for their actions. It is none too soon for NGOs to put their house in order’ (Edwards and Hulme, 1995, pp227–228).

Since 1994 there have been some important innovations in this respect, like the Humanitarian Accountability Project; the rise of self-certification and accreditation schemes, seals of approval and codes of conduct among child sponsorship agencies and other NGOs; the development of formal compacts between government and the nonprofit sector in the UK, Canada and elsewhere; the Global Accountability Project in London; ActionAid’s Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP) system; and simple but powerful things like publicizing the financial accounts of an NGO on public bulletin boards that are being encouraged by MANGO and other organizations (Jordan and van Tuijl, forthcoming).

Table 1.1 The Manchester conferences: A case summary

Date and location	Theme(s)	Key conclusions	Published outputs
Manchester 1992	Scaling-up NGO impact on development: ‘How can NGOs progress from improving local situations on a small scale to influencing the wider systems that create and reinforce poverty?’	Different strategies suit different circumstances: 1) Working with government 2) operational expansion 3) lobbying and advocacy 4) networking and ‘self-spreading’ local initiatives. All have costs and benefits but implicit bias to institutional development and advocacy to control for dangers (the ‘onion-skin’ strategy): ‘The degree to which a strategy or mix of strategies compromises the logic by which legitimacy is claimed provides a useful test of whether organizational self-interest is subordinating mission’	Making a Difference: NGOs and Development in a Changing World Scaling-Up NGO Impact on Development: Learning from Experience (DIP)
Manchester 1994	NGO growth raises questions about performance, accountability and relations with funding sources: ‘Will NGOs be co-opted into the New Policy Agenda as the favoured child, or magic bullet for development?’ If so, what does that do to NGO mission and relationships – ‘too close to the powerful, too far from the powerless?’	Problems are not inevitable – they depend on the quality of relationships between actors and how ‘room to manoeuvre’ is exploited. Therefore, negotiation between stakeholders is vital, requiring innovation in performance assessment, accountability mechanisms, and relations with funders. ‘The developmental impact of NGOs, their capacity to attract support, and their legitimacy as actors in development, will rest much more clearly on their ability to demonstrate that they can perform effectively and are accountable for their actions. It is none too soon for NGOs to put their house in order.’	Beyond the Magic Bullet: NGO Performance And Accountability in the Post-Cold War World (x 2) NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? (x 2) Too Close For Comfort: The Impact of Official Aid on NGOs (WD) Policy Arena: New Roles and Challenges for NGOs (JID)
Birmingham 1999	The changing global context poses questions about NGO roles, relationships, capacities and accountabilities ‘Adapt or die!’ Three key changes: 1) globalization reshapes patterns of poverty, inequality and insecurity 2) ‘complex political emergencies’ reshape patterns of humanitarian action 3) the focus of international cooperation is moving from a focus on foreign aid to a focus on rules, standards and supports for those most vulnerable. Hence, ‘NGO Futures Beyond Aid’, ‘New Roles and Relevance’, and ‘Global Citizen Action’ – transnational organizing among equals for systemic change cf north–south transfers and interventions.	This changing context gives rise to 4 challenges for NGOs: : 1) mobilizing a genuinely inclusive civil society at all levels of the world system 2) holding other organizations accountable for their actions and ensuring they respond to social and environmental needs 3) ensuring that international regimes are implemented effectively and to the benefit of poor countries 4) ensuring that gains at the global level are translated into concrete benefits at the grassroots. NGOs must move from ‘development as delivery to development as leverage’, or ‘marry local development to worldwide leverage’ This requires more equal relationships with other civic actors, especially in the south, new capacities (e.g. bridging and mediation) and stronger accountability mechanisms.	NGOs in a Global Future: Marrying Local Delivery to Worldwide Leverage (PAD) New Roles and Relevance: Development NGOs and the Challenge of Change NGO Futures: Beyond Aid (TWQ) Global Citizen Action

In retrospect however, NGOs did not heed this call with sufficient attention, and are now suffering from it in a climate in which, unlike 10 years ago, weaknesses in NGO accountability are being used as cover for an attack on political grounds against voices that certain interests wish to silence. Examples of such attacks include the NGO Watch project at the American Enterprise Institute, the Rushford Report in Washington DC and NGO Monitor in Jerusalem. Stronger NGO accountability mechanisms won’t do away with politically motivated attacks like these, but they would surely help to expose them for what they are.

In 1999, the Third NGO Conference took place in Birmingham, framed by a rapidly changing global context that posed some deeper questions about NGO roles, relationships, capacities and accountabilities. ‘Adapt or die’ was the subtext of that meeting, whose organizers highlighted three key sets of changes:

• First, globalization reshapes patterns of poverty, inequality and insecurity, calling for greater global integration of NGO strategies and more ‘development work’ of different kinds in the north

• Second, ‘complex political emergencies’ reshape patterns of humanitarian action, implying more difficult choices for NGOs about intervention and the need to reassert their independence from government interests

• Third, a move from foreign aid as the key driver of international cooperation to a focus on rules, standards and support for those who are most vulnerable to the negative effects of global change implies greater NGO involvement in the processes and institutions of global governance, both formal and informal (Edwards et al, 1999, p2).

The thrust of these changes is clearly visible in the titles of the books that emerged from the Birmingham conference – NGO Futures: Beyond Aid (Fowler, 2000), New Roles and Relevance (Lewis and Wallace, 2000) and Global Citizen Action (Edwards and Gaventa, 2001) – holding out the promise of transnational organizing among equals for systemic change as opposed to a secondary role shaped by the continued asymmetries of the foreign aid world.

This changing context, we believed, gave rise to four key challenges resulting from the evolution of a more political role for development NGOs in emerging systems of global governance, debate and decision-making:

1 How to mobilize a genuinely inclusive civil society at all levels of the world system, as opposed to a thin layer of elite NGOs operating internationally

2 How to hold other (more powerful) organizations accountable for their actions and ensure that they respond to social and environmental needs – something that implicitly demanded reforms in NGO accountability too

3 How to ensure that international regimes are implemented effectively and to the benefit of poor people and poor countries (getting to grips with ‘democratic deficits’ in global institutions and protecting ‘policy space’ for southern countries to embark on their own development strategies)

4 How to ensure that gains at the global level are translated into concrete benefits at the grassroots (translating abstract commitments made in international conferences into actions that actually enforce rules and regulations on the ground: Edwards et al 1999, p10).

NGOs, we concluded, must move from ‘development as delivery to development as leverage’, and this would require the development of more equal relationships with other civic actors (especially in the south), new capacities (like bridging and mediation), and stronger downward or horizontal accountability mechanisms.

Since 1999 there have certainly been some examples of innovations like these, like the ‘Make Poverty History Campaign’ in the UK (which has developed stronger coordination mechanisms among development and non-development NGOs and other organizations in UK civil society), and the development of much more sophisticated advocacy campaigns on aid, debt and trade.

Now, if one believes that there is a credible chain of logic linking these three conferences, their outputs and those of other similar effort...