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Anthropology of NGOs

Forthcoming, Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, near final draft, June 2014

Mark Schuller
Northern Illinois University

David Lewis
London School of Economics and Political Science

1. Introduction
2. NGOs as object of anthropological inquiry
Genealogies of NGO scholarship
Methodological issues
NGOs and the anthropology of development
The NGO Boom
3. NGO as productively unstable category
Taxonomical issues
Civil society and third sector
NGOs and humanitarian action
Social movements
Womens NGOs
4. Tracing an anthropological engagement with NGOs
Early Ethnographies
(Non)governmentalities
NGOs as intermediaries
Contemporary Ethnographies
Current directions

1. Introduction
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly important institutional actors in most
societies. NGOs are normally characterized as non-state organizations independent from for-profit
business working in international development, humanitarian action, human rights or environment.
Intrinsically diverse and difficult to define with precision, NGOs began attracting attention from
researchers and policymakers during the late 1980s. One reason was the post-Cold War rediscovery of
ideas about civil society by activists, particularly in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Another was the
shift towards more flexible forms of good governance promotion among international development
agencies such as the World Bank that favored NGOs as private market-based actors within wider
neoliberal restructuring. In domestic North America and Europe the concept of the third sector
(associated with U.S. sociologist Amitai Etzioni) emerged as a way of situating diverse types of citizen
groups operating in the space between state, market and household. Partly due to tensions around
applied work within the discipline, and partly due to a preference for engaging with social movements
rather than formal organizations, analytical engagement by anthropologists with NGOs have been have
been relatively slow to emerge. Perhaps another factor has been the uncomfortable similarity between
the work that anthropologists and NGOs do. Both are open to the criticism that they move uninvited into
communities where they seek to build relationships with people generally less powerful than themselves.
NGO studies and anthropology have therefore had an uneasy relationship, sometimes riddled with
productive tensions, sometimes with silences and disjuncture. The impact of NGO studies on
anthropological theory remains limited to the subfield of political anthropology, but the reach of
anthropological studies into NGO policy and practice is more widespread. It is still nonetheless small
compared to other disciplines and traceable to individual circuits of anthropologists within aid agencies.
However, this has begun to change in recent years, as political, organizational, and policy anthropologists
have each built on this foundation to begin contributing some distinctive insights. There are differences of
emphasis in this work. In Europe, the study of NGOs emerged in the inter-disciplinary field of
development studies, where there has been both critical and applied work. In North America, research
on NGOs has been more strongly influenced by deconstructive critical theoretical traditions that view
NGOs primarily as sites for neoliberal governmentality and hegemonic discourse. In India and other areas
of the Global South, both activist and post-colonial theoretical perspectives on NGOs have also emerged.
In this entry, we can identify three main aspects of a growing engagement between anthropological work
and the broad subject of NGOs: How did NGOs come to be an object of anthropological inquiry?;
reflections on the productively unstable category of NGO; and tracing anthropological engagement with
NGOs.

2. NGOs as objects
objects of anthropological inquiry
Although NGOs were not named as such until the second half of the twentieth century, they have long
been present in in anthropological work. For example, local organizations of a voluntary or associational
nature, as well as outposts of international organization such as missionary groups, had long been
encountered by anthropologists around the world. Later, as development became a subject for
anthropological enquiry, it became necessary to study not only states and their activities but also the
proliferation of non-state actors, particularly since from the 1980s onwards many governments began
contracting out services, from the 1990s the corporate social responsibility agendas of business became
more visible. As NGOs became more common across societies, they also became part of the landscape
through which anthropologists negotiated access to field sites. In line with Laura Naders (1969) call for
anthropologists to study up, some also therefore became interested in NGOs as sites of power.

Genealogies
enealogies of NGO scholarship
Scholarly engagement with NGOs has played out differently in different geographical settings and
academic communities. For example, the US and UK traditions share some common themes, but differ in
some key respects. Francophone scholarship had beginnings in tri-continental solidarity movements.

By the early 1990s, development theory had become polarized and had reached an impasse, caught
between the mainstream of modernization theory and trickle down development economics, and critical
perspectives on aid and development informed by radical Marxian political economy/dependency theory.
In the UK there had long been anthropological critiques of top down planning (e.g. Robertson 1984).
However, Norman Longs (1977) work spoke directly to break out of the impasse with a more nuanced
view of the interplay between actors and structure that built on the transactionalist Manchester School of
anthropology. In the applied development field, radical participatory practice was emerging that drew on
anthropological methods (e.g. Chambers 1993) and others interests in participation. Popular
development critiques in the form of popular books such as Hayter (1971) and Hancock (1989) received a
wide readership. By the early 1990s, a new development critique based on knowledge and power was
gaining ground (such as Hobart 1993). In the U.S., work on development had long reflected similar
polarizations but a stronger tradition of applied anthropology had remerged from the 1970s within the
World Bank and USAID (Hoben 1982).

In the UK, a new alliance between progressive academics and practitioners resulted in the Manchester
NGO conferences that led to a series of highly influential edited volumes by Michael Edwards and David
Hulme (Hulme and Edwards 1997 cited in * The NGO Boom*). In North America, work by David Korten
was representative of a new strand of pragmatic thinking around alternative development that placed
NGOs at its center, and also drew on the new participation activists such as Chambers (1993). This work
argued for reform of mainstream development thinking and practice in ways implicitly grounded in
anthropological thinking, but little if any of this work contained work by anthropologists themselves. It was
utopian in character, invested with hope that NGOs might provide the vehicles for new alternative
transformative ideas. Improved links between academics and NGO practitioners seemed to offer powerful
possibilities. Michael Edwards (1989), from a position within the NGO sector, had powerfully critiqued the
irrelevance of development studies. At the same time, such links also reflected a new interdependence
between resource-scarce university departments and development agencies based on the availability of
new funding/consultancy work opportunities. Against this backdrop, anthropologists gradually began to
take more interest in NGOs. This scholar/practitioner alliance also inspired a conversation within
Francophonie the French-speaking world of the metropole and former colonies (e.g. Houtart 1998).

Chambers, Robert. 1993. Challenging the Professions: Frontiers of Rural Development. London:
Intermediate Technology Publications.
This book further developed Chambers growing practitioner critique of development
bureaucracies and outsider professionals, based on his analysis of asymmetric power relations
and organizational cultures. He advocated a reversal of the way that development was
undertaken, drawing in part on anthropological ideas about working with grassroots community,
to challenge established practice in favor of participation and indigenous knowledge systems.

Edwards, Michael. 1989. The Irrelevance of Development Studies. Third World Quarterly 11:116-35.
Writing from a position within an NGO (Oxfam), this article suggested not only that academic
work in the development field lacked relevance to practice but also that a dominant extractive
research paradigm was irresponsible and harmful. The debate that followed led to closer links
between certain sympathetic academic researchers and NGOs keen to explore new forms of
research-practice relationships. Such thinking began to inform the series of Manchester
University NGO conferences that followed during the 1990s.

Hancock, Graham. 1989. Lords of poverty: The power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid
business. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Focusing on the powerful bureaucracies of the official aid agencies (rather than the non-
governmental organization sector, which the author characterizes as well-motivated and not
doing harm) this insider critique argues that foreign aid is self-interested and self-serving and that
most aid fails to benefit ordinary people in developing countries.

Hayter, Teresa. 1971. Aid as Imperialism. New York: Penguin Books.

A radical critique that argued that aid flows from the World Bank and the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries primarily serve the self-interest of
rich country governments and multinational corporations. Aid is seen as a mechanism that
facilitates the appropriation of resources from the developing world.

Hobart, Mark, ed.1993. An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance. London:
Routledge.
This collection was organized around the idea that development could be fruitfully analyzed
through the lens of epistemology and power rather than conventional economic and technical
terms. Underpinning development interventions, it was argued, were acts that labeled local
 populations ignorant in order to justify the removal of obstacles to progress by a developed and
knowledgeable West.

Hoben, Allan. 1982. Anthropologists and Development. Annual Review of Anthropology 11:349-375.
A wide-ranging review of the efforts of anthropologists within planned public and private social
and economic development interventions in the period since the Second World War, outlining the
contributions they have attempted to make and the challenges faced that have led to an inability
to gain significant influence in these roles.

