Season 2 Ep. 2 - INTL' NGOs: What You Need to Know

CHARLOTTE TATE
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury Scholars and others on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game. From big tech, environmental conservation, and global security to religion, culture, and changing  work patterns.  In this episode, Mark Williams speaks with political scientist Sarah Stroup about her research on international non-governmental organizations. What they are, how they operate, and some of the ways their domestic environment can affect their work on the global stage.

SARAH STROUP
The NGO community is very active in humanitarian relief, in natural disasters, and in civil conflicts. In the United States and worldwide, the NGO sector has grown substantially.  

MARK WILLIAMS
So says Sarah Stroup, one of the leading experts on international non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Whenever there are natural disasters—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, drought—or man-made ones—wars, conflict—or human development needs—healthcare, nutrition, education—governments and states aren’t the only ones to respond and try to help. Non-governmental organizations—or “NGOs”—do too. Some NGOs can be really important actors on the world stage. But what do we really know about these organizations and their operations?  What might they be doing or be unable to do, in a country like Ukraine, where many people are suffering and there are dire needs, and yet the war that Russia unleashed impedes their work?

I couldn’t wait to talk to my guest about some of these things. As a political scientist, Sarah has written extensively about international non-governmental organizations—here in the United State as well as in Britain, France, and elsewhere.  Sarah also directs the Katherine Davis Collaboration in Conflict Transformation here at Middlebury College. With war raging in Ukraine, and humanitarian crises and pressing development sometimes outpacing governments’ ability to address them—I thought Sarah’s research could help us better understand what NGO’s are as organizations; what they do as actors on the world stage; and how different factors might affect their operations. I started by asking about basic definitions: what is a non-governmental organization? And are we talking about things like the European Union and World Bank, or does the term refer to something else?

SARAH STROUP
Non-governmental organizations as a term is actually a really big category. Many of us interact with NGOs on a daily basis. For those of us in Addison County, Vermont, we might donate or give some of our time to the John Graham Shelter or to the Charter House, two organizations working on homelessness. These are local NGOs. They’re nonprofit organizations set up by private citizens that are trying to engage in some public benefit activity. Helping solve some social problem. You mentioned the European Union and the World Bank. These are also public benefit organizations but at the global level; these are groups that are set up by states. States have established them. States are the members of them. They tend to be a lot bigger in terms of their reach, but also their bureaucracy. Private NGOs are generally smaller, but also perhaps a little bit more flexible and entrepreneurial.

MARK WILLIAMS
Okay. So we’re talking about a distinction between organizations that are initiated and founded by states and the members are states themselves and those which aren’t.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly.

MARK WILLIAMS
Sarah’s point about local NGOS—like those at the county level here in Addison County, Vermont—made me wonder what the broader NGO sector across the United States looks like. How many organizations might comprise the NGO sector here in the US, and how would that compare with other NGO sectors we might see in other countries around the rest of the world?

SARAH STROUP
The United States is one of the most supportive environments in the world for NGOs. And some people might use the term “civil society organizations” instead of nonprofits or NGOs, but we’re largely talking about the same thing here. In the United States, many of us see social problems and we try to self-organize to solve them. Alexis de Tocqueville noted this in his 1840 book, Democracy in America. The political culture in the United States encourages us to come together in private associations and then use those private associations to provide food or housing or education or other things. So there’s a great regulatory structure, a great political culture that supports nonprofits and civil society organizations. And as a result, the NGO sector in the United States is the largest in the world.

MARK WILLIAMS
Really?

SARAH STROUP
Yes. The United States spends something like two percent of gross national income on private charitable giving. I think even given the disruptions to the economy of the pandemic, 480 billion dollars were given in charitable giving in 2021.

MARK WILLIAMS
Over 400-plus billion went into NGOs?

SARAH STROUP
Into NGOs. Just things that you and I give to our schools, to our churches and mosques, to local organizations in our community. As a result, there are millions of nonprofits in the United States. A recent count put this at 1.5 million nonprofits. Roughly about two percent of those are international nonprofits.

MARK WILLIAMS
Okay, great. And how does that compare with the rest of the world?

SARAH STROUP
There are many countries that have robust civil society organizations and great, huge nonprofit sectors. However, none of them really compare in size to the United States. We, of course, are a large country with a big economy. And so having a large set of charitable donations in this country has an echo effect around the world.  But maybe the next largest country in terms of philanthropic donations is Britain. They only spend maybe less than one percent of their gross national income on charitable giving. So as a share of the economy, the civil society sector is much greater in the United States than around the world.

