NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

(Redirected from Non-governmental)

A 'non-governmental organization' ('NGO') is a private institution that is independent of the government although many NGOs, particular in the global South, are funded by Northern governments. Anheier places the number of internationally operating NGOs at 40,000.^[1] National numbers are even higher: Russia has 400,000 NGOs.^[2] India is estimated to have between 1 and 2 million NGOs.^[3]

History

International non-governmental organizations have a history dating back to at least the mid-nineteenth century.^[4] They were important in the anti-slavery movement and the movement for women's suffrage, and reached a peak at the time of the World Disarmament Conference.^[5] However, the phrase "non-governmental organization" only came into popular use with the establishment of the United Nations Organization in 1945 with provisions in Article 71 of Chapter 10 of the United Nations Charter^[6] for a consultative role for organizations which are neither governments nor member states – see Consultative Status. The definition of "international NGO" (INGO) is first given in resolution 288 (X) of ECOSOC on February 27, 1950: it is defined as "any international organisation that is not founded by an international treaty". The vital role of NGOs and other "major groups" in sustainable development was recognized in Chapter 27^[7] of Agenda 21, leading to intense arrangements for a consultative relationship between the United Nations and non-governmental organizations.^[8]
Globalization during the 20th century gave rise to the importance of NGOs. Many problems could not be solved within a nation. International treaties and international organizations such as the World Trade Organization were perceived as being too centered on the interests of capitalist enterprises. Some argued that in an attempt to counterbalance this trend, NGOs have developed to emphasize humanitarian issues, developmental aid and sustainable development. A prominent example of this is the World Social Forum which is a rival convention to the World Economic Forum held annually in January in Davos, Switzerland. The fifth World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2005 was attended by representatives from more than 1,000 NGOs. Some have argued that in forums like this NGOs take the place that should belong to popular movements of the poor. Others argue that NGOs are often imperialist in nature and that they fulfil a similar function to that of the clergy during the high colonial era.

Types

Apart from 'NGO' often alternative terms are used as for example independent sector, volunteer sector, civil society, grassroots organizations, transnational social movement organizations, private voluntary organizations, self-help organizations and non-state actors (NSAs).
Nongovernmental organizations are a heterogeneous group. A long list of acronyms has developed around the term 'NGO'.
These include:
'
★ INGO' stands for international NGO, such as Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières;
'
★ BINGO' is short for business-oriented international NGO;

★ ENGO, short for environmental NGO, such as Global 2000;

★ GONGOs are government-operated NGOs, which may have been set up by governments to look like NGOs in order to qualify for outside aid or promote the interests of the government in question;

★ QUANGOs are quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). (The ISO is actually not purely an NGO, since its membership is by nation, and each nation is represented by what the ISO Council determines to be the 'most broadly representative' standardization body of a nation. That body might itself be a nongovernmental organization; for example, the United States is represented in ISO by the American National Standards Institute, which is independent of the federal government. However, other countries can be represented by national governmental agencies; this is the trend in Europe.)

★ TANGO, short for technical assistance NGO;
There are also numerous classifications of NGOs. The typology the World Bank uses divides them into Operational and Advocacy:^[9]
The primary purpose of an operational NGO is the design and implementation of development-related projects. One frequently used categorization is the division into 'relief-oriented' or 'development-oriented' organizations; they can also be classified according to whether they stress service delivery or participation; or whether they are religious or secular; and whether they are more public or private-oriented. Operational NGOs can be community-based, national or international.
The primary purpose of an Advocacy NGO is to defend or promote a specific cause. As opposed to operational project management, these organizations typically try to raise awareness, acceptance and knowledge by lobbying, press work and activist events.
USAID refers to NGOs as ''private voluntary organizations''. However many scholars have argued that this definition is highly problematic as many NGOs are in fact state and corporate funded and managed projects with professional staff.
NGOs exist for a variety of reasons, usually to further the political or social goals of their members or funders. Examples include improving the state of the natural environment, encouraging the observance of human rights, improving the welfare of the disadvantaged, or representing a corporate agenda. However, there are a huge number of such organizations and their goals cover a broad range of political and philosophical positions. This can also easily be applied to private schools and athletic organizations.