Houtart, Franois. 1998. Les ONG: Instruments du no-libralisme ou alternatives populaires? Paris:
lHarmattan.
This edited collection from the Centre Tri-Continental offers a mix of case studies, many
translated into French, and critical reflections including from Latin Americanist James Petras. The
introduction lays out several debates within NGO studies, offers a typology of direct service and
advocacy, and outlines the relationships between Northern and Southern NGOs.

Long, Norman. 1977. An Introduction to the Sociology of Rural Development. London: Tavistock.
A book that made the case for an actor-oriented approach to the analysis of rural development,
restoring ideas of local agency and contingency as a counter to what had come to be seen as the
rigidity of structural accounts of the inevitability of underdevelopment and the limitations of trickle
down economics.

Robertson, Alexander R. 1984. People and the State: An Anthropology of Planned Development.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A critical anthropological study of planning as an institution that traces the history, ideology and
practice of planning in terms of contestations between bureaucrats and people. Robertson argues
planning is based on a populism that fails to recognize different interests and imperfect
information, and exposes the contradictions within the idea of participation.

Methodological issues
Some of the phenomena noted above, that anthropological scholarship on NGOs tends to be marginal,
and more critical, than those of other disciplines, may be rooted in issues of methodology (Lewis 1999).
Traditionally, anthropological research has been based on long-term participant observation with a priority
given to subaltern people and perspectives. This poses a central problem: what is the field when
studying an NGO (Markowitz 2001): The office? The beneficiary populations and communities? Donor
agencies? As inherently multi-sited phenomena, NGOs present methodological challenges to
anthropologists, particularly those concerned with representing local realities in an inherently glocal
setting (Kearney 1995). Some methodological difficulties in studying NGOs were outlined by Nader
(1969), who challenged anthropologists to study up. Additionally, anthropologists can be similarly
affected by the general currents surrounding NGOs (Lashaw 2013), such as best practices (Elyachar
2005), or good governance (Abramson 1999). As with some other areas of anthropology, the
anthropology of NGOs has also sometimes fallen foul of the wider tensions between so-called pure and
applied anthropologists. Some have suggested that applied anthropology lacks theoretical rigor and
compromised by wider political and commercial interests, while others argue that such distinctions are
unhelpful and merely reflect wider debates about resources and relevance within the discipline. Whatever
the merits of this debate, applied anthropology has been one of the main ways in which the topic of NGOs
has entered anthropology, and it continues to be a popular area of work.

Abramson, David M. 1999. A critical look at NGOs and civil society as means to an end in Uzbekistan.
Human Organization 58(3):240-250.
This paper deconstructed the efforts by Western countries after the fall of the Soviet Union to
build civil society as part of efforts to promote democratization and good governance. He traced
the way such efforts strengthened local elites and masked a range of self-interested motivations.

Elyachar, Julia. 2006. Best Practices: Research, Finance, and NGOs in Cairo. American Ethnologist
33(3):413-426.
This article reflects on the difficulties of anthropologists studying institutions that have similar
knowledge practices as our own. Discourses of best practices led actors such as bankers and
NGOs in Cairo to fetishize research for its potential in wealth generation.

Kearney, Richard. 1995.The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and
Transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:547 - 565.
As inherently hierarchical entities that bring together a range of actors, often spanning local and
global contexts, anthropological research on NGOs remains a challenge. Similarly, which
perspectives and voice to represent especially if various stakeholder groups are at odds
can constitute major dilemmas for the anthropologist.

Lewis, David. 1999. Revealing, Widening, Deepening? A Review of the Existing and Potential
Contribution of Anthropological Approaches to Third-Sector Research. Human Organization 58(1):73-
81.
This overview paper sketches out the potential terrain for a greater anthropological engagement
with non-governmental themes. It suggests that anthropology can bring distinctive insights to this
 interdisciplinary research field by revealing more of the organizations and processes that make
up the field of non-governmental action, widening its scope to include a less ethnocentric
preoccupation with formal and informal organizational worlds, and problematizing taken for
granted categories.

Markowitz, Lisa. 2001. Finding the Field: Notes on the Ethnography of NGOs. Human Organization
60(1):40-46.
Anthropological research can challenge existing biases in NGO accounts by giving more
emphasis to the perspectives of aid recipients. This bias either a corrective or a reflection of
anthropologys romanticism and historical attachment to the local offers more radical, critical
conclusions than researchers who only talk with NGO directors or other employees. The relative
marginalization of anthropological research on NGOs is perhaps reflection of this non-mainstream
approach.

Lashaw, Amanda. 2013. How progressive culture resists critique: The impasse of NGO Studies,
Ethnography.
Based on fieldwork with activist groups in the U.S., this this article explores the distinctive
dilemmas arising from the inter-relationships between ethnographers and NGO research subjects
and the resultant problems of examining critically the moral sentiments of progressive actors.

Nader, Laura. 1969. Up the anthropologist - perspectives gained from studying up. In Reinventing
Anthropology. D. Hymes, ed. Pp. 285-311. New York: Pantheon Press.
Long ago, Laura Nader challenged anthropologists to study up. Rare is the anthropological
study of an NGO that offers a sufficiently robust analysis of multiple perspectives, especially
those across national borders.

OReilly, Kathleen and Richa Dhanju. 2010. Your Report is Completely Wrong! (aapkii report ek dum
galat hai!): Locating Spaces Inside NGOs for Feedback and Dissemination, Human Organization, Vol. 69,
No. 3.
This paper explores the difficulties of undertaking research with NGOs in which tensions emerge
during research and dissemination between NGOs interests in controlling project narratives of
success and counter-narratives. It draws on feminist ethnography and organizational theory to
explore the creation of enabling spaces for dialogue that can generate insights for both
researcher and researched.

Salemink, Oscar. 2006 Translating, Interpreting, and Practicing Civil Society in Vietnam: A Tale of
Calculated Misunderstandings. In Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and
Agencies. D. Lewis and D. Mosse, eds. Pp. 101-126. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.
This work by an anthropologist who had worked on both sides of the research and practitioner
divide for many years in Vietnam traced the complex interactions and negotiations around the
processes of construction and maintenance of civil society as idea and practice.

NGOs and the anthropology of development

While a subfield of an anthropology of NGOs has not fully developed the same way that others have,
notably medical anthropology, anthropological scholarship on NGOs builds on a critical anthropology of
development. Other anthropologists, noting that development institutions had failed to fulfill their own
missions, created a critical mass of what Ferguson (1990) called foundational critiques as opposed to
practitioners functional critiques of development. Ferguson outlined how development agencies
depoliticize poverty and inequality, turning them into technical problems. Building on this critique, Escobar
(1995) brought Foucaults discourse analysis to the study of development. Neither Ferguson nor
Escobars text specifically theorized NGOs, however their critiques were widely used by anthropologists
studying NGOs. Anthropologists have addressed issues of power and inequality (Crush, 1995),
participation (Cooke and Kothari, 2001), institutionalization (Feldman, 2003), and professionalization
(Crewe and Axelby 2012).

Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari. 2001. Participation: the New Tyranny? New York: Zed Books.
Cooke and Kotharis anthology focused on the issue of participation within official development
projects facilitated by NGOs, calling it the new tyranny a point later nuanced by a volume three
years later by Hickey and Mohan (2004).

Crewe, Emma and R. Axelby. 2012. Anthropology and Development: Culture, Morality and Politics in a
Globalized World. Cambridge: CUP.
A new and comprehensive overview of the ways an anthropological work has approached aid
communities, focusing on the growth of international development as a global professionalized
industry.

Crush, Jonathan, ed. 1995. Power of Development. New York: Routledge.

Following in the line of Ferguson, Crush argues that stated objectives aside, development
regimes are political institutions aimed at maintaining power over recipient communities. Crush
argues that development agencies constitute neo-colonial continuities of Northern subjection of
Southern peoples.

Escobar, Arturo.1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 Arturo Escobar fused Fergusons radical critique with an ascendant Foucauldian scholarship in a
(North American) anthropology still grappling with a self-critique, turning the ethnographers gaze
toward the discursive functions of development. One of the most cited books in anthropology,
Encountering Development laid the groundwork for new ethnographic approaches to the study of
power and solidified a critical stance within North American anthropology to the development
apparatus.

Feldman, Shelley. 2003 Paradoxes of Institutionalisation: The Depoliticisation of Bangladeshi NGOs.

Development in Practice 13(1):5-26.
A valuable article that explores in the context of NGOs working in the field of gender and the
development the ways social problems such as inequality and social exclusion are transformed
from the realm of the political into that of the technical.

