“I had no education. I had no experience. I had nothing.”: Understanding Non-expert, Citizen-led INGOs through Realist and Relational Lenses

• In Event: Co-production, Citizen-led and Community-centric

Abstract

Social scientists and development practitioners have recognized the emergence of private, citizen-led international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), sometimes referred to as “grassroots INGOs” (Schnable 2021) and “private development initiatives” (e.g., Kinsbergen 2014) among other names, as increasingly consequential actors in international aid provision efforts. Extant scholarship describes these organizations’ characteristics and modes of operation, often in juxtaposition to the historically dominant and highly professionalized INGOs that comprise the mainstream international development arena. Scholars document that the leaders of citizen-led INGOs often lack or have minimal skills, training, or prior experience (i.e., expertise) in development- and management-related areas; however, we have yet to theorize the kinds of expertise these leaders bring (or fail to bring) to their INGOs and how expertise is applied in the aid provision process. This paper addresses this gap by answering the question: “How does citizen-led INGO leaders’ variously present and absent forms of expertise manifest in their rationales for and modes of providing international aid?”
A budding sociology of expertise offers analytic tools for theorizing citizen-led INGO leaders’ stocks and applications of expertise. Realist approaches to expertise (e.g., Collins and Evans 2007) treat expertise as something real, objectively demonstrable, and substantively possessed by individuals. Contrarily, relational approaches to expertise (e.g., Eyal 2013) treat expertise as a subjective attribution that emerges from specific sociohistorical configurations of actors, institutions, and technologies. Rather than viewing these perspectives as incompatible, I argue that realist and relational approaches to expertise can be fruitfully combined to understand citizen-led INGO leaders’ forms and applications of expertise.
Findings from 15 semi-structured interviews with citizen-led INGO leaders that conduct health activities in developing countries suggest that they lack what realist scholars term “contributory expertise” but have varying degrees of “popular understanding,” “primary source knowledge,” and “interactional expertise.” Citizen-led INGO leaders’ ability to successfully provide health care services in developing countries in the absence of contributory expertise is determined by factors that relational scholars emphasize as crucial to constructing and deploying expertise; namely, establishing relationships with key actors (e.g., other local and international nonprofit organizations and public agencies), the strategic utilization of technologies (e.g., connective technologies that facilitate transnational coordination and communication efforts), and aspects of individuals’ biographies that facilitate perceptions of credibility (e.g., leaders’ sociodemographic characteristics and ethnic identities). Combining realist and relational approaches to expertise therefore sheds productive insights on the nature of citizen-led INGOs and contributes to explanations about the democratization of international aid provision beyond the professional realm.

References

Collins, Harry, and Robert Evans. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Eyal, Gil. 2013. “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic.” American Journal of Sociology 118(4):863–907. doi: 10.1086/668448.
Kinsbergen, Sara. 2014. “Behind the Pictures - Understanding Private Development Initiatives.” Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Schnable, Allison. 2021. Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Author

• Derek Richardson