MARK WILLIAMS
If a snapshot of contemporary America revealed an NGO sector significantly larger than that found in any other country, I wondered what a more temporal view might disclose? Were there any significant world events that happened at critical times, which could have helped fuel the growth of NGOs at home and abroad? And have these dynamics had any appreciable effects on what some have called the global civil society?

SARAH STROUP
In the United States and worldwide, the NGO sector has grown substantially. Part of this has to do with the power of, kind of the Anglo model of powerful civil societies in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere. Part of it has to do with the end of the Cold War and the excitement about the spread of liberalism around the world; US foreign aid, global donors at the end of the Cold War supported the expansion of civil society sectors in many different countries. So the NGO sector has grown on its own, but also with the support of powerful northern states and international organizations. This has created some interesting dynamics, but also tensions. The resources of the global civil society sector have been historically concentrated in the global north. But as the global civil society sector has expanded, and those resources have been transferred to the global south, many of those organizations have become more powerful, have been empowered to speak for themselves.

MARK WILLIAMS
Coming out from under the shadow of the global north.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly, exactly. So one response to this has been the growth of southern based NGOs. One example of this is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee or BRAC, which is a big development NGO. Another response has been for northern NGOs to deal with criticism that they’re kind of recolonizing the global south, right? That they’re claiming to speak on behalf of others. And so southern NGOs have spoken up for more space in big decision-making organizations at the international level and more direct access to resources.

MARK WILLIAMS
Do you think that they have a point? Has your research helped you conclude one way or the other, whether this critique has merit?

SARAH STROUP
It definitely has merit in terms of the varied capacity of NGOs to represent the interests of those that they are trying to serve. Some organizations are better than others at doing that, and so it’s a totally fair criticism. The other point I think that’s come out of this discussion is a bigger conversation about what makes civil society actors legitimate. Why should we listen to them or give our donations to them or allow them to participate in policy circles? And one of the reasons to do that is because people have local expertise and knowledge in terms of what their needs are. And so we should allow them to speak for themselves and make requests of what would best serve their communities.

MARK WILLIAMS
They might actually know what they’re talking about because they experience it. Okay. By the way, before we go any further, I wanted to ask with all of the things that one could study in international relations, how did you first get interested in studying NGOs? What was it that kindled your interest or your curiosity in this topic? What drew you to it?

SARAH STROUP
I love this question because I want to ask it of all of our colleagues as well. Right? How did we find our corner of scholarship? I went to Berkeley for grad school and when I was making my plans to go there, I actually thought that I was going to study Chinese foreign policy. Being on the West Coast was a great place to do that. And I was really interested in economic development and foreign affairs. I started graduate school in September 2001 and the second week of classes was 9/11. In our field, in international relations, I saw–I don’t know what you saw, Mark–but I really felt like there was a sea change in our conversation of moving from a rather exclusive focus on what states do, to thinking about the power of non-state actors. For 9/11 of course, it was terrorist organizations that were drawing our attention, but it fed into a larger conversation about the role of multinational corporations, the role of violent non-state actors, and then also the role of NGOs. So I started doing some research with a professor about non-state actors and the history of their involvement. And from my perspective, we knew relatively less about NGOs than some of these other groups. And I wanted to dig in.

MARK WILLIAMS
Well, I can see how 9/11 would have a tremendous impact on the field and on the trajectory of your research.

In both her own book on international NGOs—called Borders Among Activists: International NGOs in the United States, Britain, and France—and in a second book she co-authored, called The Authority Trap—Sarah has argued that domestic factors often influence an NGO’s operational norms, and can affect its activities in significant ways.  I wanted to ask her about something she wrote more recently.  It’s an article called “Domestic Constraints on the Global Impact of US Development Transnational NGOs”, that was published in the journal Development in Practice.  And in this article, she writes that NGOs, quote “exist simultaneously as global and national actors,” unquote; and that they actually have, quote “both transnational and national identities.”  Unquote. I asked Sarah if she could elaborate on this a bit more, and why she thinks it matters.  Her answers gave me a deeper appreciation for how an organization’s domestic origins might influence its work on the world stage.

SARAH STROUP
When you dig into the activities at the international NGOs, their global scope is truly impressive. Looking at Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam, Care, Human Rights Watch.

MARK WILLIAMS
WWF being?