Ferguson, James. 1990 The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press.
A sustained critique of development was inspired by this groundbreaking book, which argued that
the so-called development apparatus depoliticized poverty, rendering social problems like
inequality and social exclusions into technical ones.

Mosse, David. 2013. The anthropology of international development, Annual Review of Anthropology,
42: 227-246.
A concise, perceptive and tightly focused overview of the main themes in the ways international
development has been studied by anthropologists both as a distinct form of institutional practice
and as global integration.

Rottenburg, Richard. 2009. Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Rottenbergs book talks of the ceremonial facades through which the contradictory tendencies
within international development processes are mediated and given meaning.

The NGO Boom

Boom
A major push for anthropological scholarship was the increase in scale, reach, and activity of international
NGOs, what some call the NGO boom, or the golden age (Agg, 2006). While the term officially dates to
the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the organizational form has been around for over two
centuries (Charnowitz 1997). From the 1980s onwards, NGOs were discovered by scholars and policy
makers, resulting in an explosion of writings, some of which lauded the NGOs as potentially providing
solutions to a wide range of problems (e.g., Clark 1991; Carroll 1992; Paul and Israel 1991), and others
reacting against what was sometimes seen as excessive hype (Vivian 1994; Choudry and Kapoor 2013).
In the 1980s, international support to NGOs skyrocketed as donors began assigning non-state actors
service contracting and advocacy roles within what became known as the New Policy Agenda. Many
NGOs responded by scaling up, increasing the scale of their activities. During the decade from mid-
1980s to mid-1990s, the number of NGOs that work in more than one country increased tenfold. Noted
above, during the 1990s Michael Edwards and David Hulme published several edited volumes (e.g.,
1997) based on a series of development studies conferences held at University of Manchester, UK.
Informed by NGO practitioners and donors, these conversations focused on actually-existing dilemmas of
aid agencies: the role of the state, multiple stakeholders, accountability, and autonomy. Anthropologists,
mostly from the UK and Europe, played a minor role. These texts represent the foundation for an
emerging conversation on NGOs; if there would be a canon in NGO Studies these volumes would
undoubtedly serve as early explorations and documentation of key questions within the growing and
changing world of NGOs.

Agg, Catherine. 2006. Trends in Government Support for Non-Governmental Organizations: Is the
Golden Age of the NGO Behind Us? United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.
The 1990s are sometimes described as a golden age for NGOs, and this paper reviews the
reasons for the more pragmatic and sometimes critical policy environment that followed on from
this era. Using data of continuing international support for international NGOs, it discusses and
ultimately rejects the notion that the golden age is over.

Carroll, Thomas F. 1992. Intermediary NGOs: the Supporting Link in Development. West Hartford, CT:
Kumarian Press.
This book is typical of the explosion of writings on NGOs at the turn of the 1990s that were written
by researchers and development practitioners with an interest in the possibilities that NGOs could
contribute to an alternative development approach, based on a solid set of research studies
focused on Latin America.

Charnowitz, Steve. 1997. Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance. Michigan
Journal of International Law 18(2):183-286.
This detailed article is the perfect antidote to those who have tried to suggest that NGOs are new
actors in human rights or development work. Charnowitz traces seven historical periods in which
international (Western) NGO activity has been undertaken, from early missionary organizations to
the modern NGO idea that arose in the context of the United Nations and moved steadily from
emergence to empowerment.
Choudry, A. and D. Kapoor, eds. 2013 NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects London:
Zed Books.
A new collection of critical writings on NGOs that extends, as well as nuances, the political
economy/social movement critique of NGOs as international actors in the context of
neoliberalism, focusing particularly on the professionalization and institutionalization of activism
and social action.

Clark, John. 1991. Democratizing Development: the Role of Voluntary Organizations. West Hartford,
Conn., USA: Kumarian Press.
This was one of the first books setting out the new view of NGOs as improved conduits of
development aid, and as alternative actors in development processes. Written from a background
working with Oxfam, John Clark was later to join the World Bank to set up its NGO Unit. A surge
of writings on NGOs by mainstream commentators was to follow during the rest of the 1990s.

Hulme, David, and Michael Edwards. 1997. NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? New
York: St. Martins Press in association with Save the Children.
A series of conference collections edited by David Hulme and Michael Edwards, of which this one
is the third, have become foundational texts within the field of NGO studies. The articles in this
overview collection provide a detailed critical introduction to the good governance agenda
generated by development agencies such as the World Bank during the early 1990s that valued
NGOs as flexible agents of privatization, with important roles in democratization and service
delivery.

Lewis, David and Nazneen Kanji. 2009. Non-governmental Organizations and Development. London:
Routledge.
An up to date overview of the literature on NGOs and development, and the connections between
development theory and the growth of NGOs. It explores the ways different understandings of
development have constructed the importance and roles of NGOs differently in different periods
since 1945.

Paul, Samuel, and Arturo Israel, eds. 1991 Nongovernmental Organizations and the World Bank.
Washington, DC: World Bank.
A good example written from the perspective of the World Bank of the mainstream policy
commentators of the 1990s setting out the main practical and policy arguments for NGOs to
serve as better conduits of development aid (such as flexibility, closeness to communities, cost-
effectiveness and other implied comparative advantages).
Vivian, Jessica 1994. NGOs and Sustainable Development in Zimbabwe: No Magic Bullets. Development
and Change 25:167-193.
An important article that first identified the unhelpful tendency for the development industry to look
upon the newly discovered world of NGOs as a magic bullet that could solve any number of
longstanding development problems.

3. NGO
NGO as Productively
Productively Unstable
Unstable Category
While efforts within other disciplines to reveal more of the importance of the third sector by establishing its
economic, political and organizational dimensions, alongside examination of the work that NGOs
undertake, anthropologists have also been interested in exploring what the idea of NGO means. What
constitutes an NGO in one setting may not be understood as such in another. Mirroring work within
cultural studies, some anthropologists have come to embrace hybridity and complexity. Rather than
focusing on definitions, it has proved productive to explore how the meaning of the term varies across
different contexts and examine how these meanings may shift over time. For example, the moral universe
of the NGO is diverse and refracted, running from common perceptions of selfless NGO work
undertaking good causes to an association in many contexts with opportunism and corruption. The idea
of NGO as a kind of blank slate onto which different interests and ideas are projected is one productive
approach, while the idea that NGOs constitute useful portals into wider social, political and economic
processes is another.

Taxonomical issues
It has become clich to state that the term more easily defines what NGOs are not as opposed to what
they are. NGO is a notoriously imprecise acronym it is used in both broad and narrow senses. At its
broadest, it encompasses a diverse range of non-state actors, from small-scale community-based self-
help organizations to large-scale professionalized networks and interest groups. There are NGOs that are
active across most fields of human endeavor, from arts, leisure and recreation to human rights and
environment. This diversity has led many to attempt to classify, whereas many scholars (e.g., Vakil 1997)
are skeptical of any single rubric. . More narrowly, NGO is also used to denote a particular sub-group of
third sector organizations active in development, and often implies a reliance on funds from the
international aid system (although this may not necessarily be the case). Confusingly, non-governmental
organization is often used interchangeably with related overlapping terms such as voluntary
organization (in the UK), non-profit organization (in the U.S.). Such terms possess distinctive origins and
histories, often embedded within different geographical and cultural contexts. In an attempt to clarify,
Salamon and Anheier (1992) offer a structural-operational definition. The term NGO first became used
within the UN system, as we explain below. In part because of this conceptual confusion and a dizzying
diversity within NGOs, some scholars have attempted to classify NGOs according to a range of criteria.
For example, Bebbington and Farrington (1993) focus on NGOs domain of work, Pearce (1997) on
decision-making, Morton (1997) on scale and ability to complete projects, and Sen and Grown (1987)
based on their roles in promoting womens empowerment.

Blser, Ralf, and Dietrich Soyez. 2009. "Organisations Non-Gouvernementales Transnationales et

Gographie ? Perspectives D'outre-Rhin and Geography." Annales de Gographie no. 668 (4):359-381.

This article offers a transnational comparative approach (French and German scholarhip),
presenting an extensive literature review of differing types of NGOs, particularly as they articulate
with a concern for space and place, the focus of human geography but also increasingly within
anthropology. Several English, French, and German-language case studies are reviewed,
including one authors engagement with environmental NGOs. The discussion is primarily on
advocacy as opposed to development.

