Over the last 40 years NGOs have played increasing roles in lobbying and advocacy, the delivery of welfare, and humanitarian assistance, but can they also be a force for deep-rooted social transformation? That’s the question that activists and thinkers have been exploring on this site over the last five years, so I thought it would be useful to gather all their articles together in one place and reflect on their conclusions.
At first sight the answer to my question might seem obvious: NGOs - meaning registered charities and other non-profit ‘intermediaries’ - may not be especially radical when compared to social movements or grassroots organizing, but they do provide essential support and services to people who need them, and they help to secure a basic foundation of security and rights - without which the prospects for deeper change would be even more remote. In that sense they form an important part of the ‘connective tissue’ of a functioning civil society.
But such societies only work if those connections are activated, cultivated and held in balance so that one kind of organization doesn’t dominate to the detriment of others. The problem is that the current structure and mode of operation of many NGOs, their increasing bureaucracy and tendency to self-promotion, and their sheer distance from the people they’re supposed to serve, may be getting in the way of making these links effectively. Meanwhile, their actual impact is modest, at least if measured in terms of long-term structural change and not just the number of policy reports issued or children ‘saved’ between January and July.
