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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 chapter By Steven Sampson Lund University [email protected]
INTRODUCTION: ENGAGEMENTS AND ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF NGOS
In 1992, I took a few weeks leave from my university existence in Copenhagen to work as an EU
consultant in Romania. I had been invited to join a 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 team as 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, sat the 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 an appraisal
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 monitored NGO projects, trained NGO
staff, evaluated NGOs 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 have also been accused of being
part of the notorious “Soros mafia” of NGO project elites, and worse. And in the world of
consulting, I have been suddenly hired, and then just as abruptly let go, by various consulting
firms or 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 and NGOs 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
professionalized that one can have NGO work not as a calling but as a career, including the
master’s degree in non-profit management or NGOs 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 being professional, 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
become a 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 interests even 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 processes that 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 the studies 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’s profit-making firm. 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 monitor NGOs 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 are contactors 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 activist NGO 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.
Second, the papers show how NGOs are constantly manipulating their activist and professional
identities. This manipulation, or oscillation can take place in various temporal and spatial
settings, and belies the simple distinction between genuine activist versus the professionalized
NGO. Activism, engagement for one’s project, can take place at specified moments; but
professionalism can also suddenly emerge. We are not simply talking about ‘strategic’ practice
here but the ability of NGO activists, staff and members to switch registers depending on
context.
Third, almost all the articles show that the NGO form is not a given. In Peru, in Egypt and in
Serbia, to cite just three of the articles, we find civil society activity being carried out other
rubrics other that the typical NGO-project. The volunteerism organization in Peru mobilizes
foreign tourists as volunteers. In Egypt, an appeal to Islamic “duty” to do social work supplants
NGO-style volunteering; and in Serbia, the local administration fulfills certain social needs that
the American supported NGO project system could not fulfill. Today we see alternative forms to
the NGO, in the tradition of more loosely structured activist networks, as in the Czech
movement for Roma housing, and in the conservation movements described by Woomer. And
we see social activism taking place without the formal rubric of NGOs.
Fourth, the articles there is the issue of representation. As several articles describe, NGOs are in
a constant struggle to demonstrate that they speak for some group or constituency other than
themselves. What does this performative representation look like? How is it carried out,
augmented or changed. What happens when NGOs experience a crisis of representation
because citizens ignore them, the state restricts them or other movements supersede them?
The articles show how “the NGO form” is contingent on its ability to “per-form” representation.
More important, they show the life cycle of this NGO form which is not simply a tale of “the rise
of NGOs”, but also their demise and disappearance in contexts where they become irrelevant.
A fifth issue which pervades several of the articles is that of “ the political”. “We do civil society,
not politics,” said one of the NGOs in Vetta’s study of democratic community building and “fuzzy
accountability” in Serbia. Regardless of the rhetoric, she describes a very political project. In all
the articles, the NGOs cultivate a discourse of neutrality; some are accused of being too activist,
others of not being activist enough (Synkova), while still others are trying to place themselves
somewhere between scholarship and advocacy (Kaputsa-Pofahl). But as Kornfield notes in his
study of Jewish philanthropy, highlighting one’s neutrality over activism is itself a political
stance. Just as anthropologists have begun to take up ‘secularism’ instead of religion, we need
to examine “neutrality” alongside “politics”, viewing “neutrality” as a practice embedded in the
world of NGOs.
A sixth issue revealed here, often overlooked in the study of NGOs, is that of affect. What does
it feel like to be engaged. The emotional aspects of engagement, and how emotions are affected
by various entanglements, are the stuff of ethnographic description. In Mouftah’s description of
Lifemakers in Egypt, in Synknova’s descript of the Roma group trying to solve problems, and
notably in the description of foreign volunteers in Peru having an authentic experience as aid
workers, we can observe the importance of ethnography, of being there, to describe what
NGOing is all about. The urge and the practice of doing good is tied to an affective dimension.
The emotions are there when performing good, and even as guilt when some NGOs feel guilty
about being too professional.
Seventh, we anthropologists need constantly to deal with the issue of our own engagement
with those we study. This issue needs to be cleared up whether, as Lewis and others point out,
whether we are studying NGOs as organizations, whether we are using them as a portal, or
whether they are simply part of a larger cultural/material landscape, as Woomer does in her
study of conservation. Bernal’s description of NGO fever and Lemons’ emphasis on our research
in an NGO-saturated world require that we rethink and reflect on our relations with these
organizations. Lemons describes this as an issue of “alignment”, while Woomer unequivocally
argues that “deep engagement” can serve the purposes of anthropology and help the people
we study better than a presumptions form of detachment.
What then, is engagement for anthropologists? For Woomer and others, the engagement is a
means of creating dialogue and critique. Erica Bornstein reminds us of the pitfalls here, in which
a critique of the organization risks degenerating into a mere assessment of outputs, and the
larger landscape of how people’s needs is overlooked. Critique must therefore be distinguished
from sheer criticism, a nuance that our informants may not fully understand unless we know
how to tell them. NGOs are not necessarily our ally, even if they might have the same overall
goal of helping a vulnerable group gain more control over their lives. They may even be
complicit in constituting the field in which we work. Our alignment with NGO projects, Lemons
warns, our sharing of a moral mission, may therefore hide the fact that there are other
stakeholders than the NGOs and NGO activists with whom we feel so comfortable. As Woomer
emphasizes, a deeper engagement, rather than a retreat into academic neutrality, may be a
solution: more engagement may truly help the people we want to help, the target group, and it
may also give us more nuanced ethnography. More engagement may help build the kinds of
theories we need to understand the NGO form and how it operates.
In all these papers, the authors illuminate the relations between engagement and
entanglement. The matrix of engagement/entanglement is simultaneously personal,
organizational and structural. It thus requires both face-face-ethnography and theoretical
reflection. NGOs are engaged and entangled. But as we pursue NGOgraphy, so are we.