Western-Backed NGOs: A Hollow Version of Civil Society https://jacobin.com/2025/02/western-ngos-funding-civil-society Byv
Almut Rochowanski ..deploying their vast fortunes to pursue their own ideas of what ails the world and how to fix it, creating entire countries’ NGO sectors from scratch, micromanaging them with armies of program officers, and, as the ultimate prize, capturing policymaking in the countries targeted by their munificence..
After World War II, in parallel to decolonization, NGOs — tellingly, “nongovernmental organizations” — rose slowly but unstoppably to become one of the main players in international development aid, because donor countries did not trust the (Third World) state with social and economic agendas...
Western legislative traditions going back to the nineteenth century reflected the classic civil right of freedom of association and thus provided a regulatory framework for associations in the literal sense: people coming together as members of a club or union, taking action primarily through members’ volunteer activities to benefit each other or the common good, funded by default by membership fees. The NGOs that Western governments finance with their development aid budgets look nothing like this, but more like start-ups run by social entrepreneurs. Instead of members and volunteers, they have bosses and employees organized in strict hierarchies, and hard borders separate those who build lucrative careers managing NGOs from those who benefit from their assistance.
Since last year, the European Commission has been hammering out a new directive on “transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries,” which explicitly includes NGOs as the carriers of such “interest representation.” ..
Without foreign grant funding, the majority of NGOs in the Global South would not exist at all. ... Without foreign financing, the NGO sector would have never generated a high-earning, aloof upper class, similar to that of investment bankers and management consultants in the West.
https://discomfortzone.substack.com/p/western-backed-ngos-a-hollow-version
https://www.cruz.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letters/20170314_Letter%20toTillersononMacedoniaUSAID.pdf