Dicklitch, Susan. 1998. The Elusive Promise of NGOs in Africa: Lessons from Uganda. New York: St.
Martins Press.
Many articles on NGOs begin with a setting out NGO sub-categories in line with a specific
context. In the case of Uganda, Dicklitch distinguishes between voluntary organizations, peoples
organizations, and briefcase NGOs that are basically little more than an opportunistic individual
with bag full of legitimizing papers.

Farrington, John, and Anthony Bebbington. 1993 . Reluctant Partners?: Non-governmental Organizations,
the State and Sustainable Agricultural Development. London ; New York: Routledge.
Drawing on an early but comprehensive set of comparative case studies across Africa, Asia and
Latin America (one of the only studies of its kind), the authors here set out a categorization of
development NGOs according to their roles, history, funding, purpose, and structure.

Morton, Alice. 1997. Haiti: NGO Sector Study. World Bank.

This World Bank report sets out a definitional framework based on donor priorities and
distinguishes NGOs by size and organizational capacity.

Pearce, Jenny. 1997. Between co-option and irrelevance? Latin American NGOs in the 1990s. In NGOs,
States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? D. Hulme and M. Edwards, eds. Pp. 257-274. New York: St.
Martins Press in association with Save the Children.
Chronicling the diversity and the dynamic changes in the NGO sectors of Latin America, Pearce
usefully challenges over-generalized thinking by distinguishing membership from non-
membership NGOs, international from indigenous NGOs, and service-delivery from advocacy
NGOs.
Salamon, L. and Anheier, H. 1992. In search of the non-profit sector: in search of definitions, Voluntas,
13, 2: 125-52.
This article, in which Salamon and Anheier set out what they call a structural-operational
definition of the non-governmental organization (or non-profit organization in their terminology)
has been very influential within the new field of third sector studies for providing a clear - if
somewhat static and ahistorical - set of criteria.

Sen, Gita, Caren Grown, and Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (Project). 1987
Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Womens Perspectives. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
From the perspective of gender and development, Sen and Grown classified NGOs based on
their role in womens empowerment, from service providers to activist/advocate groups. The idea
that non-mainstream NGOs are sources of alternative or radical thinking about development is
embodied in this type of work.

Vakil, A. 1997. Confronting the classification problem: toward a taxonomy of NGOs, World Development,
25, 12: 2057-71.
The author offers a comprehensive review of the problems of defining NGOs, and drawing on the
structural-operational definition set out within the third sector research field, develops a version
adapted to the world of NGOs.

Civil society and third sector

sector
It is difficult to approach the subject of NGOs without linking it to the rise of civil society within social
science and policy circles, and the idea of the third sector. The multitude of structures crystallizing into
the form NGO reflects distinct histories. After the Cold War, ideas about civil society were rediscovered,
particularly among anti-authoritarian activists in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 1980s (e.g.,
Putnam 1995). Gramscis idea of civil society as a site of anti-hegemonic resistance gained particular
attention (e.g., Cohen and Arato 1992). Anthropologists were among the first to challenge the
assumptions behind this rediscovery, either as holdovers of Cold War ideologies (Hann and Dunn 1996)
or continuities of colonialism (Comaroff and Comaroff 1998). The idea of the third sector refers to an
institutional space between the state, the market and the household, populated by diverse groups of
organizations, from informal community self-help groups to formal professionalized agencies (Williams
2010). Sometimes also termed the non-profit sector, an extensive field of scholarship has emerged
including several major journals such as Voluntas and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (Horton
Smith 2013).
Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato. 1992. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
An influential political science synthesis of difference theoretical traditions around civil society,
overview of Gramscis (1971) notion of civil society as a site of anti-hegemonic resistance, and
which distinguishes a three part model of social structure setting the solidaristic world of civil
society apart from the different logics of business/commodities, and administration/state.

Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff. 1998 Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Along with the 1996 Hann and Dunn volume, this was one of the earliest anthropological texts to
engage historically with the re-emergence of civil society as a political concept. The Comaroffs
focus on post-colonial Africa in their collection, noting discursive shifts as well as continuities in
the transition from colonialism to development. Several chapters specifically discuss NGOs.

Hann, Chris, and Elizabeth Dunn. 1996 Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge.
An anthropological collection that locates the idea of civil society squarely within a historical
moment within Western societies and questions the ethnocentricity of exporting civil society to
non-Western societies as part of the as post-Cold War policy agenda. Chapters span the globe
with a particular focus on Eastern Europe.

Horton Smith, David. 2013 Growth of Research Associations and Journals in the Emerging Discipline of
Altruistics, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 42, 638-656.
The author, one of the founders of the field of non-profit or third sector studies, reviews the rise of
this area of scholarship. He devised the new term altruistics to refer to the diverse subject matter
of this field of scholarship that includes NGOs, philanthropy, nonprofit sector, third sector,
voluntary sector, civil society, social economy, volunteering, associations, and nonprofit
organizations.

Lewis, David. 2014 Nongovernmental Organizations, Management and Development. London:

Routledge.
This book draws on the tradition of organizational anthropology to bring a critical perspective to
the interest in management in the context of NGO and development work. Along the way, this
book also discusses the genealogy of the third sector idea, and the ways this idea has influenced
emerging ideas about the organization and management of development NGOs.

Putnam, Robert D. 1995. Bowling Alone: Americas Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy 6:65-
78.
 Since de Tocqueville, the idea of the NGO has broadened to include any constellation of
individual people who are not related by birth or marriage, to include block clubs, neighborhood
groups, trade unions, and bowling leagues, immortalized in Robert Putnams famous analysis of
what he took to be the decline of U.S. civil society.

Watkins, Susan Cotts, Ann Swidler and Thomas Hannan (2012) Outsourcing Social Transformation:
Development NGOs as Organizations, Annual Review of Sociology, 38: 285-315.
This paper opens up the organizational sociology of NGOs in ways that focus on their symbolic
power as organizations that face a set of key defining contradictions between their ambitious
goals, complex environments and modest organizational technologies and techniques.

Williams, Ann C. 2010 New and Improved?: A Case Study of Nonprofit Policy Governance, Human
Organization, Vol. 69, No. 3, 2010
Anthropologists have also gradually begun to contribute to the wider field of non-profit studies.
This paper critically examines adoption a business-oriented governance model by a womens
human service nonprofit organization. Arguing that it is a totalizing ideology of the market with
its own language, logic, set of rules, and moral claims, the authors describe how volunteers resist
adopting many of its core practices.

NGOs and humanitarian action

Humanitarianism broadly speaking began long before the creation of the Red Cross. As Bornstein and
Redfield (2011) document, humanitarianism has roots in many religious traditions. This commitment to
offering life-saving assistance was solidified in 1863, when Henry Dunant created the International
Committee of the Red Cross, which depending on the taxonomical issues noted above, could be
described as one of the first NGOs. Dunantist humanitarian assistance privileges a principled approach,
not tied up with political agendas typical of Wilsonian approaches that tie humanitarian (emergency, life-
saving) assistance with foreign policy. From the Dunantist line come a set of humanitarian principles
among them neutrality, impartiality, and independence. With no shortage of humanitarian crises war,
refugees, famine, or so-called natural disasters humanitarian agencies have grown, and have recently
become professionalized, with codes of conduct arising from individual groups, like the ICRC (Hilhorst
2005) as well as inter-agency associations such as the Sphere (2004) and the Humanitarian
Accountability Project. These principles and codes of conduct are threatened with instrumentalization,
being used by outside agencies for non-humanitarian purposes (e.g., Donini 2012). Research on
humanitarianism, even more than development, tends to be dominated by practitioners who come with a
particular research agenda based on dilemmas triggered by instrumentalization, humanitarian space, or
negotiating access (Acuto 2014), and other moral and political crises. Anthropologists are latecomers to
the conversation, and those such as Didier Fassin (2012, himself a former humanitarian), Robert Redfield
(2006), and Erica Bornstein (2012) interrogate greater cultural logics of the humanitarian enterprise.

Acuto, Michele, ed. 2014 Negotiating Relief: the Dialectic of Humanitarian Space. C Hurst and Company
Publishers Ltd.
Acutos volume pulls together timely analyses by mostly practitioner scholars about the ways in
which humanitarian agencies strategize about humanitarian space, gaining access to offer life-
saving assistance. This negotiation can involve the compromising or translating core
humanitarian values.

