*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Download 2.51 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Turn: Targeting the State Better than Civil Society
NGO TypologiesCAN’T GENERALIZE ABOUT NGOs Doyle Stevick, Education Professor-University of South Carolina, 2008, Advancing Democracy Through Education: US influence abroad and domestic practices, eds. E. Stevic & B. Levinson, p. 115-6 This typology of nongovernmental is organized according to the nature of their activities and the level of economic security they provided to the people who work for them. They are termed Letterhead, Endowed, and Revenue-Dependent NGOs (see Table 5.1). Letterhead NGOs do not have full-time staff. When they lack funding, a Letterhead NGO may be little more than a post-box address, Web site, or some pamphlets. They do not need to maintain an office or other infrastructure, which helps to keep their expenses low. When money is obtained from foundations or other sources, they carry out projects. These NGOs are usually part-time commitments for people who have some security in their regular jobs (often university professorships). Foundation grants therefore provide supplemental, but not survival, income for those involved. They may be selective and opportunistic because they are not under the same level of pressure to procure funding. Endowed NGOs have a secure and often substantial source of funds that provides job security for their employees. People in these organizations do not need to spend their time pursuing new revenue streams, and are therefore free from external constraints and the pressure to cultivate donors. They can concentrate on activities that they deem important and thus have more flexibility to address directly the problems they perceive. There is not a structural conflict between self-interest and principles and there is no need to propagate problems, avoid real solutions or manufacture crises. Their time can be committed to policy work and program implementation. Revenue-Dependent NGOs offer little or no job security. They are subject to market forces: they either obtain funds for themselves or they fail. As Sutton and Arnove note (2004, p. xi), “Some [NGOs] are very dependent upon binational, philanthropic and international agencies for their own funding.” Funds can be obtained through markets by competing to provide educational services (e.g., in service teacher-training) or, usually, by competing for foreign financing. They are uniquely vulnerable to foreign agendas. Their need for funds puts them in an inferior or dependent relationship with foreign partners. They must justify or articulate their projects in terms that are acceptable to the donors. The may lack the means to conduct those activities that they would endorse independently but that lack foreign support. As a result, they have an incentive to engage in projects about which they are ambivalent at best. Their success in cultivating foreign donors, on the other hand, can free them from the concerns of domestic constituents and enable them to avoid cooperation with domestic rivals. Foreign income can actually encourage them to exempt themselves from the domestic policy process. Such organizations can be tremendously productive and hard-working without accomplishing wider goals of program implementation. They have no financial incentive to do so. In fact, the need to sustain outside support may turn their attention first to finding new revenue streams, to cultivate a wider range of external funding sources, and to pile up projects that fragment their time and energies. Worst of all, their ability to procure funding is linked directly with urgent problems in the national system; the more flawed the system, the easier it is to justify projects and hence to support themselves. Turn: Targeting the State Better than Civil SocietyTARGETING AID TO BUILD UP THE STATE RATHER THAN TO NGOs AND “CIVIL SOCIETY” STRUCTURES BEST FOR REDUCING ETHNIC CONFLICT AND CORRUPTION Jens Stilhoff Sorensen, Research Fellow – Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 2010, Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives, ed. J. S. Sorensen, p. 98-9 There are two crucial observations, or problematizations, here. First, in post-conflict reconstruction the critical issue is integration into state structures and institutions, but it order for the state to gain legitimacy there must be real improvement in the life-chances of the various groups in the populations, such as through service provision and employment. The state needs instruments to address ethnic integration, attract loyalty and gain legitimacy, and economic and developmental instruments may be crucial here. The tensions generated in an underdeveloped area by opening it up to market forces create an environment an insecurity that may block such a process, as well as create an environment where reliance on alternative traditional structures is cemented or exacerbated. Second, the idea of a division of society into autonomous “spheres” such as the “market”, the “political system” and “civil society,” needs to be rethought. Not only is there an inconsistency in the idea that “civil society” and the “market” should be separate spheres from the state, since the practice is to support civil society as a means of promoting better government, and since “civil society” in some cases has been promoted as organizations that could become part of state structures, but in addition, there is a particularly problematic relationship between ethnicity, community and civil society that becomes urgent when the latter is adopted for instrumental purposes by aid donors in ethno-plural societies. Thinking of civil society as an autonomous sphere that provides checks and balances for governments in an ethnically divided society where the state is subject to competition by ethnic groups constitutes a serious neglect of the forces of ethnic identity politics and the interconnections between state and society. A rethinking of the relationship between state, market and civil society can be undertaken with reference to Hegel’s concern that the state is a crucial safeguard against the particularistic interests of the market and in civil society. Promoting a state that is an active agent in social and economic development and a service provider for all ethnic communities might be the alternative that could offer a window of opportunity for some loyalties and trust to be transferred to the state and its institutions instead of relying on alternative loyalty and security networks. Certainly this risks the problem of ethnic and clan-based nepotism and corruption, but the alternative is regeneration of the particularistic interests in the private sector, where support to civil society carries the risk of contributing to the organization of platforms for ethnic polarization and hence fragmentation. Institutions are at least accountable and can be subject to public scrutiny. Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
|