Editor’s Note: In June 2015, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its second Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper presented there. To learn more about the research, readers can contact the paper’s author, Reza Hasmath ([email protected]).
(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
In theory, as the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a society increases, they will start to form a mature NGO sector that aims to help shape public policy. In practice, however, that process can unfold in ways that are varied and complex. Take China, which is now home to more than 500,000 registered NGOs (along with 1.5 million organizations that operate without clear legal status). Despite the impressive growth of this sector in recent decades, relatively few Chinese NGOs are inclined to act as independent agents of policy change.
More specifically, many NGOs in China lack a quality that is central to the identity of their counterparts in other countries—namely, a sense that they belong to a professional “epistemic community.” So argues Reza Hasmath, a lecturer in Chinese politics at Oxford University. An epistemic community, he explains, is a network of organizations that develop a shared base of knowledge and expertise in order to define and assess policy solutions in a given issue area.
Hasmath studied 102 NGOs that operate in four cities (Chongqing, Kunming, Nanjing, and Shanghai) and in a variety of fields (including education, environment, health, and welfare). Overall, according to his paper, representatives from just 28 percent of participating NGOs said that they “considered NGOs in China to be part of an epistemic community,” and 51 percent said that Chinese NGOs do not fit that description. Hasmath found significant regional variation in responses to this question: In Chongqing, 69 percent of interviewees said that NGOs are not part of an epistemic community, but in Kunming close to half (45 percent) of respondents affirmed the existence of such a community.
Instead of building or joining an epistemic community, NGO leaders in China tend to focus on establishing ties with government officials. Many of them, Hasmath says, believe that “to accomplish anything in the long term, [they] need to gain the trust of the state.”
Hasmath offers several reasons to account for these findings. One crucial factor, he suggests, is the difficulty of forming an NGO in China. Before an NGO can formally register with the state, it must find a government agency that will sponsor its application. But agencies have little incentive to sponsor groups because doing so might expose them to criticism and other adverse consequences. What’s more, an NGO can register in only one issue area—a limitation that “makes it much more difficult [for an organization] to scale up at a national level,” Hasmath notes.
Another factor involves the nature of the organizations in question. In China, social welfare groups make up 85 percent of all NGOs, and groups in that category must work closely with the state if they hope to achieve a meaningful impact.
Yet another factor is the short lifespan of most Chinese NGOs. On average, these organizations last only two years, in part because funding challenges and a lack of succession planning thwart their ability to last longer. “The environment is so tough that many of them don’t survive,” Hasmath says. Their lack of longevity, moreover, reinforces the difficulty that NGOs face in trying to become more professional.
Carolyn Hsu, an associate professor of sociology at Colgate University whose research also focuses on Chinese NGOs, says that Hasmath’s research “is important because it asks what NGOs are actually doing in China.” But she differs from Hasmath in how she interprets that research. The fact that these organizations aren’t forming self-aware epistemic communities “doesn’t mean that they are not changing society,” she suggests. It just means that their work “doesn’t fit a Western concept of what an NGO should do.”
Reza Hasmath, “The Role of Knowledge and Professionalization in the Development of Chinese NGOs.”
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.