Bornstein, Erica. 2012 Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
This book examines social relationships around philanthropy and giving in contemporary urban
India, located within anthropological work on the gift. Instead of the outcomes of philanthropic or
humanitarian action, Bornstein addresses what lies behind the impulse to give, whether to
strangers or to kin - both a sense of the individuals place in the world and a way of engaging with
poverty and injustice.

Bornstein, Erica, and Peter Redfield, eds. 2011 Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics
and Politics. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
This reader, arising from a School of Advanced Research Advanced Seminar, establishes a
research agenda for a critical anthropology of humanitarian aid. The editors introduction teases
apart the distinction between often competing pulls of human rights and humanitarianism. The
case studies in the book ask new questions that deconstruct the transnational discursive
structures through which humanitarian NGOs work.

Donini, Antonio, ed. 2012 The Golden Fleece: Manipulation and Independence in Humanitarian Action.
Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Doninis edited volume, with chapters largely written by humanitarian practitioners, presents on-
the-ground analyses about how humanitarian agencies respond to pressures of
instrumentalization from a range of actors: states, donors, militaries, civil society, belligerents,
media, and even the NGOs themselves.

Duffield, Mark, Joanna Macrae, and Devon Curtis. 2001 Editorial: Politics and Humanitarian Aid.
Disasters 25(4):269-274.
Mark Duffield has been a leading critic of the ways international NGOs within a wider framework
in which liberal interventionism has come to characterize global governance have become
 instrumentalized and used for non-humanitarian ends, often in line with donors geopolitical or
national interests. Duffield has outlined what he terms the security-development nexus, creating
uncomfortable tensions around contemporary aid industry and Western presence in unstable
parts of the world.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. R. Gomme, transl. Berkeley:
University of California.
A veteran of celebrated Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF), Fassin offers a critique of the ways in
which moral and political discourse and practices what he calls humanitarian reason have
shifted. Drawing from case material from his work at the MSF in France, South Africa, Venezuela,
and Palestine, Fassin discusses shifts in humanitarian governance faced with increasing
challenges of inequality and violence.

Hilhorst, D. 2005. Dead Letter or Living Document? Ten years of the Code of Conduct for Disaster Relief.
Disasters 29(4):351-369.
Hilhorst analyzes the Red Crosss Code of Conduct, and the ways in which it has guided
humanitarian interventions on the field, but importantly the ways in which humanitarian action and
practice has led to creative syntheses and reinterpretations of the professionalization goals.

Redfield, Peter. 2006 A Less Modest Witness. American Ethnologist 33(1):3-26.

Redfield discusses the ways in which French NGO Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF, Doctors
without Borders) deliberately builds upon its hyper-visibility and acclaim, distinct from modesty
that one could assume was appropriate for humanitarian agencies. MSF embraces and deploys
its celebrity status to call attention to injustice, as an interpretation of its humanitarian mandate.

Social movements
The study of social movements has long concerned political scientists and anthropologists, who from the
1970s onwards began distinguishing older class-based labor and peasant movements from the new
identity-based social movements focused on gender or ethnicity (Escobar and Alvarez 1992).
Anthropological work on social movements predated that on NGOs, and anthropologists have been
naturally drawn to the idea of counter-hegemonic peoples movements (Nash 2005). Indeed, there has
been a tinge of disdain for NGOs, often seen as less authentic and politically compromised. Social
movements are seen as the authentic voice of marginalized people, while NGOs are shorthanded as the
professionalized face of establishment power, or the sterile end points of co-opted formerly radical social
movements (the NGO-ization critique). Escobars (1996) work on development for example set up a
contrast with the potential of social movements to challenge international systems of developmentalist
power. Yet more recent ethnographic work suggests a more complex picture: social movements may be
exclusionary, the boundaries between movements and organizations are often highly fluid, and NGOs
may themselves become part of social movements (Edelman 2001). What constitutes an NGO and what
constitutes a movement is often ambiguous (Fisher 2010, Hopgood 2006). Discussing transnational
advocacy networks, political scientists Keck and Sikkink (1998) theorized the flows of solidarity activism
and power. Building on Manual Castells, Annalise Riles (2001) offers an ethnographically grounded
analysis of the network as a cultural/social form.

Edelman, Marc. 2001 Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics. Annual Review
of Anthropology 30:285-317.
Marc Edelmans analysis of Via Campesina, which arguably is both an NGO and a social
movement (1999,2005), expands on an ethnographic discussion of network, fusing Annaleise
Riles critique of the concept. Drawing on ethnographic critique of concepts used in the largely
sociological study of social movements since the 1980s such as resource mobilization, Edelman
discusses networks as an emerging approach that can theorize transnational movements.

Escobar, Arturo, and Sonia E. Alvarez. 1992. The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity,
Strategy, and Democracy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
This classic text outlines a new research agenda for researchers of social movements. Grounded
in rich ethnography, chapters discuss the ways in which social movement participation can
produce new collective identities. These activist identities are not essentialized, and thus move
beyond the debates of identity politics. Alvarez and Escobar edited another volume (1998)
interrogating the interconnection between identity and culture.

Fisher, William F. 2010 Civil society and its fragments. In Varieties of Activist Experience: Civil Society in
South Asia. D.N. Gellner, ed. pp. 250-268. London: Sage.
A key problem, Fisher suggests, is the general lack of theorization of different civil society groups
and the institutions of the state. The categories of civil society, NGO and social movement are
fluid and ambiguous and it makes more sense therefore to break down the black box categories
(p.256) and focus on how organizations actually operate at various local and global levels.

Gellner, David N. 2010 Introduction: making civil society in South Asia. In Varieties of Activist
Experience: Civil Society in South Asia. D.N. Gellner, ed. Pp. 1-16. London: Sage.
In his introduction to a collection on activism in South Asia, Gellner explores anthropologically the
idea of the third sector (often associated with NGOs as an analogue of civil society) as both an
ideal type and an empirical reality and suggests that activist suffers the same definitional
instability (p.5) as NGO.
Hopgood, Stephen. 2006. Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
This organizational ethnography of Amnesty is a landmark study, exploring how the NGOs has
been shaped by different interest groups seeking change since Amnestys foundation in 1961.
Hopgood questions organizational assumptions around the idea of NGO as a category,arguing
that Amnesty is closer to a movement or a quasi-religious order, which he describes as a form of
religionless Christianity.

Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Political scientists Keck and Sikkink theorized the role NGOs play in transnational advocacy
networks, with Southern NGOs tapping Northern NGOs to appeal to their Northern governments
to pressure the Southern governments. This model has been adopted and adapted by many
scholars, including anthropologists.

Nash, June C., ed. 2005 Social Movements: an Anthropological Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell
Publishers.
This volume pulls together 17 chapters from anthropologists analyzing social movements
spanning the globe and different issues such as HIV/AIDS, free trade, struggles against corporate
globalization, and religion. Nashs introduction offers an intellectual history of anthropological
engagement with social movements. Chapters employ a range of theoretical approaches,
including discussions of identity discussed in Escobar and Alvarezs seminal volumes, but veer
towards (neo-)Marxist analytic frames.

Riles, Annalise. 2001. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Building on the work of Manuel Castells (e.g. 2000), Riles theorizes the form of the social
network, hailed by many theorists of civil society as the embodiment of democracy. Riles work
raises important questions and offers a methodological grounding to claims. The book represents
an important ethnographic intervention into top-down theorizing, offering a model for future
anthropologists in NGOs, social movements as well as networks.

Women
Womens NGOs
Arguably more than other sectors, womens NGOs can trace genealogies rooted in social movements tied
particular womens struggles. For example, a sustained wave of feminist mobilization since the 1970s
has been in large part facilitated by a flowering of womens organizations (Naples and Desai 2000). Far
from monolithic, the feminist / womanist movements are diverse, working on multiple issues, and
constituting multiple identities (Alvarez 1999). Arising from a vibrant and diverse transnational social
movement, womens NGOs engaged in self-critique as different constituencies became concerned about
NGOization, professionalization, and a gradual loss of the political dynamic within womens NGOs
hybrid structure blending advocacy and service delivery (INCITE! 2007; Lang 2000). The issue of
representation a concern shared within scholarly feminism, particularly Third World and women of
color remains a central discussion, one intimately linked with the power dynamics within relationships
transcending North and South (Grewal and Bernal 2014; Thayer 2001). International womens NGOs
politicized the question of womens rights and gender quality within development, transforming official
discourses and practices, from Women in Development (WID) to Gender and Development (GAD), to
Women and Development (WAD). Empowerment became an official buzzword not only for individual
women but for the womens movement itself, symbolized by the 1995 UN Conference on Women in
Beijing. The parallel forum for NGOs in many ways eclipsed the official meeting of State representatives.
Feminist activism within NGOs takes many contemporary forms, including combating gender-based
violence (Wies and Haldane 2011) and neoliberalism (Davis and Craven 2013).