SARAH STROUP
Previously the World Wildlife Fund but a major environmental group. These organizations have activities in dozens of countries. And you might think that because of their global scope, they have cosmopolitan  identities. They have cosmopolitan practices. From my research, it is true that working in many different contexts allows NGOs to develop relationships, to develop networks, to have new knowledge and that can help them be highly effective in many different contexts. But transnational NGOs don’t drop out of the sky fully formed as global groups. They have, like superheroes, origin stories, right? They grow out of a particular place. Usually a small group of people just trying to tackle one problem. An example of this is OXFAM. OXFAM was started in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. They were responding to famine in Europe caused by blockades during World War II. The argument that I’ve been making for a while is that when these small groups become bigger groups, they don’t lose those roots. Their origin stories create durable identities, habits, practices. And when those organizations go out into the world, they take those habits, those ideas, those practices with them.

MARK WILLIAMS
Your article really focuses on American international NGOs, U.S. based NGOs. And one of the big arguments that it makes is that the NGOs that are based here in the United States operate in what you call a unique cultural environment. And so I have two questions here that I want to ask. First, what is this cultural environment that you’re talking about in the article here in the United States, what’s it consist of? And second, why does that matter? How does this cultural environment affect NGO behavior or NGO practices?

SARAH STROUP
Anyone who studies culture knows that this is a fraught term. There’s a lot of possible meanings, but maybe I’ll  try to put a little meat on the bones here of what I mean by that cultural environment. The first is the Tocquevillian notion that I referred to earlier. That when Americans see social problems, there’s a presumption that we each have the capacity to address those, right. And perhaps do so collectively, but that we don’t need the state to do it. And that’s a nice contrast that a lot of political scientists like to make between a more pluralist orientation or a statist orientation. Here in the United States, that giant civil society sector is a reflection of the cultural idea that it doesn’t have to be a central authority that deals with a diverse array of social problems. In addition to that idea of self-organization, there is a privileging of what I would say are market oriented concerns around efficiency. It’s more about getting the most bang for your buck, right? Being as efficient as possible. It yields this really interesting pattern in the United States where you have for-profit, non-profit and state actors all tackling the same thing. Right?

MARK WILLIAMS
Can you give me an example of what that might look like?

SARAH STROUP
Yes. If you were interested in building schools in Pakistan, you could have a U.S. NGO trying to do it. You could have a for-profit corporation, and you might have the U.S. Aid Agency, USAID, all engaging in those. The market logic here, I think, is that competition yields new innovations and that the best model will win out here. What I think is the interesting contrast is that there isn’t a hierarchy here. That all those different actors, market actors, nonprofit actors, state actors, are all working sometimes in concert, sometimes in competition, but they’re all working alongside one another. And that isn’t something that happens in other contexts necessarily. That means there’s tons of space for nonprofit actors to act in the United States. But it also means maybe it’s a little bit fragmented, a little bit competitive. It truly is a marketplace of nonprofits.

MARK WILLIAMS
So all of these actors are acting more or less in accordance with the efficiency principle.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly.

MARK WILLIAMS
Well, many NGOs like Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders are household names. For the most part I think that these kinds of organizations have good reputations. People tend to see them as well-meaning actors. Is this conventional wisdom about NGOs accurate? Is it good? Or are there any problems with this kind of conventional view?

SARAH STROUP
It’s a great question. And one of the fun and interesting challenges of teaching courses about NGOs is that we don’t come into these conversations with a blank slate, right? We have prior knowledge or concerns about NGOs. One of the things that I found in conversation with students, the research supports as well, is that people tend to trust NGOs.  Maybe more than they would trust the media or businesses or the government. There’s this wonderful survey instrument called the Edelman Trust Barometer that asks people, in I think as many as 40 countries today, who they trust the most. And for years, NGOs–in 36 out of 38 countries–NGOs were reported to be the most highly trusted institution in their countries. It is interesting and I guess we’re kind of taking NGOs on their word when they say that they work for public benefit. Great. That maybe seems to be more valuable or laudable than what state media or businesses do. That conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily bad. I think the challenge is when people go from that on-average assumption, that NGOs might be more trustworthy to thinking about particular organizations. So it’s not that people shouldn’t trust NGOs, but rather that perhaps we might get ourselves in trouble if we think that NGOs are different, just because they’re nonprofits. Governments, corporations, NGOs, these are all organizations.

MARK WILLIAMS
Organizations that have their own interests as well.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly.

MARK WILLIAMS
When you talked about the trust barometer and the exceptional level of trust that’s invested in NGOs, is there a differentiation between domestic versus international NGOs?

SARAH STROUP
That’s a great question. The trust barometer does not divide those up. And I think it would vary a lot by country to think about which NGOs are most salient in people’s minds when they’re answering survey questions like that. In the United States, one of the things that’s really interesting about this environment is there is not as much attention to international causes, which as an IR scholar, I find really surprising given the global scope of US power, right?

