International Humanitarian NGOs and State Relations: Politics, Principles and Identity examines the often discordant relationship between states and international non-governmental organisations working in the humanitarian sector. INGOs aiming to provide assistance to populations suffering from the consequences of conflicts and other human-made disasters work in the midst of very politically sensitive local dynamics. The involvement of these non-political international actors can be seen as a threat to states that see civil war as a state of exception where it is the government's prerogative to act outside 'normal' legal or moral boundaries. Drawing on first-hand experience of humanitarian operations in contexts of civil war, this book explores how the relationship works in practice and how often clashing priorities can be mediated. Using case studies of civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, Darfur, Ethiopia and Chechnya, this practice-based book brings together key issues of politics, principles and identity to build a 'negotiation structure' for analysing and understanding the relationship. The book goes on to outline a research and policy development agenda for INGOs to better adapt politically to working with states. International Humanitarian NGOs and State Relations will be a key resource for professionals and policy makers working within international humanitarian and development operations, as well as for academics and students within humanitarian and development studies who want to understand the relationship between states and humanitarian and multi-mandate organisations.

This book investigates the contributions of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to policymaking at the WTO, challenging the idea that NGOs can be narrowly understood as potential 'democratic antidotes' to the imperfections of Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs). The book highlights the significance of interactions between states, NGOs and IGOs, in order to understand their contributions to international trade governance. Based on case studies in the areas of labour standards, intellectual property and investment rules, the author finds that NGO activities serve an agenda setting function: they publicize neglected trade-related issues, persuade others to support their positions, enhance the resources of less developed member states and highlight normative rationales for policy change. In evaluating NGO campaign tactics and emphasizing relations between NGOs and WTO member states, this book advances understandings of the parameters of NGO agency in global governance. The Making of International Trade Policy will appeal to scholars and students with an interest in NGOs, research institutes and thinktanks, as well as policymakers, national trade negotiators, government departments and the trade policy community. NGO personnel active on WTO and trade policy issues - both researchers and activists - will also find this book thought-provoking.

Why do some development projects succeed where others fail? This book looks at some macro and some less known micro success stories and considers what enabled them to bring change in some of the world's most deprived communities. Using case studies from ten countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Tiwari's innovative approach offers a multi-layered understanding of poverty which provides insights into causal, enabling and impeding factors. While a macro level analysis of development is a common feature of the current literature, there has been little attempt to develop a micro level understanding of development at the grassroots. Tiwari's work fills this important gap while drawing attention to the importance of engaging local actors at an individual, collective, and state level, demonstrating how achieving a "convergence" of goals among all actors is a crucial component to a development project's success. Looking beyond the case studies to consider how this unique "convergence framework" might be usefully applied to other contexts, the book has profound implications for how we view fragile states and conflict zones, and the ability of the international agencies to take effective action. A unique study based on extensive empirical research, Why Some Development Works will make essential reading for students and researchers studying international development across the social sciences, as well as humanitarian and development practitioners and policy makers.

The idea that international development aid needs to be better managed and coordinated gained currency in the early 1990s. The increasing emphasis on management has resulted in the present vogue of 'managing for development results' as one of the central tenets in the discourse on international aid. But how appropriate are these ideas, tools, and techniques for non-governmental development organizations (NGOs), and how much does geographic context matter? Examining the current debate on aid effectiveness and the role of NGOs in contributing to it, this book highlights the critical importance of understanding how the global and the local interact to increase aid efficacy and develop more culturally astute ways of managing NGOs. With a focus on NGOs active in sub-Saharan Africa as case studies, author Frederik Claeye demonstrates that NGOs are not mere passive recipients of management knowledge and practices emanating from the global governance structure of international aid, but actively engage with these ideas and practices to translate and rework them through a local cultural lens. This process results in the emergence of unique hybrid management systems that combine the pressure to become more business-like with the mission to satisfy the demands of the communities they serve.

Peacebuilding is an interactive process that involves collaboration between peacebuilders and the victorious elites of a postwar society. While one of the most prominent assumptions of the peacebuilding literature asserts that the interests of domestic elites and peacebuilders coincide, Costly Democracy contends that they rarely align. It reveals that, while domestic elites in postwar societies may desire the resources that peacebuilders can bring, they are often less eager to adopt democracy, believing that democratic reforms may endanger their substantive interests. The book offers comparative analyses of recent cases of peacebuilding to deepen understanding of postwar democratization and better explain why peacebuilding missions often bring peace—but seldom democracy—to war-torn countries.

