Accountability of NGOs: Empowerment vs. Power

Strong civil society organizations have developed worldwide to combat injustices and support humanity, particularly so with the advent of democracy in recent decades. People all around the world have recognized the power of asserting their own agency and are looking to address their concerns and promote human development more than ever before in history. However, this movement has reached varying success across the world due to the diversity of regimes and situations the civil society finds itself in. For example, there is a particular difference between the so-called northern NGOs (NNGOs) usually located in the more economically stable and institutionally integrated parts of the world and the southern NGOs (SNGOs) which are usually located in areas where there is a greater struggle for economic and institutional stability. The latter often faces additional funding, operational, and participation issues precisely because of the environment it finds itself in. In the end, only about 1% of all official aid and an even smaller portion of humanitarian assistance becomes delivered to local organizations of the so-called global south and input of these organizations is similarly downgraded and misunderstood in spite of their direct connection to communities served by humanitarian interventions and NGO assistance. 

Just like with the general interaction between the “North” and “South” in which the so-called developed countries wield, or attempt to wield, greater economic and political influence over the so-called developing world, SNGOs often find themselves, due to the nature of world order today as a consequence of history, colonization, and modern developments, in a subordinate position to NNGOs. This is exemplified in the disproportionate funding that is usually delivered mostly to NNGOs, lack of connection to funding sources, lack of presentation on negotiating tables, and lack of attention from mainstream media and the rest of civil society. What adds irony to this arrangement is that humanitarian and peacebuilding work that is often the focus of NGO work is most often delivered precisely in the areas in which SNGOs operate and that they are most familiar with, and thus best suited to interact with and implement projects in. 

This problem has been mitigated to an extent with the focus of NNGOs being shifted away from simple intervention in faraway lands. This approach often resulted in major confusion and misallocation of resources and trainings because of misunderstandings arising due to NNGOs distance from the area of intervention and the problem at hand. Real life results of these shortcomings can range from focus on unnecessary desk over training and capacity-building delivery to actually endangering lives by allowing unqualified personnel to provide medical treatment. Recognizing the gravity of these issues, NNGOs have since recognized the need to partner with their counterparts in the regions the intervention is occurring to make their program more adjusted to the locality they are working with. In this way, small local NGOs of the so-called developing world get a chance to take their slice of the pie with a portion of funding being allocated to them and they are allowed an extent of autonomy and agency in program implementation. Major hiccups and programming disasters arising from the developed world’s presumed ability to properly address issues everywhere are thus being alleviated to an extent, but certainly not yet eliminated. 

However, it should be noted that the funding and intervention opportunities SNGOs now get are being filtered through NNGOs’ funding allocation choices and programming preferences. There is still an underlying assumption that NNGOs are most capable of deciding where capacities and resources are missing and most appropriately design an intervention, with the local SNGOs serving as an additional player, in worst cases to be merely of service to the funder and an instrument of the NNGOs’ agenda. In the best case there is a somewhat honest attempt to allow for “empowerment” of the SNGO because at least some funds and attention are now getting to the deprived counterpart thus making both the funder and the NNGO feeling more confident about their success albeit actual agency of SNGO was lifted to a very limited degree. In reality, however, SNGOs continue to lack direct involvement with funders and donors, often have limited autonomy in project planning and funding allocation as a consequence of being in a contractual and subordinate relationship to the NNGOs that are inviting them to join the project, and remain in a position where, even when their empowerment is supposedly promoted, they continue to be deprived of actual power and agency. 

Towards Solutions

In order to allow for a more appropriate intervention and begin tackling the underlying inequities of the current world order as it pertains to civil society, it is crucial to address these disparities in the relationship between NGOs from varying backgrounds. This issue should be addressed in a way that not merely empowers SNGOs but also facilitates their grand entrance to the mainstream rhetoric, incorporates their ideas in the funding and project planning processes, and cements their independence through acknowledging their power and agency that they already possess and are able to develop without explicit interference of the “northern” counterparts. In order to allow these processes to occur, it is instrumental to recognize the difference between merely empowering SNGOs and move the rhetoric towards more explicitly acknowledging their existing power as well as the need for existing power structures to make space for manifestation of this power to maximize impact and importance of SNGOs. A clear example of manifestation of such power would be allowing greater agency in funding allocation, greater access to funding, and a more direct contact with donor in accordance with greater economic autonomy. In addition to this, SNGOs should be allowed greater autonomy and agency in creation of locally-applicable projects and they should be the first to present an idea so that NNGOs’ possible intervention is influenced by the local perspective as opposed to the local perspective continuously being influenced by outside forces. In order to maximize effectiveness and understanding of SNGOs, appropriate translators and social and cultural professionals should be allocated to the initiative as needed to avoid misunderstandings amongst any of the parties involved and improve everyone’s ability to collaborate.  

