Nongovernmental Organization

A nongovernmental organization (NGO) is what it claims to be: a group defined by its autonomy from the state. An NGO is a constitutive element of civil society that, in theory, stands separate from, if not [Page 618]necessarily in conflict with, the state. In democratic polities, NGOs are the mainstays of pluralism and of government accountability to its citizens.

Although nongovernmental organizations generally exist to organize, mobilize, and represent likeminded individuals, not all operate with an explicit connection to governance and state-society relations. Some NGOs, such as bowling leagues or quilting bees, exist purely within the societal realm to bring individuals together to pursue their purposes privately. More relevant to a governance context are NGOs that bring their interests or beliefs to bear on the public realm by making claims on behalf of private or public interests. Some NGOs exist to influence policy in a way that accrues benefits to their own members (private interest), while others seek to accrue benefits to society as a whole (public interest).

Most scholars, when discussing NGOs, focus on groups that make claims with respect to the public interest rather than private interests. As such, although they are societal actors, we do not typically think of business enterprises as NGOs because their governance goals involve benefits that accrue only to them (or to their sector). Rather, we tend to identify organizations such as religious, environmental, scholarly, or aid groups as NGOs because they promote some view of the collective interest and seek benefits that accrue to society as a whole. Indeed, some NGOs provide public goods, such as relief services, when formal governance mechanisms break down.

However, there are certainly gray areas in this definition of NGOs. One difficult case is labor organizations: Are the goals they promote self-interested or public interested? While one could argue that labor organizations represent only their own members in promoting goals such as high wages, one could also claim that other labor goals, such as full employment and corporate accountability, are public goods. More problematic are radical organizations that promote and use violence. Like NGOs, they are societal and typically have goals that involve society at large rather than simply their own members. However, the term NGO is generally reserved for organizations that pursue their goals nonviolently, even if they seek to bring broad changes to society. The term NGO can apply both to social movement organizations as well as those that broadly accept the status quo, but groups that seek to overturn both state and society through violent means stand outside the mainstream conception of what constitutes a nongovernmental organization.

Given these parameters, there remains wide variation in the types of NGOs that exist in the world. NGOs vary in the scope—whether local, national, or international—of their operations or ambitions. This scope guides the level of government they engage: local NGOs engage local governments, national NGOs engage national governments, and international NGOs engage international institutions. However, these distinctions of scope have blurred as advances in information and communications technologies have reduced the effects of distance, allowing local, national, and international NGOs with similar agendas to coordinate with one another in informal networks. Indeed, one attribute that makes NGOs so interesting to students of governance is that, unlike national governments or international organizations, NGOs are “glocal”—that is, capable of using their networks to operate simultaneously at the global, national, and local levels.

...