MARK WILLIAMS
Yes. And given how often international issues affect us domestically anyway.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly. So I think, you know, if you ask that survey question in the United States, most people are thinking about domestic NGOs. If you ask that question in Britain, international causes are one of the top five causes that get funded in Britain. There’s a lot of public attention to international affairs.

MARK WILLIAMS
One other question about the trust barometer, do you know whether the responses are capturing people’s perspectives towards charities versus NGOs? Are charities held in the same esteem, in other words, as NGOs are?

SARAH STROUP
That is also an interesting question. And one of the challenges of studying these organizations is that every country has a different language for speaking about these organizations. In the United States, we might say charities or nonprofits more frequently than we say, NGOs. Other countries might talk about philanthropies or talk about NGOs, or in France, associations. So the cross national survey is rather blunt, and I think just asks people about NGOs.

MARK WILLIAMS
They’re all sort of lumped together.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly. They’re all lumped together. But one of the fascinating things about thinking about civil society in different countries is that when you start digging into the very language that people use to describe the sector, you learn that people have different ideas about what good charitable activity looks like.

MARK WILLIAMS
Okay. So what does it mean that not all NGOs should be trusted? Are they pushing bad medicine, phony vaccines, bad science? Are you talking about something truly nefarious or something that’s worrisome, but less egregious?

SARAH STROUP
I think my argument is that NGOs don’t necessarily deserve our trust simply for being NGOs, rather than being state agencies or businesses. If we stop by learning that an organization is a nonprofit and say, oh great, that makes them worthy of my attention and donations and other things. I think that’s where the mistake is made. There are NGOs that do good work. There are NGOs that do bad work. One of the really interesting things about the high level of trust in NGOs is that that crosses the political spectrum. It crosses income levels. When we really get into it though, the NGO that you know and trust might be working at cross purposes from the NGO that I know and trust.

MARK WILLIAMS
So when you say some do good work and some do bad work, by good work, do you mean they are effective? Or do you mean it in a more valuating way?

SARAH STROUP
Thank you for pushing me on that. Here I would say some NGOs are more or less effective at achieving their stated mission. So, whether it’s providing housing or providing education. Middlebury College is actually an international NGO, given our global scope and nonprofit status. Over time, we might vary in our effectiveness. Relative to other institutions, we might be more or less effective. So the push that I think I and other NGO scholars have been making over the past decade-plus is to think about that wide variety of practice and effectiveness within the NGO community. Not to say that we shouldn’t support the NGO community, but rather to say, we shouldn’t just defer to them or accept that they’re trustworthy simply because they occupy this status as nonprofits.

MARK WILLIAMS
Right. I understand. Well, let’s see if we can try and make some of what we’ve been talking about a bit more concrete. Russia’s war against Ukraine: It’s unleashed a number of incredibly pressing problems from health and medical needs to an immigration crisis, a range of other problems. How do some of the issues that we’ve been talking about play out in a war theater like Ukraine in terms of the operations of NGOs that may be working there?

SARAH STROUP
It’s a great question. And I have thought about this a lot. The NGO community is very active in humanitarian relief,  in natural disasters, and in civil conflicts, and has been at the forefront of trying to respond to the crisis in Ukraine. There are a couple of things that we can see in the Ukraine crisis that are kind of emblematic of some larger challenges and issues in the NGO community. The first is, as I think all of us who read the news have seen, the media attention to Ukraine has simply been overwhelming. Now, part of that is because of the substantial suffering that is in Ukraine. Members of the Middlebury community are affected by this. The horrific stories of displacement and death and suffering are heart rending. The challenge is that media attention to what’s happening in Ukraine is not necessarily met by media attention to other places in the world where suffering is also awful. And here I am not trying to engage in some kind of ranking of suffering around the world, right? But rather note that NGOs are part of an information ecosystem that focuses our attention on some things rather than others. So one area of the world that’s received less attention is Yemen. Since the civil war started roughly seven years ago, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, maybe a hundred people have died a day in Yemen. Not from outright violence, but actually mostly from famine and economic disruption caused by the civil war. So the challenge, if you’re an NGO in this information ecosystem, is that you rely on outsiders for your resources, right? NGOs do not generate their own income. They need to get donations from people like you and me, from big government agencies, and UN agencies.

