The Effect of Closing Civic Space on Aid: Cross-National Evidence from NGO Laws

• In Event: Foreign Aid and NGOs in Developing Countries

Abstract

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the developing world play a crucial role in delivering services, promoting development, defending human rights, and contributing to a vibrant civil society. Over the last three decades, concerns over aid effectiveness have driven bilateral donors to increasingly rely on NGOs to implement official development assistance, providing much needed financial support for NGOs in contexts where domestic sources of funding can be lacking. While many aid-receiving governments have welcomed the increasing role of NGOs in providing services like health care and education, massive increases in funding have also expanded the ability of NGOs to mobilize citizens and advocate for political change.

In response to their growing influence, developing countries are increasingly adopting laws that restrict the activities, funding sources, and legal security of domestic and international NGOs. ‘NGO laws’ frequently expand the legal basis for government authorities to exercise oversight of NGO operations and increase the discretion authorities have in targeting specific NGOs for legal scrutiny. This discretion is often used to target NGOs’ focusing on “contentious” advocacy work, including human rights and democracy promotion, increasing the legal and physical risk associated with carrying out advocacy activities.

NGO laws can obstruct the ability of donors to promote their objectives in aid-receiving countries. In the most extreme cases, laws have barred NGOs from accessing external support or provided a legal basis to target NGOs receiving funding from certain donors. In doing so, these laws have challenged donors’ reliance on NGOs for aid delivery. Furthermore, these laws are also used to persecute grassroots organizations working to promote democratic accountability. How donors respond to anti-NGO laws has significant consequences for the ability of locally-operating NGOs to continue carrying out activities in accordance with their mission.

Existing research on the response of donors to NGO laws has treated bilateral donors as a homogenous block, ignoring important differences in bilateral donors’ global funding portfolios, expertise, and objectives. We argue that variation along these dimensions is likely to shape how donors respond to the challenges posed by restrictive legislation. Specifically, some donors prioritize democracy promotion more than others, reflected by variation in the proportion of their total aid portfolio allocated to advocacy versus development activities.

We expect that donors focused on democracy-promotion will double down on their support for contentious activities in the face of anti-NGO laws by increasing their funding for advocacy work and decreasing their funding for government-implemented development projects. Donors that prioritize democracy promotion as an objective have incentives to punish restrictions on civic space by aid-receiving countries, and they can leverage expertise in advocacy work and connections to advocacy NGOs on the ground. Conversely, donors that focus on development will face little incentive to punish receiving-countries that pass anti-NGO laws. We expect that these donors will maintain funding for development projects and will be more likely to remove NGOs from their aid delivery chains to avoid regulations that might harm aid effectiveness.

Using original, cross-national data on the enactment of restrictive NGO laws, paired with a dyadic dataset of bilateral aid flows channeled to NGOs by sector, we interrogate how donors’ different foreign aid priorities condition their response to closing civic spaces in aid-receiving countries. Aggregating data from over two million aid projects between 2012 and 2018, we estimate how bilateral support for a recipient country’s NGO-implemented advocacy programs changes relative to aid for NGO and government-implemented service delivery programs following the passage of an anti-NGO law. Our results provide insights into how donor priorities shape the incentives of governments in aid-receiving countries, the implications of domestic crackdowns on the resources available to civil society, and, ultimately, the nature of NGO work on the ground.

Authors

• Lucille E Right, Duke University

• Jeremy Springman, Duke University

• Erik M. Wibbels, Duke University