International trade continues to be a focal point for political and social contestation. The extension of World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements into new areas such as investment, services and intellectual property rights engendered massive conflict and rendered ongoing negotiations infinitely more technical and complex. A chorus of legitimacy concerns were raised by the extension of trade rules beyond barriers to trade at the border to national regulatory regimes in a host of ostensibly non-trade areas such as food safety, environment, human health and taxation. Meanwhile, the WTO's Doha Development Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations is trapped in seemingly endless deadlock. These developments are accompanied by the proliferation of progressive, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are critical of the global trade agenda. They aim to elevate social, cultural and environmental concerns of entire communities over market-related concerns in the international trade system and to give a voice to poor and otherwise marginalized groups in trade policymaking processes.This book considers whether more open trade policymaking processes that include progressive NGOs lead to a stronger, more legitimate and qualitatively enhanced international trade system. The European Union (EU) stands out among major trading powers for its significant and dramatic response to new demands for access and participation. This book examines whether improvements in the political opportunity structure for progressive NGOs results in more legitimate external trade policymaking in the EU. Hannah argues that there is clear potential for NGOs to represent citizens' demands, constitute a basic form of popular representation and hold decision-makers accountable to a broader public, and in the past NGOs have been instrumental in providing education, raising awareness, and giving a voice to broader societal concerns about the social, environmental and health-related aspects of proposed trade deals. However, they have not been able to determine policy outcomes in this arena, regardless of whether they are deeply and formally integrated into the trade policymaking process or protesting on the margins.The book builds upon the insights of constructivism to advance an alternative account of the role of NGOs in the EU's trade policymaking process, suggesting that NGOs have succeeded only when their attempts to achieve more democratic, sustainable and equitable trade policies have conformed broadly to the dominant episteme. When they seek to overrule that episteme, they fail. These findings suggest that early optimism about the power of NGOs to influence international public policy was both premature and naive. This book will be of value to scholars and students with an interest in NGOs and international trade negotiations, as well as to policymakers, national trade negotiators, government departments and the trade policy community.

This book illustrates the results of ethnographical research designed to shed light on the notion of civil society in a context characterized by the transformation of power relations. Such transformation is given by shifting resources, renewed local and international opportunities, and a general reframing of goals and objectives. The academic literature has usually relied on a substantialist understanding of the notion of civil society - referring to the latter as something that exists a priori or does something. This volume relies, instead, on a relational approach - where civil society becomes the name we give to a host of complex interactions in which local associations are involved in a time of reconfiguration of power relations. Building on this approach, this volume analyses the relational dynamics affecting Tunisian associations after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 2011 and their implications for the changing political order. Findings show two main interrelated trends: the nationwide professionalization of local associations and the localized networking strategies of various socio-political categories crossing the associational sector. The book shows how their members understand the standardization of local associations as a strategy to have guaranteed access to the public sphere and, therefore, to influence the changing political order.

Issa Shivji has long been one of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence. In two extensive essays in this book, he shows that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. Aid, in which NGOs play a significant role, is frequently portrayed as a form of altruism, a charitable act that enables the wealthy to help the poor. As structural adjustment programmes were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programmes to minimise the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished - and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa. If social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, argues Shivji, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today. Issa Shivji is one of Africa's most radical and original thinkers and has written frequently for Fahamu's Pambazuka News. He is the author of several books, including the seminal Concept of Human Rights in Africa (1989) and, more recently, Let the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neoliberalism (2006).

