A Conditional Analysis of Roles of Service Providing NGOs in Democracy-Building

• In Event: NGOs, Community Networks, and Policy Advocacy

Abstract

A Conditional Analysis of Roles of Service Providing NGOs in Democracy Building

Service providing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play prominent roles in international development, driven in part by the diminishing role of governments in welfare provision (Batley & Rose, 2011; D. W. Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2011; J. M. Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2002). International donors have bankrolled the proliferation of NGOs under the assumption that these organizations are more cost effective and efficient service providers than government agencies. NGOs are thought to be better connected to beneficiary communities and thus more in tune with local needs than either government or for-profit enterprises. Finally, local residents often prefer to receive services provided by NGOs because they are seen as more trustworthy than their public and for-profit counterparts (Mitlin et al., 2007).

Yet the rise of service-providing NGOs may come at a price. Scholars have elucidated the ways in which governments control and co-opt service-providing NGOs, leaving only a small population of advocacy NGOs relatively unfettered to promote democracy and pursue rights-based agendas that are often are at odds with government interests. In some cases, control and co-optation is achieved through top-down regulatory and monitoring schemes that strictly delimit organizations’ activities (Herrold, 2016; Wiktorowicz, 2000). In other cases, partnerships between governments and NGOs erode organizations’ identity and independence, leaving them less responsive to citizens and less likely to challenge the government (J. M. Brinkerhoff, 2002; Jamal, 2007; Teets, 2014). As a result of this control and co-optation, small populations of advocacy NGOs are typically thought to be the only organizations capable of promoting democracy.

In this paper, we question the premise that service-delivery NGOs are a-political and thus not participants in the democracy building arena. We argue that in fact service-delivery NGOs can play important roles in promoting democracy by serving as public arenas, or spaces in which members and beneficiaries build and practice democratic habits such as discussion and debate, collective problem solving, free expression, rights claiming, and the like (Edwards, 2009; Herrold, 2020) .

However, the role of service delivery NGOs in promoting democracy is not uniform and is instead conditioned on several institutional and contextual factors. These include: 1) organizational readiness, or the organization’s embeddedness in, and relationship to, local its beneficiary community; 2) organizational governance, or organization’s commitment to participatory representation and transparency; 3) the nature of service an organization provides; 4) an NGOs’ collaboration with other NGOs and the government; and 5) donor risk tolerance. We consider the applicability of the proposed features by presenting a set of propositions; these propositions are not formally tested, but we assess their potential viability by relying on a series of semi-structured interviews with informants from Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine, setting the stage for future empirical research.

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Authors

• Catherine E. Herrold, Syracuse University

• Khaldoun AbouAssi, American University- School of Public Affairs