(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Editor’s Note: In June 2014, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its inaugural Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper that was presented at the forum. To learn more about the paper, please email its author, Alison Schnable.
In 1990, there were about 900 US-founded nonprofit organizations that provided international development aid. Since then, more than 10,000 such non-governmental organizations have entered the field. Inexpensive international flights, the advent of email, and near-universal cell-phone coverage have enabled the proliferation of small, relatively low-budget organizations around the globe.
Recent research suggests that these new organizations are on the whole very different from the Oxfams and UNICEFs of yore. Most of them are less than 25 years old, were started by people who are neither international development professionals nor trained aid workers, and are sustained by volunteers rather than paid staff members, according to Allison Schnable, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Princeton University. “Because these are not bureaucratized, professional organizations, they are not approaching development in the same way as are the experts in [Washington] D.C.” and elsewhere, Schnable says.
In her work, Schnable distinguishes between two “narratives” that NGOs tend to use. Older, more traditional aid organizations follow an “elite” narrative that focuses on building legal and political institutions. That narrative is also prevalent in academic institutions and in official development agencies. Newer, more volunteer-driven organizations, meanwhile, promote a “popular” narrative that downplays institution building in favor of providing goods and services, or of developing the religious, educational, or economic capabilities of aid recipients.
“The [popular organizations] tend to see aid in terms of replicating the sort of mobility they’ve had in their own lives: What is it that’s missing in Tanzania that we have in my home town?” Schnable says. So they tend to provide resources that they perceive as lacking within a beneficiary community, or else—through education, business training, or religious instruction—they try to mold aid recipients into the kind of people who (in their view) can break out of the cycle of poverty. The “elite” narrative, by contrast, emphasizes the value of providing technical expertise and the role that competent, democratically accountable institutions play in providing aid. Elite groups, Schnable explains, “are concerned with how aid affects the government or the broader macro-economy” of a country.
To conduct her research, Schnable used IRS records to identify more than 11,000 US-founded NGOs that were active at the end of 2011. She also interviewed 43 people from five grassroots NGOs that she selected for in-depth case studies. For 150 organizations, moreover, she carried out a content analysis of each group’s website. Pairing that analysis with the IRS data, she studied the relationship between the age, the income level, and the approach to aid of the various NGOs in her sample. “What I saw on their websites, and especially in interviews with these grassroots organizations, is that they have much less interest in—and even a real impatience with—the [elite] institutions,” Schnable says. “Their idea seems to be that you have to provide these services now, develop these sorts of people now, and the rest will come later. It’s a real contrast to the ‘expert’ way of talking about aid today.”
That popular narrative can be very limited in scope, she observes: Groups that focus on immediately providing goods and services often unintentionally compromise broader goals because they undermine the growth of local institutions and they lack a blueprint for long-term sustainable development.
Ann Swidler, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that (to her knowledge) Schnable is the first scholar to categorize and analyze all US-founded NGOs. “As Schnable points out, these [newer grassroots organizations] often neglect factors—like political corruption and lack of physical infrastructure—that stand in the way of development,” Swidler says. “Well-intentioned volunteers and donors also assume that they can transform people simply by educating or ‘enlightening’ them about better ways to live. Most do not provide the sort of consistent, long-term material support that might really change people’s lives.”
Alison Schnable, “Exporting Bootstraps: Aid Narratives and Grassroots NGOs.”
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.