From Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and Ngos

From Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs

Ed. by Amanda Lashaw, Steven Sampson, and Christian Vannier

Under review with Univ of Alabama Press., November 2015

Presented at Roundtable on NGOgraphy, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, November 2015

Introductory chapterBy Steven Sampson Lund

INTRODUCTION: ENGAGEMENTS AND ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NGOS

In 1992, I took a few weeks leave from my university existencein Copenhagen to work as an EU consultantin Romania. I had been invited to joina team of Danish environmental engineers and consultants, their task being to provide “technical assistance” to Romania’s newly formed Ministry of Environment as part of Romania’s EU accession process. I was the only person in Denmark with any social science knowledge of Romania, having done ethnographic fieldwork there and written about Romanian affairs in the Danish press throughout the 1980s and later, and I spoke Romanian. So I joined this teamas the “the culture guy”, so to speak. It was my job to explain, mediate and assist in case there were conflicts between our Danish team and the Romanian staff in the ministry. Soon after our arrival in the Ministry, my boss commented on a very strange situation: upstairs on the third floor of the building, in the office right next to the Minister, satthe head of the major Romanian environmental NGO. Both the minister and this NGO leader were from the same political party, so we knew there was something political going on, perhaps a legacy from communist times when party and state were intertwined. But still, my boss complained: ‘What the hell was this?’ he lamented. ‘‘NGOs don’t belong inside a government ministry. In Denmark, the environmental organizations are not even allowed past the reception area.Steven, this is a ministry, we have to get this NGO guy out of here. Find out what these environmental protection NGOs are all about.’

So began my entry into the world of non-government organizations in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Since this trial by fire, I have participated in a variety of NGO and civil society development projects in Romania, Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia. I have been anappraisal consultant for donors looking to give money away, I have been asked to ‘map the NGO sector’, so that donors could ‘find NGOs we can trust’. I have monitoredNGO projects, trainedNGO staff, evaluatedNGOs programs, helped to set up a government-NGO partnership programs in Romania, worked on NGO law in Kosovo, set of NGO foundations in Albania and Kosovo, mapped NGOs in Bosnia, trained NGOs in how to deal with donors (read Marcel Mauss and invite them home for dinner), helped write slick grant proposals with the latest hot words (“governance”, “climate”, “gender mainstreaming”), and I have served as confidante and mentor to stressed out staff, ambitious NGO activists, newly stationed consultants and suspicious government officials. I have participated in hundreds of hours of meetings, consultations, discussions and intrigues in the NGO scene in the Balkans and home in Scandinavia, where the voluntary sector and NGOs are active in aid work and assistance to refugees and immigrants;and I have advised various cooperative projects between Scandinavian NGOs seeking reliable Balkan partners. While working for donors, I have been approached on the street by people seeking funds, had CVs stuffed into my hands, and fielded requests for NGO staff or their children to study in the West. I havealso been accused of being part of the notorious “Soros mafia” of NGOproject elites, and worse. And in the world of consulting,I have been suddenly hired, and then just as abruptly let go, by various consulting firmsor government donors who either did not like the advice I gave them or the reports I submitted.

In this “social life of projects” (Sampson 1996), some of the NGOs I helped start and evaluate continue today; others have folded long ago, their staff having become professionals in state organs or international NGOs, started their own consulting companies, or entered academia (invariably Central European University or The New School. Like many of the authors in this book, I have watched NGOs develop as organizations, but also made close relationships, even friendships, with individual NGO activists and professionals. And when I retreated to academia, I did what I could to reflect on, write about and teach about “The NGO Sector” as a world of its own.

Since entering the NGO world in the early 1990s, the context has changed drastically. What Bernal calls “NGO fever” has not subsided. Today, NGOs are more established, states now have NGO laws and regulations. There are monitoring systems for tracking NGO funding, there are public-private partnerships andNGOs doing social entrepreneurship. Former donors have left or moved on to more pressing funding in war zones and fragile states, NGO staff have become so professionalizedthat one can have NGO work not as a calling but as a career, including the master’s degree in non-profit management orNGOs studies. Finally, changes in the nature of the state, the labor market, and social services, taking place under the rubric of neoliberalism, have imposed new responsibilities on NGOs, and pushed them to act in more market oriented fashion. With the popular reaction to the economic crisis having spawned social movements, and the pressing needs of vulnerable groups segmented by class, race, gender, ethnicity, health or migration status, NGOs must maneuver between beingprofessional, having to represent a specific interest group as advocates, and as potential spearheads for social movements. It is this new scene that anthropologists have entered. And they have entered not simply as field researchers trying to identify social and cultural meanings and structures. They have entered as activists, helpers, employees and ultimately, critics. As fieldwork, NGO anthropology has become more messy, the zones of inside/outside, us/them, engagement/detachment increasingly grey. But the insights to be gained are multidimensional, if not profound.