Alvarez, Sonia E. 1999 Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO Boom. International
Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2):181-209.
This article discusses the tensions inherent to the hybrid form of womens NGOs. In the Sen and
Grown piece noted above (1987) womens NGOs often are hybrid, doing advocacy and providing
direct service. Donor and state interest in NGOs threatened to flatten this hybridity. Womens
NGOs that initially arose to challenge the state often saw them being used if not coopted to
provide services, particularly in gender expertise.

Bernal, Victoria, and Inderpal Grewal, eds. 2014 Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminism, and Neoliberalism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
This edited volume offers a rich set of theoretically sophisticated analyses of womens NGOs
under neoliberalism. Contributors interrogate the uniqueness and advantages professed of
womens NGOs within a particular context of dilemmas posed by neoliberal globalization and its
impacts on states.

Craven, Christa, and Dana-Ain Davis, eds. 2013 Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to
Neoliberalism in North America. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books.
This volume includes several chapters that discuss womens NGOs, including those combating
gender based violence (Wies) and international human rights abuses (Uzwiak). These chapters
discuss dilemmas of professionalization and power within NGOs, within neoliberal logics of
individual achievement and measurable outcomes. Other chapters discuss activists, some of
whom work with and for institutions that can be on the NGO spectrum.
Lang, Sabine. 2000. The NGO-ization of feminism. In Global Feminisms Since 1945. B.G. Smith, ed. Pp.
290-304. London: Routledge.
Lang discusses the ways in which the feminist movement became depoliticized when it became
more professionalized. While the cases studied are German feminist networks during unification,
the chapter provides a lucid explanation of the dilemmas and processes and as such is useful
beyond.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the
Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Arising from a conference held in Santa Barbara in 2004, this series of papers by a radical
women of color organization named and critiqued the non-profit industrial complex, a model for
planned, tamed, incremental, measurable social change outcomes sponsored by wealthy and
foundations. Chapters in the book explore models for social justice organizing outside the
501(c)(3) model the U.S. nonprofit structure.

Naples, Nancy A, and Manisha Desai, eds. 2002 Womens Activism and Globalization: Linking Local
Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge.
This collection includes several analyses of womens NGOs working across national borders,
many of which also across North-South contexts. Chapters discuss inequalities within and
between NGOs, the politics of who gets to set agendas, what counts as a womens issue, and
the dilemmas of authenticity, communication, and effectiveness in solidarity efforts.

Thayer, Millie. 2001. Transnational Feminism: Reading Joan Scott in the Brazilian serto. Ethnography
2(2):243-271.
This article offers a nuanced analysis and critique of the ways in which NGOs privilege Northern
feminist concepts and structures. Not simply an issue of translation, these concepts and priorities
are often felt as impositions and inappropriate to address local realities.

Wies, Jennifer, and Hillary Haldane, eds. 2011 Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender Based
Violence. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
This collection discusses an important and often missing level of analysis within theorizing NGOs:
front-line workers at direct service agencies working to combat gender-based violence (GBV).
Chapters from contributors many of whom have experience working within agencies discuss
the politics of denial of service, inequalities in care, credentialing of activism, and the
inappropriateness of Western cultural models in culturally-specific contexts.

4. Tracing an anthropological
anthropological engagement with NGOs
Anthropological scholarship on NGOs, begun on trajectories noted above straddling applied and
theoretical research, has seen exponential growth and diversification. As a whole anthropological
scholarship at least the theoretical strand still tends to be more critical than other disciplines, but
recent political science scholarship has begun to challenge normative conceptions of NGOs tied with civil
society and the third sector. Initially an offshoot of analyses of development, anthropological
scholarship on NGOs has evolved into an analysis not only in but of NGOs. The scholarship on NGOs
demonstrates shifts in theoretical trends, with an engagement on neoliberalism, governmentality, and a
reworking of classic anthropological themes of religion, the gift exchange, language, citizenship, and
ethnicity as well as contemporary discussions of moral economies, identity formation, and hybridity.

Early Ethnographies
The gold standard for anthropological scholarship remains the ethnographic monograph. Anthropologists
draw heavily upon ethnographic case material to build, deconstruct, sharpen, challenge, combine, or
retrace anthropological theory. As such anthropological books on NGOs offer excellent glimpses into not
only the nascent subfield of NGO studies but also the development of anthropological theory. Early
ethnographies were few and far between, and tended to focus on international NGOs (e.g., Fox 1998;
Fox and Brown 1998), with Hilhorst (2003) a significant exception. Much of this early work theorizes on-
the-ground inequalities within development, such as hegemony (Kamat 2002), dispossession (Elyachar
2005) or paternalism (Eriksson Baaz 2005). Cultural analyses such as religion (Bornstein 2003) or
ethnomusicology (Smith 2001) are also woven through several texts. More work on NGOs by
anthropologists has begun to appear in recent years. A selection of ethnographic monographs is
presented here that represents contemporary theoretical strands.

Bornstein, Erica. 2003. The spirit of development: Protestant NGOs, morality, and economics in
Zimbabwe. New York: Routledge.
This book offers a historically and ethnographically grounded analysis of transnational evangelical
organization, World Vision, having begun to take on development roles. Bornsteins work also
explores the ways that these NGOs programs serve also to provide legitimacy for the state that
takes credit for them. Bornsteins ethnography offers a grounded analysis that gives voice to the
many perspectives of World Vision, offering critical questions while resisting the anthropological
temptation to reject missionary ideologies as ethnocentric.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Julia Elyachar interrogates the role of NGOs in solidifying the hegemony of this capitalist model,
serving as a disciplinary force which in the end dispossessed many poor in Cairo, Egypt.
Eriksson Baaz, Maria. 2005. The Paternalism of Partnership: a Postcolonial Reading of Identity in
Development Aid. London: Zed Books.
International NGOs, donor agencies and northern NGO partners influence on wider NGO
policies and practices offers fertile ground for anthropology. However, few finegrained accounts
are available. This book deconstructs discourses of partnership, an important concept to
Northern European NGOs with their African partners. Deploying Foucauldian discourse
analysis, Eriksson Baaz discusses how European NGOs paper over inequality while forcing
consent on their African peers, justifying additional work through ideologies of equality.

Fox, Diana Joyce. 1998. An Ethnography of Four Non-Governmental Development Organizations: Oxfam
America, Grassroots International, ACCION International, and Cultural Survival, Inc. Lewiston N.Y.: Edwin
Mellen Press.
Not surprisingly, the first ethnographic monographs on NGOs concerned development. Diana Fox
explored four international development NGOs: Oxfam, Grassroots International, Accin
International, and Cultural Survival. All in some form privileged the grassroots in their discourse;
the ethnography focused on evaluating how these discourses were translated (or not) into
practice.

Fox, Jonathan A., and L. David Brown. 1998. The Struggle for Accountability: the World Bank, NGOs, and
Grassroots Movements. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
This multi-sited ethnography is one of the first to attempt to understand the ways in which large
development agencies actually work: how agendas are set, how work is organized, how it is
understood, and how it is changed. Looked at ethnographically, the more grassroots NGOs
share similar concerns of hierarchy, and individuals who attempt to make a difference within the
official structures.

Hilhorst, Dorothea. 2003. The Real World of NGOs: Discourses, Diversity and Development. London: Zed
Books.
This monograph interrogated everyday practices within an NGO in Philippines, one of the most
densely populated NGO fields in the world, using diverse theoretical frames such as Weber and
Foucault. A student of Norman Long, Hilhorsts text anticipated a brokerage and translation
analysis, and was among those that acknowledged NGOs internal diversity.

Kamat, Sangeeta. 2002. Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
 Anthropological analyses in this century of the political roles of NGOs build on the insights noted
above. Kamat discusses hegemonic and counter-hegemonic process in NGOs relationship with
the State in India.