Negotiating Corruption demands that we think again about corruption in Africa. It problematises the framing of African corruption as a phenomenon that emerges from a clash between two sets of norms. Moreover, it highlights the colonial legacies of this frame, which situates African corruption within continually recurring debates about the political inclusion or banishment of 'others'. NGOs are characterised as intermediaries between the local and the international, and between the state and the population. In both of these roles they are understood to reform governance by bringing about changes in culture and instituting bureaucratic norms. They have, therefore, been seen as part of the apparatus of a global liberal governmentality. This book complicates this portrayal and highlights the ambiguous role of liberal governmentality through an exploration of the 'grey practices' of the NGOs studied. These practices are 'grey' as they do not fit the pattern of virtuous NGOs holding the state to account described in development policy, yet at the same time they ensure that the state produces the outcomes that a fully-functioning state ought to. This enacting of oppositional and antagonistic elements is further unpacked in conversation with Homi Bhabha's concepts of negotiation and hybridity. Negotiating Corruption draws attention to both the limitations of current explanations of corruption in Africa and the problematic way in which they are framed. The book's detailed engagement with understandings of corruption within policy and academic debates will make it a useful resource for undergraduate teaching. It will also be of keen interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students who engage with the issues of corruption, NGOs, civil society, African politics, governmentality, and hybridity.

The regulation of civil society provides the framework under which those organisations can most effectively provide services in education, health, social services, housing, development aid and so on. Civil Society in Europe identifies common principles of civil society law in two ways. First, the approaches of the Council of Europe and the European Union are explored. Next, civil society regulation in twelve domestic legal systems are investigated on a broad range of substantive areas of law including internal organisation, registration, external supervision, public benefit organisations and international activities. From these, the authors distill a set of minimum norms and optimal conditions under which civil society can deliver its aims most effectively. This book is essential reading for policymakers and legislators across Europe and beyond.

This book explores the limits of NGO influence and the conditions that constrain NGOs when they participate in international negotiations Through an empirically rich study of the UN World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) this book conceptualizes structural power mechanisms that shape global ICT governance and analyses the impact of NGOs on communication rights, intellectual property rights, financing, and Internet governance. The institutional framework of UN negotiations makes it easy for states to exclude NGOs from crucial meetings and to neglect their most relevant demands, in part explaining why NGOs had only limited influence on the policy outcomes of the WSIS in Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005, although high numbers of NGOs participated. Using a critical perspective, Dany demonstrates that despite the far-reaching participation rights for civil society actors, structural power mechanisms continued to limit the influence of participating NGOs and this contradicts the widely held assumption that extensive NGO participation necessarily increases NGO influence on the policy outcomes. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, global governance, the United Nations, and global information and communication politics.

In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala. She highlights how each program's beneficiaries-diverse groups of savvy women-exercise their agency by creatively appropriating, resisting, and reinterpreting the lessons of the NGOs to match their personal needs. Beck uses this dynamic-in which the goals of the developers and women do not often overlap-to theorize development projects as social interactions in which policymakers, workers, and beneficiaries critically shape what happens on the ground. This book displaces the notion that development projects are top-down northern interventions into a passive global south by offering a provocative account of how local conditions, ongoing interactions, and even fundamental tensions inherent in development work allow such projects to persist, but in new and unexpected ways.

It has become commonplace to observe the growing pervasiveness and impact of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). And yet the three central approaches in International Relations (IR) theory, Liberalism, Realism and Constructivism, overlook or ignore the importance of NGOs, both theoretically and politically. Offering a timely reappraisal of NGOs, and a parallel reappraisal of theory in IR-the academic discipline entrusted with revealing and explaining world politics, this book uses practice theory, global governance, and new institutionalism to theorize NGO accountability and analyze the history of NGOs. This study uses evidence from empirical data from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and from studies that range across the issue-areas of peacebuilding, ethnic reconciliation, and labor rights to show IR theory has often prejudged and misread the agency of NGOs. Drawing together a group of leading international relations theorists, this book explores the frontiers of new research on the role of such forces in world politics and is required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are ubiquitous in the Global South. Often international in origin, many attempt to assist local efforts to improve the lives of people often living in or near poverty. Yet their external origins often cloud their ability to impact health or quality of life, regardless of whether volunteers are local or foreign. By focusing on one particular type of NGO-those organized to help prevent the spread and transmission of HIV in Kenya-Megan Hershey interrogates the ways these organizations achieve (or fail to achieve) their planned outcomes. Along the way, she examines the slippery slope that is often used to define "success" based on meeting donor-set goals versus locally identified needs. She also explores the complex network of bureaucratic requirements at both the national and local levels that affect the delicate relationships NGOs have with the state. Drawing on extensive, original quantitative and qualitative research, Whose Agency serves as a much-needed case study for understanding the strengths and shortcomings of participatory development and community engagement.