What kind of world is the world of NGOs? If I were to use a single word, it would be that NGOs are a world of engagement. What distinguishes NGOs from the other kinds of social groups that we anthropologists study, the tribes, ethnic communities, workplaces, networks or organizations, is that we study organized engagement.NGO people are people with a project.

It is this world of engagement which is the subject of this collection of articles. NGOs have becomea world unto itself, for some even a way of life. And if anthropologists are supposed to do anything, it is to reveal what it means to be part of such an engaged world. I will not argue that NGO worlds are somehow more engaged than others. Similar issues arise if we study social movements, missionaries, cults, or fundamentalist groups. But I will try to show that the morally based character of NGO engagement, the “doing good”, the projects of activists, staff and volunteers and the way they try to help their target populations or advocate for causes, the way they interact with donors, competitors and state authorities, that this world reflects and depends on a specific performance of engagement. NGOs, including those who are compelled to act under the strictest regulations of professionalism, must to perform as moral actors; they may be professional and even entrepreneurial to varying degrees. But it is in the moral sphere, that of ‘doing good’ of helping ‘vulnerable groups’ through advocacy, awareness raising or channeling resources, that they sustain their claim. NGOs are moral interventions. And moral interventions require some kind of personal engagement with the world.

Engagement has a price. The price I call here “entanglement”. Like “engagement”, the word “entangled/entanglement” appears in several of these articles. NGOs are entangled in the struggle for resources and for legitimacy with many other actors and institutions: with the state apparatuses under which they operate, with the donors who fund them and the consultants who monitor them, with the market which they must negotiate, with the competing NGOs all fighting for donors’ funds or a lucrative state contract, with social movements and civil society who consider NGOs less authentic or less representative, and with the personal, private projects of NGO members and staff. These entanglements are not simply the ‘context’ in which NGOs operate. We need to do more than simply ‘contextualize’ (a truly horrible word) if we are to describe what NGOs are up against. Rather, the articles here show how NGOs’entanglements facilitate NGOs’ own projects while others alter or inhibit them. What is NGOing all about? It’s about manipulating these various actors in pursuit of their own interestseven as they themselves are manipulated.

The articles in this book, introduced in sections by senior NGO scholars, describe various matrices of engagement and entanglement. They describe what happens when moral interventions, moral projects enter a world of other projects. The articles all try to elucidate these worlds of NGOs in two ways. First, they give us a panorama of NGO realities, from Roma organizations in the Czech Republic to conservation groups in Tanzania, to women’s groups in Delhi, to youth democracy in Serbia, to Jewish philanthropy debates in New Orleans. Second, they attempt to show how an explicitly anthropological approach to NGOs and NGO life can reveal the engagement/entanglement processesthat might be overlooked by other social scientists, journalists, or even by sympathetic activists. The anthropological approach to NGOs, therefore, not without its own challenges and contradictions.The NGOs’ engagement is not just a matter of the people we study. We too, must deal with engagement and entanglement in our own research. The two types of engagements and entanglements intersect, and this is what make ethnography so much more complicated than other, more detached social sciences.

In this intersection, I will describe these two issues: the nature of ‘NGO worlds’ – with their engagement and entanglement-- and the anthropological approach to ‘the NGO form’, with its corresponding engagement/entanglement issues. Like any introduction, my real purpose is less to introduce or synthesize the contributions than to get the reader to stop reading and to skip over to thestudies themselves. For these purposes, I will try to keep the discussion simple.

You are what you do

David Lewis, in his essay in this book, observes that a preoccupation with what NGOs are, should give way to a focus on what NGOs do. We might supplement this by adding: and why do they do it as NGOs? Why the NGO form? The NGOs described in the chapters here are all groups of people with a moral intervention project. They are more than just networks, kin groups or social movements. They are organized as juridical persons. Several have charismatic leaders (Sinervo’s, Mouftah’s and Synkova’s articles, for example), others tend to appropriate the NGO form or in some cases deny it even as they act like NGOs anyway (Sinervo, Mouftah) They are corporate in the legal sense and therefore conform to the now hegemonic definition of NGOs as not for profit, autonomous from government, voluntary and corporate. These characteristics are relevant for NGOs’ practical status (they can make contracts with donors or with the state), but more importantly, their juridical status also helps them sustain a moral legitimacy. The worst accusations that can be hurled at an NGO is that it is a front for the state or a political party, or that it is a disguise for someone’sprofit-makingfirm. The moral mission, the urge to help others, to solve a social problem, to call attention to a need, to supply a needed service, is paramount as the charter of any and all NGOs. Hence, a lot of social and symbolic energy is spent clarifying these needs. The nature of who needs what, or more precisely, are the right kinds of needs being fulfilled, pervades several of the articles here: notably Synkova and Kapusta-Pofahl in the Czech Republic for Roma and gender equality, or for Muslim women in Delhi as they pursue justice, or for the conservation groups in Tanzania.