To come back to the very definitions of issues at play, two definitions of empowerment are: 1) “making someone stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights” and 2) “giving someone the authority or power to do something.” In either of these definitions, there is an underlying assumption of the passivity of the actor empowerment is intended for and there is a need for someone else to step in and “activate” this actor. In the long run, this can justify continuous involvement of NNGOs in the development of SNGOs’ worldview and lived experience as NNGOs appear even necessary as a means of motivating the SNGO to become motivated and able to engage and cause positive change. Power, on the other hand, is usually seen as “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way.” This positioning emphasizes the existing power within the SNGOs so giving power as opposed to empowerment to SNGOs should be a more desirable framing that would also draw further considerations and actions towards a more positive change and enabling of greater agency and space for SNGOs so that there is an ability for SNGOs to stand on equal footing with NNGOs, funders, and other actors involved in the civil society world. 

Acknowledging that SNGOs already have power and do not need a mere “helping hand” so they can be able to only assist in the intervention down the road as it becomes needed for funders and NNGO counterparts as is presently happening would change the way that SNGOs are treated and enable actual agency and a more effective intervention. CSOs have already seen that interventions are more effective when SNGOs are involved in the process, at least as local consultants and subcontractors. Allowing even greater agency and placing NNGOs in a position of support to SNGOs would only maximize these already important achievements CSOs have made ever since entering the stage of greater cooperation across geographic, political, economic, and cultural lines. NGO intervention, when the local organizations are brought to the center, will be equipped to: 1) tailor an intervention approach that is more cognisant of the local context, 2) understand risks and contingencies at a deeper level, 3) be able to sustain its impact for years and possibly generations to come due to a more direct organizational involvement, 4) waste less time and timing due to bureaucratic constraints being eased as the local organization’s road towards implementation is cleared, and 5) establish better accountability towards both the local community and donors as bigger NGOs and international organizations can still help monitor the process and take charge in auditing and reporting while local organizations focus on actual implementation, interaction with local society, and continuation of the project and its impacts.  

Of course, there is already a movement towards greater inclusion of SNGOs, and smaller local organizations for that matter. The difference in centering power over empowerment is crucial because it allows for a proper positioning of the SNGOs and paves a way towards a more radical step in placing the various CSO actors in the international system on equal footing. The system of humanitarian intervention may have many faults and in need of more considerable changes, but this is a constructive way to reframe the thinking around who holds power and who has the right to think is able to provide empowerment to others, if anyone at all should have that right. Drawing from the need to recognize the power that smaller SNGOs already hold is also the fact that the underlying reasons for lack of acknowledgement of this power are things such as lack of communication, internet connectivity and language barriers, as well as the underlying assumption that work that is benefitting smaller local NGOs is done once the contract is signed and objectives are fulfilled in a way that benefits the funder. 

In the end, in order to truly embrace and tap into power that local NGOs holds, funder and the rest of civil society involved in proposing intervention should: 1) invest more time and effort in contacting local NGOs when desiring any kind of intervention; funder should allow time for NGOs to more fully explore partners they are already in contact with and be able to engage translators and more researchers in the pursuit of new partnerships so that organizations that have previously been ignored or simply difficult to reach are now brought into a more profound engagement, 2) place local NGOs on equal footing in interactions with donors, policymakers, and other actors involved in the humanitarian intervention; this means that SNGOs agency and independence should be acknowledged and ensure they have a place at negotiating tables, are involved in funding allocation processes, and are consistently consulted on any changes or inquiries about the project and related activities or future planning, and 3) retain local SNGOs in the spotlight and work with them in a sustained, consistent fashion; this means that engagement should never end upon completion of the project; funders, contracting parties, and bigger NGOs partnering with SNGOs should recognize their presently dominant role and instead allow themselves to take a step back and also listen and learn from the smaller local organizations that may have better contacts and engagement on the ground and are also in turn looking to understand the dominant frameworks of funding flows and interactions better - if all parties are open to learning from each other and understanding that no one party is more capable than the other, whereas each brings its unique contribution to the table, with the local organizations bringing crucial local knowledge as well as new insights into how policymaking and humanitarian aid provision could work, then a more sustained and fruitful work and collaboration are ensured to ensue.