Ndegwa, Stephen N. 1996. The two faces of civil society : NGOs and politics in Africa. West Hartford,
Conn.: Kumarian Press.
NGOs also play a role in politics, as many monographs attest. While not an anthropologist,
Stephen Ndegwa offers a look at how West African NGOs play a role in the formal political
processes, including political parties.

Smith, Jennie Marcelle. 2001. When the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in
Rural Haiti. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jennie Smith offered a holistic analysis of the array of peasant organizations in Haiti, building off
of history and ethnographic insights of rural Haiti. These longstanding collective institutions
morphed with the arrival of official development aid into formal peasants associations.

(Non)Governmentalities
A Foucauldian concept posthumously published (1991), governmentality quickly became a core thesis
within political anthropology. A neologism combining the phrase governmental rationality, it has often
been simplified as the conduct of conduct. Offering an alternative reading of governance promoted by
official development agencies, governmentality offers scholars of NGOs a heuristic to interrogate the
interactions between different groups as part of official projects. In his foundational review article, William
Fisher (1997) discusses the many relationships states have with NGOs, with the former sometimes
deploying NGOs to extend their power. A 2001 special issue in PoLAR set out a critical research agenda,
challenging the insidious outcomes of donors instrumental use of NGOs in a privatization of the state
(Leve and Karim 2001, Peterson 2001). Anthropologists used the concept of governmentality in its
transnational dimension (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), neoliberal governmentality (Sharma 2008), and
nongovernmentality (Jackson 2005), and non-governmentalism (Lewis 2005).

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal
Governmentality. American Ethnologist 29(4):981-1002.
As World Systems scholars noted, neoliberalism as enforced by international financial institutions
such as the World Bank specifically targeted Southern states, downsizing their roles and
responsibilities. Resisting the facile special analogy of above and below states, Ferguson and
Gupta argue that this out-sourcing of state functions to NGOs was also part of an emerging
system of transnational governmentality. Seen ethnographically, state and NGO governmentality
share many resemblances.
Fisher, William. 1997. Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices. Annual Reviews in
Anthropology 26:439 - 464.
This text inspired a sustained discussion of NGOs in anthropology. This text recognized the
importance of NGOs as global political actors, elaborating on NGOs roles within the neoliberal
restructuring of governance relationships in the 1990s. Drawing on both Gramsci and Foucault,
Fisher showed how states increasingly viewed NGOs as flexible tools for maintaining or
extending their power.

Jackson, Stephen. 2005 .The State Didnt Even Exist: Non-Governmentality in Kivu, Eastern DR Congo.
In Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African NGOs, Donors, and the State. J.I.T. Kelsall, ed. Pp. 165-
196. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.
Based on ethnographic research in Kivu, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Stephen Jackson
coined non-governmentality, which he defined as an ideology that the welfare of the population
and the improvement of its condition can best be served by non-state actors (169). There is a
revolving door between state and non-state actors and the emergence of government organized
NGOs (GONGOs). This non-governmentality is a crystallization of ideological currents in
neoliberalism.

Leve, Lauren, and Lamia Karim. 2001. Privatizing the State: Ethnography of Development, Transnational
Capital, and NGOs. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24(1):53-58.
This was the introduction to the 2001 special issue of Political and Legal Anthropology Review
(PoLAR) that discussed NGOs roles in privatizing the state that included pieces by both authors
Bornstein and Peterson. This volume inspired a critical analysis of the political roles of NGOs
within neoliberal globalization.

Lewis, David. 2005. Individuals, organisations and public action: trajectories of the non-governmental in
development studies. In A Radical History of Development Studies. U. Kothari, ed. Bloomfield, CT:
Kumarian Press, pp.200-221.
A historical account of the rise of non-governmentalism from the 1980s onwards within both development
studies and international development policy, and the strengths and weaknesses of the research
literature that emerged from this trend.

Peterson, Kristin. 2001. Benefit Sharing for All?: Bioprospecting NGOs, Intellectual Property Rights, New
Governmentalities. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24(1):78-91.
 Part of the 2001 special issue of PoLAR, this article deconstructs the role that NGOs play in
transnational legal discourses and structures. NGOs constitute new political subjects and
subjectivities facilitating integration into new governmentalities.

Sharma, Aradhana. 2006. Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Womens Empowerment,

Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India. Cultural Anthropology 21(1):60-95.
Discussing a hybrid structure in India, Aradhana Sharma distills a neoliberal governmentality
wherein NGOs reproduce represent the emergence of new mechanisms of rule and a
proliferation of innovative institutional forms that take on governance functions formerly assigned
to the state (61).

NGOs as intermediaries
Moving away from anthropological critiques of development, some anthropologists began deconstructing
NGOs as single entities with monolithic intentions, identities, missions, and effects. As structures, NGOs
bring together different and sometimes disparate sets of actors. Anthropologists across the Atlantic came
to a similar approach, however focusing on the relationships themselves more than the actors. Recent
ethnographic scholarship has specifically theorized these sets of relationships. Moving in a different
direction than earlier functional work on NGOs as bridging organizations (cf Carroll, Korten 1999), such
work drew inspiration from Fergusons insight that even the most powerful actors within development are
often stymied in the pursuit of their interests, anthropologists have specifically interrogated the role that
NGOs play as intermediaries or brokers (Mosse and Lewis 2006). Some authors note the role that
foreigners play in brokering relationships with transnational donors (Davis 2003), or NGOs fulfilling roles
typically reserved for states before neoliberalism (Richards 2009). Local populations (Rossi 2006) as well
as NGOs (Robins) sometimes have the ability to shift the contours of international aid. NGOs can be the
glue to a fragmented neoliberalism (Schuller 2009) or the friction as groups across national and
cultural boundaries interface (Tsing 2006).

Davis, Coralynn. 2003 Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrumental
Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal. Meridians: feminism, race,
transnationalism 3(2):204-249.
Coralynn Davis deconstructs a conflict wrought by a foreign feminist in Nepal. The NGO she
founded to empower lower-caste women triggered retribution from local male elites. As a
foreigner this activist had privileged access to define the issue to the transnational donor.

Korten, David. 1990. Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda West Hartford,
Conn: Kumarian Press
 David Kortens book represented a utopian strand within practitioner writings on NGOs, in which
he suggested that NGOs can serve as catalysts for social and political change, open up spaces
for mainstream critique of orthodox development ideas and approaches, and evolve through a
series stages or generations that could lead them eventually to link with and dissolve into
progressive global social movements.

Lewis, David, and David Mosse, eds. 2006. Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of
Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.
Drawing theoretical inspiration from Bruno Latours (1987) actor network theory (ANT) and
Norman Longs (1992) actor-oriented approach to development and change, this volume
discusses development agencies roles as brokers and translators. A brokerage and translation
approach specifically recuperates human agency especially of aid recipients and NGO
fieldworkers, often glossed over or theoretically dismissed in simplistic models from radical
critiques of NGOs.

Richard, Analiese. 2009 . Mediating Dilemmas: Local NGOs and Rural Development in Neoliberal Mexico.
Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32(2):166-194.
Richard discusses the structural position of caciques, local power brokers, which NGOs inherited
in a post-PRI, neoliberalized Mxico. Ostensibly apolitical, NGOs stood poised to offer services in
a patronage system based on shared political ideology or loyalty.

Robins, Steven. 2009. Humanitarian Aid beyond Bare Survival: Social Movement Responses to
Xenophobic Violence in South Africa. American Ethnologist 36(4):637-650.
Robins discusses the shifting responses of humanitarian agencies to a wave of xenophobic
violence. The article analyzes how a local AIDS coalition shifted strategies in response to
changing realities and how local intermediary groups interpreted international agencies concerns
and mandates.

Rossi, Benedetta. 2006 Aid Policies and Recipient Strategies in Niger: Why Donors and Recipients
Should Not Be Compartmentalized into Separate Worlds of Knowledge. In Development Brokers and
Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. D. Lewis and D. Mosse, eds. Pp. 27-49. Bloomfield,
CT: Kumarian Press.
Rossis painstaking project level ethnographic work in Niger examined how rural development
project beneficiaries, far from being passive recipients of external top down interventions and
resources, work to reappropriate NGO aid and its associated discourses for their own ends.
Schuller, Mark. 2009. Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti. Political and Legal
Anthropology Review 32(1):84-104.
Schuller theorizes the power wielded by the NGO class as semi-elites to set agendas, using
Zinns analysis of guards of the system to explain why this intermediary class aligns with
transnational elite interests.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005 Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
In Tsings ethnography of globalization, NGOs are portrayed as part of a response to the impact
of globalization on national and local processes in Indonesia. Tsing describes how an emerging
environmental justice movement contributes to a counter-cultural alternative to the authoritarian
state, provided in part by a dynamic national NGO sector, supported by transnational donors.

