International Non-state Actors and Social Development Policy

This article focuses on two broad groups of actors, international NGOs (INGOs) and international consultancy companies (ICCs), and situates them within wider trends in aid and development policies. In the context of a neo-liberal policy agenda, many leading INGOs reorganised so that they became closer to emerging ICCs, as consulting, outsourcing, and sub-contracting became key features of aid and development policy. Throughout the 1990s, in the context of declining ODA, and increasing spending on emergencies, trends towards concentration and oligopolisation amongst private development actors grew apace, fuelling short-termism, projectisation, and intense competition within the aid market. The article discusses a new aid and development regime which is focused on co-ordinated poverty reduction. It suggests that, notwithstanding its progressive elements, the regime will provide added impetus to existing tendencies towards concentration, oligopolisation, mergers and consortia amongst non-state actors, given that it is being implemented within the core principles of the new public management.