MARK WILLIAMS
And we in turn are being prepped and guided and directed by the type of news that we encounter and consume.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly, exactly. So that spotlight on one part of the world focuses resources and attention on Ukraine. Again, deservedly so, but also there are many other contexts that also deserve our attention and perhaps aren’t getting it. And unfortunately, NGOs are implicated in that because of the complex interests that we talked about earlier–organizational survival as well as serving NGO missions–NGOs make sure that their websites have a section that talks about the work that they’re doing in Ukraine, right? They’re trying to respond to the interests and sympathies that their donors have. Unfortunately, as a result that might shift their attention from other areas where they, where their work would be as well.

MARK WILLIAMS
So you have scarce resources and you have to determine how to allocate them. And one of the things that fuels the reallocation is what’s getting the most intention, what seems most intense and acute at the time.

SARAH STROUP
Another thing I’ll add about what’s shown up in the Ukraine crisis returns to a theme that we started with at the beginning of our conversation about inequality in the global civil society sector. When something like a war breaks out, as in Ukraine, big donors tend to go to their NGO partners that are the largest and best established. One example of this is the European Union, which has a humanitarian aid agency called ECHO. Our colleague Amy Yuen and I are writing a paper about this. And ECHO has established partnerships with a very small handful of northern-based NGOs. So it’s great. Big donors want to get their money out the door as quickly as possible to help beneficiaries in Ukraine. The complaint here is that they are sending that money through a very small group of already wealthy and well established organizations. And if in this case, you’re an organization in Ukraine, you might say, if your goal is to help Ukrainians, you should give that money directly to Ukrainian NGOs. Rather than the pass-through of these big global organizations.

MARK WILLIAMS
Right. Okay.  

MARK WILLIAMS
Sarah, you’ve been studying NGOs for a number of years now. You’ve written two books on a series of other articles about them and all your research about NGOs, what’s the most unexpected things, or the most surprising findings that you’ve discovered over the course of your research?

SARAH STROUP
It is always wonderful to be surprised. And I think that if we’re asking open-ended questions, we should be surprised sometimes, right, by what we find. For me, I think that the biggest surprise over the past few years has been to challenge my assumptions about what power gets you. If I think about the lens that we as IR scholars bring to the world, right? We might think in global politics that the biggest actors, the United States, Russia, China, the World Bank, the UN, these huge actors with tons of resources, they’re the ones that have the most influence. And I think that I took that assumption into my research on NGOs, initially. What I’ve learned that has been surprising is that for NGOs, maybe for other actors, we could extend this. But for NGOs, these big leading NGOs do have a huge global reach and way more money than other organizations. However, their influence is often limited by their need to maintain their authority, to maintain their political access and reputation with others. So the biggest NGOs, if they are regularly talking to government officials, they can’t go out on a limb too much politically because that will challenge those relationships, right? If they want to help lots of people around the world but media attention is focused in a particular place, right, they can’t alienate their donor audiences.

MARK WILLIAMS
They are constrained in ways that one wouldn’t anticipate despite the appearance, and maybe reality, of having a lot of influence, there are these constraints that are impinging upon their activities.

SARAH STROUP
Exactly, exactly. And that totally surprised me. Going into my last book project with Wendy Wong. She and I ultimately called this “the authority trap.” That these organizations with lots of resources and big reputations are trapped by their need to maintain that access to money and maintain that political access. There are smaller NGOs and maybe those reputational concerns are less substantial for them. But of course, that also means that they have less reach. Right? They are smaller. They have fewer audiences that defer to them. So I don’t know if that depresses or excites people who watch NGOs.

MARK WILLIAMS
But it wasn’t something you had anticipated when you began your research.

SARAH STROUP
Yes. I think I assumed that these leading NGOs would have the capacity to truly transform the political problems that they faced. And what we found is a lot of people listen to them, but they more often advance incremental change rather than radical transformation.

MARK WILLIAMS
Interesting. Interesting. That’s really fascinating. Well, we’ve been talking with political scientist Sarah Stroup about her research on international non-governmental organizations. Sarah, it’s been such a pleasure visiting with you. Thanks so much for spending time with us today on New Frontiers.

SARAH STROUP
Thanks so much for having me, Mark. I really appreciate it.

MARK WILLIAMS
Thanks.

ARJUN KUMAR
Professor Sarah Stroup grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where she became a devoted fan of the San Antonio Spurs, studied piano, was a member of her high school debate team, and then after graduating, joined the debate team at Dartmouth College. Outside of the classroom, students sometimes run into her hiking the trails with her giant rescue dog Woody, skiing at Middlebury’s Snow Bowl, or at the hip coffee shop, Vergennes Laundry.

MARK WILLIAMS
This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Our theme music is by Ketsa. If you like the show, leave us a rating or review on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode of New Frontiers. Thanks a lot.