Logics of legitimation: African development CSOs as hybrid organizations

• In Event: In a collaborative pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals? Reflections on development CSO-practices in Africa

Abstract

There is a lively scholarly debate on the legitimacy of development CSOs, which has focused on, for instance, the challenge for international non-governmental organizations to be simultaneously seen as legitimate by their audiences in the Global North and their partners and beneficiaries in the Global South (Lister 2003; Mitchell et al. 2020; Walton et al. 2016). Some studies have examined Southern CSOs’ efforts to gain legitimacy vis-á-vis the field of international development through certain management practices and ‘development speak’, whereas others have investigated the divergence among accountability mechanisms perceived to be legitimate by international donors, governments, and local communities. Some recent studies have scrutinized different interpretations of sources of CSO legitimacy held by donors and grassroots organizations (Elbers et al., 2021) and investigated sources of legitimacy of local advocacy CSOs in their relationships with communities (Matelski et al., 2021). As a contribution to the theorizing the legitimacy of development CSOs in Africa, this paper establishes an approach of logics of legitimation, which zooms into the diverse and simultaneous rationalities of appropriateness. The approach draws on, first Dodworth’s (2022) notion of legitimation as practice; second, literature on CSOs as ‘practical hybrids’ (Booth & Cammack, 2013; Rusca & Schwartz, 2014); and third, the notion hybrid organizing where diverse institutional logics are combined to perform legitimacy in the eyes of different audiences (Battilana & Doraro, 2010; Battilana et al., 2017). Illustrative empirical examples are drawn from qualitative case studies generated over several research projects on CSOs in Tanzania and Uganda (see Kontinen & Ndidde 2023; Kontinen & Nguyahambi 2023; Kontinen & Bananuka 2022). The paper argues how African CSOs not only need to balance between legitimacy evaluations from different actors, but also diverse contextualized institutional logics of differently determining the appropriateness of their goals and practices, and how continuously striking balance between the logics is well-captured with the idea of CSOs being practical hybrids.

References:
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Author

• Tiina Kontinen, University of Jyvaskyla