The Tragedy of NGOs: A Faustian Perspective on Human Rights Activism

I feel as if I’d drummed into my brain
the wealth of human knowledge all in vain.
I finally stand back, only to find
no new-born power rising in my mind.
Not one hair’s breadth is added to my height,
nor am I any nearer to the Infinite.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

International relations (IR) is typically considered a social science, but it can learn a lot from thinking poetically. Here, I strive to adopt a lesson from poetry in order to explain some of the actions and criticisms of transnational human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

According to German folklore, the philosopher-scientist Faust exasperatedly sells his soul to the devil as his attempts to discover the universe’s truths fail to reveal any deeper meaning in his scholasticism. The deal gives Faust limitless knowledge and worldly pleasures. In early versions of the legend, Faust delves into a life of sin with the devil as his servant only to discover that, at the end of their agreement, he has been irrevocably corrupted, and is dragged to hell. The legend is meant to metaphorize those who sacrifice their principles for their ambitions.

IR, along with other social sciences, asks why questions that determine causal mechanisms and how questions focused on constitutive explanations, to borrow from Alexander Wendt’s phrasing in Social Theory of International Politics. In that sense, I ask how the moral authority for human rights activism is constructed by NGOs and how their theoretical critics reinterpret such supposed moral authority. I argue that such organizations are best understood through a Faustian perspective. NGOs balance concerns over adhering to their principles or their ambitions when it comes to human rights; and their critics recognize this. Criticisms of NGOs suggest that the human rights bar has been set too high, causing NGOs to be seen as irrelevant on the one hand, or as hypocrites on the other. The tragedy is therefore that human rights NGOs have painted themselves into a corner, in terms of their authority. By lambasting states’ conduct in the human rights arena, any cooperation NGOs have with states seemingly sacrifices their principles for their ambitions. Until the world’s human rights NGOs devise a strategy by which to convincingly propagate their ideals without acceding to the pressures of governmental cooperation, they will be fighting a two-front war.

Ambitions and Principles

Central to an understanding of their authority is the balance that NGOs give to their commitment to independent human rights monitoring and governmental interactions. NGOs’ take their independent, impartial reporting—as exemplified by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—to be their primary source of authority when it comes to human rights activism. Both organizations cite these as their core principles in their governing documents. While the principles which govern the most successful NGOs seem somewhat clear, balancing those with their ambitions to expand their member-base and bind more governments to human rights conduct is less so.

In 2011, former Hillary Clinton aide—Suzanne Nossel—was appointed Executive Director of Amnesty International with a commitment to internationalism and a belief in the US’ ability to reassert Liberal principles in IR. Nossel also defended preventive war as a way to enforce human rights obligations in other countries, which contradicts international legal obligations to secure UN Security Council authorization. Eventually, Nossel resigned from Amnesty International. Nossel notably demonstrates the ways in which human rights principles stand in opposition to NGOs’ ambitions: in order to promote and enforce liberal values of human rights, Amnesty International drew on government experience and military might.

One might further point to the increasingly professionalized trend of human rights activists and NGOs that strives to establish a firmly defined set of “shared values” as evidence that human rights discourses constitute principles and ambitions as opposing interests. Along with the movement’s professionalization and the codification of a shared value set comes an exclusion of contending interpretations and theories of human rights. In other words, to realize the movement’s growing professional ambitions, NGOs invariably narrow the scope of what human rights are, thereby sacrificing at least some activists’ principles. (The reader should be clear that by no means do I wish to philosophize on human rights in this article, but rather merely seek to identify and contextualize the contradictory interests of NGOs to either professionalize and uniformly propagate human rights standards, or endorse alternative sources of human rights justification.) By accepting, for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the world’s principal source of human rights, Amnesty International’s statute limits debate over the extent to which economic and social rights equally constitute basic human dignity. In cases like Nossel’s and the professionalization of human rights, principles that underpin NGOs’ authority—independence, impartiality, and broadly defined human rights standards—diverge from ambitions related to enforcing human rights through force, interacting freely with governments, and creating a shared understanding of human rights.