The Syrian war has been an example of the abuse and insufficient delivery of humanitarian assistance. According to international practice, humanitarian aid should be channelled through a state government that bears a particular responsibility for its population. Yet in Syria, the bulk of relief went through Damascus while the regime caused the vast majority of civilian deaths. Should the UN have severed its cooperation with the government and neglected its humanitarian duty to help all people in need? Decision-makers face these tough policy dilemmas, and often the "neutrality trap" snaps shut. This book discusses the political and moral considerations of how to respond to a brutal and complex crisis while adhering to international law and practice. The author, a scholar and senior diplomat involved in the UN peace talks in Geneva, draws from first-hand diplomatic, practitioner and UN sources. He sheds light on the UN's credibility crisis and the wider implications for the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. This includes covering the key questions asked by Western diplomats, NGOs and international organizations, such as: Why did the UN not confront the Syrian government more boldly? Was it not only legally correct but also morally justifiable to deliver humanitarian aid to regime areas where rockets were launched and warplanes started? Why was it so difficult to render cross-border aid possible where it was badly needed? The meticulous account of current international practice is both insightful and disturbing. It tackles the painful lessons learnt and provides recommendations for future challenges where politics fails and humanitarians fill the moral void.

Civil society organizations, nonprofits, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and a variety of formal and informal associations have coalesced into a world political force. Though the components of this so-called third sector vary by country, their cumulative effects play an ever-greater role in global affairs. Looking at relief and welfare organizations, innovation organizations, social networks, and many other kinds of groups, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark explore the functions, impacts, and composition of the nonprofit sector in six key countries. Chinese organizations, for example, follow the predominantly Asian model of government funding that links their mission to national political goals. Western groups, by contrast, often explicitly challenge government objectives, and even gain relevance and cache by doing so. In addition, Kallman and Clark examine groups in real-world contexts, providing a wealth of political-historical background, in-depth consideration of interactions with state institutions, region-by-region comparisons, and suggestions for how groups can borrow policy options across systems. Insightful and forward-seeing, The Third Sector provides a rare international view of organizations and agendas driving change in today's international affairs.

In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape. With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects-notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum-and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence-and a model of how things could be.

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.

This volume presents the first global history of human rights politics in the age of decolonization. The conflict between independence movements and colonial powers shaped the global human rights order that emerged after the Second World War. It was also critical to the genesis of contemporary human rights organizations and humanitarian movements. Anti-colonial forces mobilized human rights and other rights language in their campaigns for self-determination. In response, European empires harnessed the new international politics of human rights for their own ends, claiming that their rule, with its promise of 'development,' was the authentic vehicle for realizing them. Ranging from the postwar partitions and the wars of independence to Indigenous rights activism and post-colonial memory, this volume offers new insights into the history and legacies of human rights, self-determination, and empire to the present day.

How can nonprofit organizations and NGOs demonstrate accountability to stakeholders and show that they are using funds appropriately and delivering on their promises? Many nonprofit stakeholders, including funders and regulators, have few opportunities to observe nonprofit internal management and policies. Such information deficits make it difficult for 'principals' to differentiate credible nonprofits from less credible ones. This volume examines a key instrument employed by nonprofits to respond to these challenges: voluntary accountability clubs. These clubs are voluntary, rule-based governance systems created and sponsored by nongovernmental actors. By participating in accountability clubs, nonprofits agree to abide by certain rules regarding internal governance in order to send a signal of quality to key principals. Nonprofit voluntary programs are relatively new but are spreading rapidly across the globe. This book investigates how the emergence, design, and success of such initiatives vary across a range of sectors and institutional contexts in the United States, the Netherlands, Africa, and Central Europe.