Contemporary
Contemporary Ethnographies
Roughly a decade after Fishers 1997 review, and half a decade following the 2001 PoLAR issue on
NGOs, scholarship on the subject within anthropology deepened and nuanced an analysis of the poltiical
form of NGOs, the ways in which NGOs are conduits of power. Grafting Foucault and Marxist world
systems anlaysis, Schuller (2012) discusses bureaucratic logics and processes as trickle down
imperialism. NGOs can both empower (Hemment 2007) as well as quell (Sangtin Writers and Nagar
2006) citizen dissent. NGOs can also incorporate individuals into transnational circuits of capital (Karim
2011) or projects, often sold within a capitalist logic and system (James 2010). NGOs can be sites for
deliberating on and making claims on the common good (Rajak 2011) or defining those worthy of
assistance (Nguyen 2010). Working through an NGO structure within a strong centralized state, blurring
boundaries, NGOs can play pedagogical roles, fashioning neoliberal citizen subjects (Sharma 2008).

James, Erica Caple. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
In her ethnography of womens NGOs in Haiti, Erica James outlines the creation and mobilization
of a viktim (victim) identity, as material benefits accrue to those deemed neediest in what she
calls the political economy of trauma.

Hemment, Julie. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Womens NGOs in particular have been targeted by the new democratic regimes in post-
Glasnost Russia for their role in promoting democratization during the socialist era. Yet NGOs
can be spaces for supporting and institutionalizing activism in spaces of new civil society. While
 the changes achieved were not exactly as activists had planned this is a cautiously optimistic tale.
The term NGO-graphies has its origins here.

Karim, Lamia. 2011 Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Karims ethnography of Grameen Bank, one of the largest and most successful NGO type
organizations, was controversial even before it was published. It questioned the microfinance
industry, a development approach that has gained widespread mainstream acceptance,
particularly in the US. The book documents the coercive tactics deployed by Grameen Bank
affiliates in keeping pressure on women to repay their debts.

Nagar, Richa and Sangtin Writers. 2006 Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven
Lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Also a controversial tale, Nagar was part of a collective called the Sangtin Writers who were
beneficiaries of an NGO the same NGO studied by Aradhana Sharma who created a
grassroots offshoot. The Sangtin Writers used personal testimony to discuss the limits to
NGOization, particularly the hypocrisy and inequalities engendered by it. Minnesota published a
correspondence between Nagar and the womens NGO.

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. 2010. The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africas Time of
AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press.
In an inverse set of narratives, Vinh-Kim Nguyen deconstructs the triage functions NGOs play,
defining need, in effect, who is worthy of NGO aid. Discourse people being able to talk about
themselves and their suffering literally became matters of life and death, as NGO service
providers were consumers of these testimonies by providing life-saving drugs.

Rajak, Dinah. 2011. In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Dinah Rajaks monograph analyzes how NGOs facing funding shortfalls in post-apartheid South
Africa now depend on private corporations who enlist NGOs in their corporate social responsibility
(CSR) agendas. She uses Mauss theorizing on the gift, created by conditionality and
asymmetric power, veiled by the elevation of the partnership paradigm (p.189). CSR now takes
the place of grassroots civil society idealized in the 1990s, but does not strengthen it..

Schuller, Mark, and Foreword by Paul Farmer. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid and
NGOs New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
 Theorizing the roles that NGOs play as intermediaries, Mark Schullers ethnography of two
womens NGOs in Haiti fuses Marxist world systems analyses with Foucauldian theories of
power, in a process he calls trickle-down imperialism. Building this analysis is a frame of civic
infrastructure, or the inter-related spheres of relationships between different sets of actors.

Sharma, Aradhana. 2008. Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal
India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Drawing on more Foucault than Gramsci, Aradhana Sharma discusses a particular Indian
womens organization that makes strategic claims to being either a government office or an NGO,
and the ways in which this institution reproduces neoliberal logics of individual empowerment.

Current directions
While a coherent, sustained, anthropology of NGOs has yet to emerge as a specific sub-discipline,
unlike say medical anthropology, and a canon has yet to develop within, scholarship on NGOs
continues to grow in quantity and in theoretical sophistication. Ideas and discourses of the
nongovernmental and nongovernmental public action remain key themes in the early twenty first
century. Work on NGOs can be found within political anthropology, anthropology of development, public
policy, humanitarian action, and organizational anthropology. A second special issue of Political and
Legal Anthropology Review on NGOs in 2010 is a good indication of possible new theoretical directions
within anthropological scholarship on NGOs (Alvar 2010, Curtis 2010, Timmer 2010, Vannier 2010).
Unlike the first PoLAR series it did not confine itself to a single theme. This is emblematic of the disparate
inquiries that characterize anthropological work on NGO issues: on memory (Delcore 2003), identity
(Kaag 2008), and public deliberation (Junge 2012). There are increasingly diverse and sophisticated
analyses but with little cohesion or sustained conversation. It should be noted that the 2001 PoLAR
special issue resulted from an AAA conference session; there have been a handful of sessions
specifically on NGOs at the annual conference since then. Recent ethnographies on NGOs have begun
to chip away at more monolithic understandings of NGOs (Fechter and Hindman 2011).

Alvar, Bretton 2010. Babylon Makes the Rules: Compliance, Fear, and Self-Discipline in the Quest for
Official NGO Status. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(2):178-200.
Bretton Alvar discusses the powerful disciplinary functions in official NGO registration processes
of a Rasta NGO in Trinidad and Tobago.

Curtis, Jennifer. 2010 Profoundly Ungrateful: the Paradoxes of Thatcherism in Northern Ireland.
Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(2):201-224.
 Jennifer Curtis discusses the ways in which NGOs in Northern Ireland did not fit the mold of
neoliberalism and depoliticization, but became spaces for mobilizing opposition and demanding
more for the state.

Delcore, Henry D. 2003 Nongovernmental Organizations and the Work of Memory in Northern Thailand.
American Ethnologist 30(1):61-84.
Anthropologists have also noted how NGOs can be sites for making sense of often contradictory
social realities of meaning making. Henry Delcore discussed the ways in which NGOs serve as
public memory for a community, particularly following conflict or other social disruptions.

Fechter, Anne-Meike and Heather Hindman, eds. 2011 Inside the Everyday Lives of Development
Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
Work that develops the insight that NGOs and other development actors are not single entities
but constellations of individuals with (at least potentially) different interests. Contributors are
reflexive, grappling with a range of both theoretical and practical concerns such as legitimacy,
authenticity, power and privilege, and narrative.

Junge, Benjamin. 2012 NGOs as Shadow Pseudopublics: Grassroots Community Leaders Perceptions
of Change and Continuity in Porto Alegre, Brazil. American Ethnologist 39(2):407-424.
Benjamin Junge discussed NGOs role as pseudo-publics, wherein Porto Alegre citizens, hailed
through a radical participatory budgeting process, can mobilize a collective identity through
private entities.

Kaag, Mayke. 2008. Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad: Islamic Solidarity in the Age of Neoliberalism.
Africa Today 54(3):3-18.
Related to the role of meaning making is identity formation. Mayke Kaag analyzes the functions of
Islamic NGOs in solidifying ones faith and practice as a Muslim in a contested religious sphere
such as Chad.

Timmer, Andrea. 2010 Constructing the Needy Subject: NGO Discourses of Roma Need. Political and
Legal Anthropology Review 33(2):264-281.
Andrea Timmer discusses the ways in which Roma (Gypsy) communities were defined as
worthy recipients of NGO aid. Many authors ground the discussion in Bourdieus habitus (1990)
to explain the processes of inequality reproduction in NGO projects, and some build on recent
discussions (e.g., brokers and translators, intermediaries)
Vannier, Christian. 2010 Audit Culture and Grassroots Participation in Rural Haitian Development.
Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(2):282-305.
Sharing a similar critical approach of disciplinary power of the audit culture (Power 1997;
Strathern 2000) Christian Vannier analyzes a CBO in rural Haiti, discussing the ways in which
NGOs create new systems of governance.