Nongovernmental Organizations

Conceptual Overview

The NGO as a concept has a long and complex history. Social and political organizing did not first emerge with the creation of NGOs. Such organizations can be traced throughout history and in every cultural and social context. For example, such organizations would include colonial struggles for freedom, women's rights activism, and workers' rights organizations. To take the definition of NGO in its most modern sense, one can suggest that such an organizational form first emerged in the United States and Europe as a response to the socioeconomic upheavals felt during and after the World War I. These “first” NGOs were usually affiliated to the church or the public sector, and committed to responding to food and medical shortages faced by people in the occupied territories. After the World War II, however, the NGO's role was more closely aligned with development policy. Outlined in Harry S. Truman's Doctrine of 1949, development was outlined as a policy that could help counter Soviet imperialism. Poverty was understood as a premise for national and political instability. Poverty itself was seen as a result of poor resource management and coordination. Planning, structuring, monitoring, and evaluation all became key ideas in guiding post-1945 development policies and projects. In this way, development became an instrument of Cold War tactics: a planned and monitored strategy to foster capitalist economics through free markets, international trade agreements, and social engineering inspired by the Declaration of Human Rights. Such planned interventions were supported in part by the birth of the Bretton Woods institutions (e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund), which laid down an explicitly pro-West development agenda.

During this time, the NGO emerged as a distinct organizational category. Civil society movements, social movements, church-based organizations, along with more established agencies such as Oxfam and

Save the Children, all came under the umbrella definition of what an NGO is. So as the NGO became a legitimate organizational category through which development ideas could proliferate, sources of money became more readily available for NGOs to tap into. However with this more structured funding pattern in place, the NGO's status as an autonomous and local entity was impinged as donor money came with a contractual ideological bind. Development was perceived as an extension of colonial values and power relations. The NGO was feared by many development practitioners, as under threat of being removed from its political platform and instead reinvented as the administrative arm of Northern interests.

By the 1970s, opposition to pro-North, top-down structured development policy was vocal and explicit. This position was initiated by Latin American academic groups in the South, led by the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, whose concept of conscientization became a catalyst for development practice reform. Conscientization is a process of learning where the objective is to value alternative ways of knowing through mobilizing and empowering local groups. By making this unknown knowledge known, Freire suggested that such a learning process would become critical, transformative, and potentially liberating. The position of the teacher as all-knowing and powerful was challenged through a facilitative and mutually beneficial process of learning. These theoretical ideas were supported by the emergence of alternative bottom-up development methodologies. These methodologies, known as participatory action research (PRA), gained great credence within NGOs and led to the rise of “participatory” practices in development projects. PRA is a set of practices that seeks to redefine recipients of aid projects: from passive receivers of aid to active agents of change. PRA also explicitly addresses power relations by integrating beneficiaries in decision-making processes about development projects. By incorporating PRA methodologies, even moderate NGOs could present more cost-effective economic change to their funding agencies through promoting greater citizen involvement.

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