But, how does the above discussion of NGOs’ ambitions and principles relate to Faust, and, more importantly, why should anyone care? Recall the once-idealistic Faust who, with his commitment to intellectualism, makes no headway and—increasingly disillusioned—forms a pact with the devil, thus abandoning his convictions. Indeed, this is Goethe’s lesson. In the prologue, the reader learns of God’s challenge to the devil: “Try to seduce his soul from its true source […] and if things do not go quite as you planned, / admit, with shame, among those souls that you would devour / are some that can’t be moved, even by you, / from the good they dimly, stubbornly pursue.” Faust’s entire role is predicated on his eventual decision between his principles and the temptations of ambition. NGOs similarly constitute their interests in maintaining their principles or fulfilling their ambitions, to the extent that they cannot realize both. We should care about this divide because it helps explain how, in the way that human rights discourses have been constructed, critics target NGOs from more conservative Realist perspectives, as well as more left-leaning Marxist, and Constructivist perspectives. It is worth noting that I deliberately exclude Liberalism from this analysis due to its general acceptance of NGOs—Liberals tend not to criticize NGOs, and I seek to explain NGOs critics. Therefore, I focus on Realism, Constructivism, and Marxism. However, and in spite of Liberalism’s NGO optimism, when a significant portion of the world’s population seems in favor of human rights, but several IR theorists doubt their main proponents’ normative value, IR has a significant question to answer.

Realist Critics

Human rights NGOs endure staunch criticism from Realist theorists who argue in terms of state-systems, material capabilities, balance of power, and security dilemmas. According to a 2002 interview with John Mearsheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, “there is not much place for human rights and values in the Realist story.” At least three theoretical assumptions clarify why human rights NGOs have little place for Realists. First, Realists claim that states’ material capabilities make them the principally legitimate actors in IR as opposed to NGOs’ supposed moral authority on human rights. Second, Realism holds that states pursue their interests defined in terms of power as opposed to things like human rights. Third, according to Realists, the absence of a supranational, centralized authority makes enforcing human rights untenable, and thus, their place in IR practically irrelevant.

The arguments against Realism are well-known, but few seek to explicate Realism’s relationship to NGOs. In Faust, the main character is unsatisfied with his studious life and its lack of insight into any improvement for humankind. As Goethe puts it, Faust’s “laborious studies only show that / Nothing is the most we ever know.” Moreover, Faust laments his scholarship’s inability to find “a way to improve or convert Mankind.” Faust’s commitment to learning is hence undone by the realization that it does not reveal any deep or practical insights. Discipline and studying claim a higher standard of conduct for Faust, but end up betrayed as the main character doubts their substantive ability to fulfill his life’s ambitions.

Realists take a similar stance on human rights. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer writes on the American public’s general “proclivity for moralizing” politics and IR. In opposition to baseless political moralizing, Realists like Mearsheimer “tend not to distinguish between good and bad states” because all states pursue power in the international system. We can extrapolate the implications for NGOs from Mearsheimer’s argument with a quick parallel to Faust. In the German legend, the principles of scholarship and studiousness lacked substance like the Realist claim that distinctions between good and bad states (e.g., those states committed to human rights and those that are not) lack substance for IR theorizing. Realism tells us that states attempt to accumulate power and material capabilities and that they likely will not pursue human rights principles unless they advance a state’s power ambitions. Hence, for Realists, believers in human rights—and certainly human rights NGOs—delude themselves into believing that human rights reveal theoretical or practical wisdom for IR.

Faust sets too high of expectations for an erudite life’s ability to glean some quotient of meaning in the world, then doggedly abandons his principles because of their inability to lend insight into the universe. For Realism, NGOs similarly set their hopes too high for human rights. States, as the main actors in IR, pursue power over morals, making NGOs irrelevant and clearly unauthoritative.

Marxist and Constructivist Critics

NGOs also face criticism from Marxists who claim that their interaction with government policymakers betrays the anti-establishment principles NGOs were founded on, and Constructivists who argue that NGOs are a biased project to promote the Western, Liberal monopoly on human rights.

In his 2012 article, “The Contradictions of Human Rights Organizations,” Samuel Farber argues that NGOs provide legitimacy and support for governmental and intergovernmental agencies that they seek to hold accountable to contemporary human rights norms. According to Farber, “the world of NGOs and their supporting foundations is not self-contained,” because their implicitly liberal bias “blinds them to the political and socioeconomic context of the countries they report on.” Rather than tearing down the system as they may have originally sought to do, say Marxists like Farber, NGOs have betrayed their anti-establishment principles.

