NGO Collaboration: Limited or Limiting?

Posted on 20 September 2010 By Sarah Stroup In her September 6 post, Sherine Jayawickrama argues that the advancement of the missions of [NGOs] requires much greater coordination and collaboration. This got me thinking about my most recent homework project Ive been reading up on studies of international NGOs from the 1970s and 1980s to understand continuity and change among relief and development NGOs. In 1977, John Sommer wrote in Beyond Charity: US Voluntary Aid for a Changing Third World that NGOs should seek ways to overcome their traditional tendency to act alone and instead collaborate more constructively with each other and with local organizations in recipient countries. In sum, its a little depressing to think that experienced NGO analysts have been calling for greater NGO collaboration for decades with seemingly little change. Sherine notes several transnational initiatives like the Sphere Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnershipas evidence of greater collaboration. Yet the HAP initiative is evidence that the best intentions behind collaboration are not enough. The original intention behind HAP was to hold NGOs accountable to aid recipients through the establishment of an independent ombudsman that could report and act on instances of bad humanitarian assistance. This proposal had problems: why were NGOs, rather than states, responsible for their citizens suffering, and what sorts of penalties would be assessed to NGOs? Today, HAP is instead a voluntary certification system that tries to educate member agencies and recipient communities about accountability to aid recipients. HAP is refreshingly frank and fairly new, so Ill set aside questions of its long-term effectiveness. Ultimately, HAP reinforced the Sphere Projects goal of defining a single set of best practices, but disagreed on (1) whether an ombudsman was the best way to achieve that goal and (2) how to assign responsibility for failure in fragile and complex environments. The HAP story offers insight into the limits of other attempts at NGO collaboration. First, I see fundamentally different understandings of how to best alleviate poverty at major Northern INGOs. Should NGOs put political pressure on donor governments and international organizations to change global trade rules or intervene in civil wars? Or should NGOs focus on small, intensive and local aid projects? Different INGOs have different answers to these questions. Second, as noted elsewhere on this blog, it is difficult to measure the impact of NGO actions, complicating attempts to actually identify best practices. NGOs want to avoid working at cross-purposes. Point taken. But why is collaboration the answer? Why isnt specialization a viable alternative? If NGOs think there are different ways to address poverty, why not pursue those in different ways at different levels? Collaboration tries to overcome the two formidable obstacles mentioned above NGOs may disagree on both where they are actually going and how to get there. Specialization capitalizes on these differences among NGOs and on the comparative advantage that NGOs have vis--vis states: their small size. Small, differentiated agencies may be able to experiment, to innovate, and to work at many different levels of the change process. Of course, for either collaboration or specialization to work, there has to be a mechanism (likeOCHAs cluster system or ALNAP) for exchanging information and learning from mistakes.

The picture Ive painted of specialized NGOs is pretty rosy, I admit, ignoring powerful forces like donor preferences. But Im wondering why many practitioners speak of creating shared standards and coordinated campaigning rather than of dividing up the formidable task of combating poverty around the globe. Going back several decades, the call for greater collaboration has yielded imperfect results. Where would a call for specialization by NGOs get us? Sarah Stroup is visiting assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College and is currently working on a book on humanitarian and human rights INGOs.