The combination of moral mission and organizational form creates the challenge for anthropological engagement and the way in which we describe NGOs’ entanglement.NGOs are not just movement; they are organizations. Hence, they have a rationality, a structure, a budget, they hold meetings, they have officers, they have everyday routines, they must perform and act in a manner that we call ‘professional’. Dorthea Hilhorst (2003) summarized this characteristics by observing that NGOs must be ‘good at doing good’. NGOing, as several articles point out, is the practice of balancing the moral and the professional in a way that convinces others. It is these others who create and maintain the entanglements described in this book.

The nature of NGO entanglements

The first source of entanglement for most NGOs is the state. In the West, states can act as donors and in doing so also monitorNGOs for their non-profit status. In developing countries, the state is often subject to conditions from aid donors, who require them to involve the NGO sector in development work or social services. Such partnerships are imposed. In most of the articles in this book, states fulfill a variety of roles: they arecontactors with NGOs, allowing NGOs to fill gaps, doing the state’s dirty work of neoliberalization, and at times jealous observers of NGOs engagement. Sinervo describes how one state agency to assist children masquerades as an NGO to obtain some moral capital, while a local activistNGO insists of denying their NGO status for the same reason. In Serbia, the local residents find themselves more comfortable with a state-organized administration than with the USAID funded NGO initiatives. Here the NGO activity is an instrument for a neoliberalization of social services. Good intentions aside, NGOing thus has both intended and unintended consequences. Several of the chapters here describe this clash between the intentions and ultimate consequences of NGOing.

A second entanglement for NGOs are the donors. Without the money, support and networks provided by donors, many of the NGOs described in this book would not exist. Donors are resources, they allocate funds and provide expertise and networks. But they also constrain. As pointed out by Lemons, Kornfield, Bernal, and Vetta, and by many informants in the other articles, much NGOing is not much more than performing for donors with the requisite trainings, seminars, reports, budgets and statistics. In Peru, some of the donors are foreign tourists who mobilize their families back home as donors. And in Egypt people donate not money but their time and energy as part of an Islamic “duty”. If donating is ultimately giving, donations are more than just project grants.

The third source of entanglement are competing NGOs and other social activist movements. In the Czech Republic, Synkova describes conflicts between an ethnically-based Roma NGO and the more academically inclined social service groups. She finds a resistance to professionalization among the Roma group which adds to their authenticity but denies them grants. A similar conflict between professionalism/engagement arises in gender activism between academics, feminist activists and state gender equality officers seeking legitimacy (Kapusta-Pofahl). Within Jewish philanthropy, Kornfield describes conflicts between established and more activist Jewish groups in their vision of deciding how to give aid to post-Katrina New Orleans. The competition among moral claims, with various groups asserting that they are more authentic or represent the genuine constituency, is reminiscent of factional conflict describe by Bailey in India or the clan conflicts based on honor and prestige that we know from the Balkans, East Africa or New Guinea.

The fourth, and most difficult entanglement for NGOs is with their ostensible target group, the people they are supposed to help, the stakeholders of the project. Several of the articles describe how NGOs can be pushed into overlooking for forgetting their target groups, while in other cases they construct them as needy objects (poor children, uninformed about conservation) in need of enlightenment. This entanglement is relevant to the anthropological fieldworker, who may share the NGOs general concern but must also weigh the costs of critiquing or going beyond his or her informants.

Discoveries and issues

What is it exactly that anthropologists have ‘discovered’ about the NGO world? First, that professionalization aside, there is still a lot of engagement out there. NGO activists and volunteers in various settings are trying to solve pressing problems, sacrificing to help others, and looking for solutions. Women’s groups in the Czech Republic, environmental groups in Tanzania, democratic youth in Serbia, Islamic youth in Egypt, and Jewish philanthropy in New Orleans, just to take some examples, are constantly endeavoring to find solutions. Some of these solutions involve expanding the target group, from a limited group to a larger one (as in New Orleans). Others involve alliances with academics or with the state authorities (Czech Republic and Serbia). Still others involve redefining religious obligations (Egypt). The engagement identified by the anthropologists is not only that of an NGO. It is also very personal. NGO activists, staff and volunteers have personal stories. They have a history. They have subjectivity, they have personal projects which coalesce with their efforts to aid their target group. NGO work also involves emotions.