Methods

NGOs vary in their methods. Some act primarily as lobbyists, while others conduct programs and activities primarily. For instance, an NGO such as Oxfam, concerned with poverty alleviation, might provide needy people with the equipment and skills to find food and clean drinking water.

Public relations

Non-governmental organizations need healthy relationships with the public to meet their goals. Foundations and charities use sophisticated public relations campaigns to raise funds and employ standard lobbying techniques with governments. Interest groups may be of political importance because of their ability to influence social and political outcomes. At times NGOs seek to mobilize public support.

Consulting

Many international NGOs have a consultative status with United Nations agencies relevant to their area of work. As an example, the Third World Network has a consultative status with the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). While in 1946, only 41 NGOs had consultative status with the ECOSOC, by 2003 this number had risen to 3550.

Project management

There is an increasing awareness that management techniques are crucial to project success in non-governmental organizations.^[10]
Generally, non-governmental organizations that are private have either a community or environmental focus. They address varieties of issues such as religion, emergency aid, or humanitarian affairs. They mobilize public support and voluntary contributions for aid; they often have strong links with community groups in developing countries, and they often work in areas where government-to-government aid is not possible. NGOs are accepted as a part of the international relations landscape, and while they influence national and multilateral policy-making, increasingly they are more directly involved in local action.

Management

Two management trends are particularly relevant to NGOs: diversity management and participatory management. Diversity management deals with different cultures in an organization. Intercultural problems are prevalent in Northern NGOs which are engaged in developmental activities in the South. Personnel coming from a rich country are faced with a completely different approach of doing things in the target country. A participatory management style is said to be typical of NGOs. It is intricately tied to the concept of a learning organization: all people within the organization are perceived as sources for knowledge and skills. To develop the organization, individuals have to be able to contribute in the decision making process and they need to learn.

Staffing

Not all people working for non-governmental organizations are volunteers. Paid staff members typically receive lower pay than in the commercial private sector. Employees are highly committed to the aims and principles of the organization. The reasons people volunteer are not necessarily purely altruistic, and can provide immediate benefits for themselves as well as those they serve, including skills, experience, and contacts.
There is some dispute as to whether expatriates should be sent to developing countries. Frequently this type of personnel is employed to satisfy a donor who wants to see the supported project managed by someone from an industrialized country. However, the expertise these employees or volunteers may have can be counterbalanced by a number of factors: the cost of foreigners is typically higher, they have no grassroot connections in the country they are sent to, and local expertise is often undervalued.⁹
The NGO sector is an important employer in terms of numbers. For example, by the end of 1995, CONCERN worldwide, an international Northern NGO working against poverty, employed 174 expatriates and just over 5,000 national staff working in ten developing countries in Africa and Asia, and in Haiti.

Funding

Large NGOs may have annual budgets in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. For instance, the budget of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) was over US$540 million in 1999.^[11]. Funding such large budgets demands significant fundraising efforts on the part of most NGOs. Major sources of NGO funding include membership dues, the sale of goods and services, grants from international institutions or national governments, and private donations. Several EU-grants provide funds accessible to NGOs.
Even though the term "non-governmental organization" implies independence from governments, some NGOs depend heavily on governments for their funding. A quarter of the US$162 million income in 1998 of the famine-relief organization Oxfam was donated by the British government and the EU. The Christian relief and development organization World Vision collected US$55 million worth of goods in 1998 from the American government. Nobel Prize winner Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (known in the USA as Doctors Without Borders) gets 46% of its income from government sources.^[12]

Monitoring and control

In a March 2000 report on United Nations Reform priorities, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote in favor of international humanitarian intervention, arguing that the international community has a "right to protect" citizens of the world against ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity. On the heels of the report, the Canadian government launched the Responsibility to Protect project, outlining the issue of humanitarian intervention. While the R2P doctrine has wide applications, among the more controversial has been the Canadian government's use of R2P to justify its intervention and support of the coup in Haiti.
Years after R2P, the World Federalist Movement, an organization which supports "the creation of democratic global structures accountable to the citizens of the world and call for the division of international authority among separate agencies", has launched Responsibility to Protect - Engaging Civil Society (R2PCS). A collaboration between the WFM and the Canadian government, this project aims to bring NGOs into lockstep with the principles outlined under the original R2P project.
NGO Monitor is a conservative pro-Israel site which aims to promote "critical debate and accountability of human rights NGOs in the Arab-Israeli conflict." The organization has successfully conducted campaigns against Oxfam and the Ford Foundation — leading to formal apologies and changes in practice — on the grounds that these organizations are too anti-Israeli.
NGOWatch is a project of the American Enterprise Institute which monitors NGOs. The project is primarily a negative analysis of NGOs which are considered to be on the progressive side of the political spectrum.
Indian NGOs is a portal of over 20,000 NGOs who work with the corporate sector in India. This portal offers insights into how the corporate sector is using NGOs to benefit their program.
In recent years, many large corporations have beefed up their Corporate Social Responsibility departments in an attempt to preempt NGO campaigns against certain corporate practices. As the logic goes, if corporations work ''with'' NGOs, NGOs will not work ''against'' corporations.