Noted scholars Makau Mutua and Stephen Hopgood offer two unrelated by similarly constructed arguments. In Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, Mutua suggests that there are explicit, direct links between human rights norms and Western, Liberal principles. The abstract and seemingly apolitical nature of NGOs’ “universal” truths hides the deeply political reality of the human rights power struggle. In a similar but slightly unrelated vein, Hopgood’s Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International unpacks the internal structure of Amnesty’s moral authority on human rights and their method for consolidating that authority. Hopgood ultimately finds that Amnesty International mirrors a religious organization’s belief in an objective moral authority for human rights and its ethos devoted to voluntarism, individualism, practicality, self-discipline, self-effacement, and moral import.

Essentially, the way that the human rights movement developed has betrayed its purpose for all of these critics. For Farber, NGOs were designed to be anti-establishment, yet now rely too heavily on governmental support. For Mutua, NGOs succumb to overly narrow Western conceptualizations of human rights, thus reconstructing a discursive power struggle that privileges the Liberal democratic system. For Hopgood, Amnesty International represents one example of an organization that has drifted from its roots towards a mission-oriented quasi-religious global operation.

Each argument presupposes a certain principled standard towards which NGOs strive. For Marxists, NGOs lost sight of their original, anti-establishment purpose, much in the same way that Faust sold his soul, therefore “exploiting everything [he] thought of worth” (Goethe’s words). For Constructivists, NGOs’ privileging of Western human rights is Faustian in the sense that human rights ideals, like the ideals of scholarship and enlightenment, constitute an overly-narrow and unfulfilling human rights theory. No wonder NGOs betrayed their principles for their ambitions as “[n]ot one hair’s breadth is added to [their] height.” Faust’s scholarly principles, like claims to universal human rights, do not imply any intrinsic higher moral authority, only the primacy of Western, Liberal norms.

Conclusions: Fighting Two Fronts

IR scholars ought to look beyond more traditional forms of knowledge in the discipline. As Professor Patrick Jackson asks: must international studies be a science? There is an immensely diverse and varied way of interpreting the world around us, whether scientific, poetic, or otherwise. Lessons taken from the poetry of German folklore, for example, shed light on the interactions between human rights NGOs and their contemporary theoretical critics across the political spectrum.

I began with the premise that IR can learn from poetic knowledge like Goethe’s. From this premise, I advanced a Faustian perspective of human rights NGOs and their critics which holds three principles. First, NGOs construct both their principles (e.g., western, liberal human rights) and ambitions (e.g., independence of state actors which they endeavor to hold accountable) that stand in opposition to one another. Second, NGOs’ independence and impartiality justifies their authority for human rights monitoring and advocacy. Third, by adopting a stringent standard of states’ compliance to narrowly-defined human rights, NGOs make it difficult to pursue their ambitions without sacrificing at least some of the movement’s principles, thus inviting Realist, Marxist, and Constructivist critiques.

Faust crammed his head full of knowledge in vain. Woefully unsatisfied by his scholastic principles, he sacrificed them for ambition and pleasure. Human rights NGOs and their critics demonstrate the same lesson. By adhering to a strict narrative of human rights and claiming a monopoly on independent monitoring, NGOs set themselves up to be cast as either ineffective idealists bent on moralizing the international system, or as hypocrites betraying the principles they set out to realize. As of right now, human rights NGOs face a two front war from both conservative Realists and left-leaning Marxists and Constructivists. Unless they can rectify the disparities between realizing their principles and ambitions, the world’s NGOs will continue to fight such a two front war.

While critics wage war against NGOs, however, we ought to remain wary of the assumption that human rights principles are mutually exclusive of organizational ambitions. To some it would seem that NGOs’ assertive—or downright aggressive—strategies for naming and shaming countries in the global South that violate human rights advances neither their ambitions nor their principles. For few will continue to support an NGO so harshly critical of so many international actors. And furthermore, few would contend that asserting human rights by force—as in Nossel’s advocacy for preventive war—genuinely constitute a principled stance on human rights. NGOs’ critics must recognize that support for human rights is on the rise across national, racial, ethnic, religious, and other lines; they do have a place in the story of IR, and they are not simply monopolized by anti-establishment politics or a sinister Western, Liberal order. NGOs, however, must recognize that human rights have the power to stand on their own. We do not need to professionalize the human rights movement. We do not need a single standard of human rights. We do not need violent enforcement of human rights. We do not need to sacrifice our principles for our ambitions.