Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History

Introduction Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now recognized as key third sector actors on the landscapes of development, human rights, humanitarian action, environment, and many other areas of public action, from the post-2004 tsunami reconstruction efforts in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, to the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign for aid and trade reform and developing country debt cancellation. As these two examples illustrate, NGOs are best-known for two different, but often interrelated, types of activity – the delivery of services to people in need, and the organization of policy advocacy, and public campaigns in pursuit of social transformation. NGOs are also active in a wide range of other specialized roles such as democracy building, conflict resolution, human rights work, cultural preservation, environmental activism, policy analysis, research, and information provision. This chapter mainly confines itself to a discussion of NGOs in the international development context, but much of its argument also applies to NGOs more widely. NGOs have existed in various forms for centuries, but they rose to high prominence in international development and increased their numbers dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. It is difficult to know precisely how many NGOs there are, because few comprehensive or reliable statistics are kept. Some estimates put the figure at a million organizations, if both formal and informal organizations are included, while the number of registered NGOs receiving international aid is probably closer to ‘‘a few hundred thousand.’’ The United Nations estimates that there were about 35,000 large established NGOs in 2000. Nor are there accurate figures available for the amount of resources that NGOs receive from aid, contracts and private donations. In 2004, it was estimated that NGOs were responsible for about $US23 billion of total aid money, or approximately one third of total ODA (Riddell, 2007: 53). Newsweek (5 September 2005) cited figures suggesting that official development assistance provided through NGOs had increased from 4.6% in 1995 to 13% in 2004, and that the total aid volume had increased from US$59 to US$78.6 billion in the same period. The world of NGOs contains a bewildering variety of labels. While the term ‘‘NGO’’ is widely used, there are also many other over-lapping terms used such as ‘‘nonprofit,’’ ‘‘voluntary,’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ organizations. In many cases, the use of different terms does not reflect descriptive or analytical rigour, but is instead a consequence of the different cultures and histories in which thinking about NGOs has emerged. For example, ‘‘nonprofit organization’’ is frequently used in the USA, where the market is dominant, and where citizen organizations are rewarded with fiscal benefits if they show that they are not commercial, profit-making entities and work for the public good. In the UK, ‘‘voluntary organization’’ or ‘‘charity’’ is commonly used, following a long tradition of volunteering and voluntary work that has been informed by Christian values and the development of charity law. But charitable status in the UK depends on an NGO being ‘‘non-political,’’ so that while Oxfam is allowed the formal status of a registered charity (with its associated tax benefits) because of its humanitarian focus, Amnesty International is not, because its work is seen by the Charity Commission as more directly ‘‘political.’’ Finally, the acronym ‘‘NGO’’ tends to be used in relation to international or ‘‘developing’’ country work, since its origin lies in the formation of the United Nations in 1945, when the designation ‘‘non-governmental organization’’ was awarded to certain international non-state organizations that were given consultative status in UN activities. The work undertaken by NGOs is wide-ranging but NGO roles can be usefully analyzed as having three main components: implementer, catalyst, and partner (Lewis, 2007). The implementer role is concerned with the mobilization of resources to provide goods and services to people who need them. Service delivery is carried out by NGOs across a wide range of fields such as healthcare, microfinance, agricultural extension, emergency relief, and human rights. This role has increased as NGOs