Legal status

NGOs are not legal entities under international law, as states are. An exception is the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is considered a legal entity under international law because it is based on the Geneva Convention.
The Council of Europe in Strasbourg drafted the European Convention on the Recognition of the Legal Personality of International Non-Governmental Organisations in 1986, which sets a common legal basis for the existence and work of NGOs in Europe. Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to freedom of association, which is also a fundamental norm for NGOs.

Citizen organization

There is a growing movement within the “non”-profit and “non”-government sector to define itself in a more constructive, accurate way. Instead of being defined by “non” words, organizations are suggesting new terminology to describe the sector. The term “civil society organization” (CSO) has been used by a growing number of organizations, such as The Center for the Study of Global Governance. ^[13] The term “citizen sector organization” (CSO) has also been advocated to describe the sector — as one of citizens, for citizens.^[14] This labels and positions the sector as its own entity, without relying on language used for the government or business sectors. However some have argued that this is not particularly helpful given that most NGOs are in fact funded by governments and business.

Notes

1. (Anheier et al, "Global Civil Society 2001", 2001)
2. http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/archive/2006-01/2006-01-27-voa2.cfm U.S. On Russian N-G-O Law ''Voice of America'' 27 January 2006
3. http://www.indianngos.com/ngosection/newcomers/whatisanngo.htm "What is an NGO?" 5 January 2007
4. The Rise and Fall of Transnational Civil Society Davies, Thomas Richard
5. The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: the Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars, , Thomas Richard, Davies, , 2007,
6. http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapt10.htm
7. http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/a21-27.htm
8. http://www.un.org/documents/ecosoc/res/1996/eres1996-31.htm
9. http://docs.lib.duke.edu/igo/guides/ngo/define.htm World Bank Criteria defining NGO
10. Mukasa, Sarah. ''Are expatriate staff necessary in international development NGOs? A case study of an international NGO in Uganda.'' Publication of the Centre for Civil Society at London School of Economics. 2002, p. 11-13.

11. Poll shows power of AIPAC drops slightly
12. http://www.intractableconflict.org/m/role_ngo.jsp ''Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project'' of the Conflict Research Consortium at the University of Colorado
13. :Glasius, Marlies, Mary Kaldor and Helmut Anheier (eds.) "Global Civil Society 2006/7". London: Sage, 2005.
14. Drayton, W: "Words Matter". Alliance Magazine, Vol. 12/No.2, June 2007

External links

★ Grant-Proposal Guidelines and Their Effects on NGO Programming: An Intern's Perspective in Cambodia - University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development

★ Duke University NGO Library

★ Global Policy Forum: The site includes the history of NGOs and various articles.

★ Congo - Conference of NGOs in consultative relationship with the United Nations

★ UN NGLS - UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service

★ London School of Economics International Working Paper Series on NGOs

★ World Bank Criteria defining NGO (Note: This links to a page of outdated information. Updated World Bank definitions are necessary).

★ What is a Non-Governmental Organization? City University, London

★ Interaction: largest alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations

★ Directory of Irish based international NGOs

★ Community NI: Northern Ireland's voluntary and community sector online

★ Canada: Ottawa: Detailed NGO contact list with career and job pages

★ directory of development organizations 2007

★ Article on NGOs by James Petras

★ Video showing South African shack dwellers marching on a local NGO

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NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

History

Types

Methods

Public relations

Consulting

Project management

Management

Staffing

Funding

Monitoring and control

Legal status

Citizen organization

See also

Notes

Further reading

External links

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