This book presents a rigorous empirical study of various aspects of poverty alleviation in rural Bangladesh. The themes include the trend and structure of rural poverty and the role of microfinance in alleviating rural poverty through participation of the rural poor in NGOs and microfinance institutions (MFIs). It also includes different challenges of participation of rural poor women in NGO-MFIs. In probing those issues, this book employs a different approach of investigation. In comparison with other poverty studies, this book can claim a number of distinct features. First, this book probes the participation behavior of rural poor women who face different socioeconomic, cultural and psycho-attitudinal challenges to participate in NGO-MFIs which ultimately prevented the attainment of the prime objective of poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. In analyzing those issues, this book uses a social psychological theory named the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical model upon which the research framework was grounded upon. Second, unlike other studies which are based on relatively small and unrepresentative samples, this book is based on a nationally representative large-scale survey. Third, even though it employs a cross-sectional survey, the study explored in this book attempts to infuse an element of dynamics by employing information on both current and initial condition of resources of households being defined as the resource-base a household had inherited at the time it was formed. This type of data-set helped analyze the dynamics of resource adequacy of the participants in NGO-MFIs which yielded key insights into the challenges of poverty alleviation. Fourth, a concern with the possible influence of microfinance in the economy runs as an intrinsic theme throughout the book. In addition to devoting a long chapter of emergence of NGO-MFIs in Bangladesh, the author analyzes the role of microfinance in its specific contexts in each subsequent chapter, for example, in shaping the trends in poverty, inequality, resource accumulation and in influencing participation of the rural poor in NGO-MFIs and in affecting the ability of the rural poor to be free from poverty and to cope with environmental shocks. Some remarks on possible prospects or recommendations are provided at the end of the book.

The threats the world currently faces extend beyond traditional problems such as major power competition, interstate conflict, and nuclear proliferation. Non-traditional security challenges such as climate change, migration, and natural disasters surpass states' capacity to address them. These limitations have led to the proliferation of other actors-regional and international organizations, transnational networks, local and international nongovernmental organizations-that fill the gaps when states' responses are lacking and provide security in places where there is none. In this book, Mely Caballero-Anthony examines how non-traditional security challenges have changed state behavior and security practices in Southeast Asia and the wider East Asia region. Referencing the wide range of transborder security threats confronting Asia today, she analyzes how non-state actors are taking on the roles of "security governors," engaging with states, regional organizations, and institutional frameworks to address multifaceted problems. From controlling the spread of pandemics and transboundary pollution, to managing irregular migration and providing relief and assistance during humanitarian crises, Caballero-Anthony explains how and why non-state actors have become crucial across multiple levels-local, national, and regional-and how they are challenging regional norms and reshaping security governance. Combining theoretical discussions on securitization and governance with a detailed and policy-oriented analysis of important recent developments, Negotiating Governance on Non-Traditional Security in Southeast Asia and Beyond points us toward "state-plus" governance, where a multiplicity of actors form the building blocks for multilateral cooperative security processes to meet future global challenges.

"Nonprofit organizations are playing an increasingly important role in delivering basic government services. Yet they are discouraged by federal law from participating in legislative lobbying efforts-even on issues that affect their clients directly. Without the involvement of nonprofits in the governmental process, the vulnerable populations they serve are left without effective representation in the political system. A Voice for Nonprofits analyzes the effect of government restrictions on the participation of nonprofits in the policymaking process and suggests ways to address the problems. The relationship between nonprofits and the government is ideal in many respects, according to Jeffrey M. Berry and David F. Arons. By underwriting operating budgets and subcontracting the administration of programs to nonprofits, governments at all levels are able to take advantage of nonprofits' dedication, imagination, and private fund-raising skills. However, as nonprofits assume greater responsibility for delivering services traditionally provided by government, that responsibility is not matched by a congruous increase in policy influence. Berry and Arons believe the lobbying restrictions should be eased so that nonprofits may become more involved in public policymaking. Their recommendations are designed to ensure that nonprofit organizations-and the constituencies they serve-are effectively represented in the American political system. "

Behind India's high recent growth rates lies a story of societal conflict that is scarcely talked about. Across its villages and production sites, state institutions and civil society organisations, the dominant and less well-off sections of society are engaged in antagonistic relations that determine the material conditions of one quarter of the world's 'poor'. Increasingly mobile and often with several jobs in multiple locations, India's 'classes of labour' are highly segmented but far from passive in the face of ongoing exploitation and domination. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in rural South India, the book uses a 'class-relational' approach to analyse continuity and change in processes of accumulation, exploitation and domination. By focusing on the three interrelated arenas of labour relations, the state and civil society, it explores how improvements can be made in the conditions of labourers working 'at the margins' of global production networks, primarily as agricultural labourers and construction workers. Elements of social policy can improve the poor's material conditions and expand their political space where such ends are actively pursued by labouring class organisations. More fundamental change, though, requires stronger organisation of the informal workers who make up the majority of India's population. -- .