Introduction

The global poverty agenda, long promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), was formally endorsed by the World Bank in 2000, marking a major shift in official approaches to aid. This new international focus has led to calls to greatly increase aid, drop the debt and change the terms of trade that keep poor countries excluded from benefiting from the global economy. Finding effective ways to reduce poverty concerns governments and NGOs, and there is at times a growing convergence of thinking around the causes and solutions to poverty among donors, governments and NGOs worldwide. Expectations run high that further increases in aid will be forthcoming and that the targets set to focus all aid efforts, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be met, albeit later than anticipated. Strategies for achieving these goals include addressing poverty directly and tackling factors such as good governance, corruption, the role of the state and civil society, and identifying drivers of growth and change that will enable positive change to be sustained.

Although figures on aid flows are contested, aid from the UK and the European Union is certainly increasing, and both are promising much more aid, especially for Africa. The volume of aid to Africa is already high, though erratic and overshadowed by the lack of direct foreign investment and debt (UNCTAD, 2000: Lockwood, 2005). Significant and increasing proportions of aid go directly to governments through direct budget support; money from donors and public-giving flows to NGOs in the countries of the north and south. Yet the problems of poverty continue to grow, and for many of the world's people, especially in Africa, poverty, hunger and economic insecurity persist and even increase. Aid is not fulfilling its promise and donors, practitioners and academics talk about the crisis of aid and the apparent failure of aid to enable many countries in Africa to progress. The need to show demonstrable and positive outcomes from aid is now critical for both donors and NGOs; assumptions of the role and performance of NGOs are being examined to see if they hold true and whether NGOs can achieve their ambitious aims (Lewis, 2003b).

Donors and NGOs have responded to questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of aid in a number of ways. Donors have introduced new mechanisms and conditions for aid going directly to states, including the concept of selectivity, which allows them to work only with states that have adopted good pro-poor policies, defined according to their criteria. The mechanisms of aid to African states are changing, from projects to programmes, sector and even budget support, tightly tied to national poverty plans that have to be agreed by donors. Direct budget support is accompanied by heavy technical support and conditions, especially around governance and accountability. For funding going via NGOs, donors have heightened their control through new conditions, tighter selectivity and growing demands for accountability, these last encoded in specific management procedures and practices. The increase in conditionality, selectivity and paperwork, especially for accountability, is widespread among donors, with most adopting similar measures and policies. Northern NGOs, in their turn, adopt and promote the new aid approaches – from needs to rights, from projects to programmes, from service delivery to advocacy – and implement them through largely standardized management procedures.

Yet many observers, including some NGO commentators, fear that part of the problem and challenge of aid lies precisely in this increasing reliance on the management models, and the ideology that underpins them, that dominate aid disbursement. They are seen as 'depoliticising development' (Ferguson, 1990), treating intensely political choices as technical and managerial ones, and imposing control and regulation through external solutions to local problems. Some critics argue that these rational, managerial models privilege the scientific and rational while devaluing essential knowledge, analysis and action at the local level; they reinforce existing relations of power and so place achieving the broad aims of poverty reduction and development at risk (Mawdsley et al., 2002; Long and Long, 1992; Mosse, 2005).

The increasingly bureaucratic management of aid, which seeks to control, count and account tightly for both finances and complex processes of social change, is underpinned by a set of beliefs about how to achieve change, which are drawn less from experience and the analysis of success or failure in practice, and more from the shifting ideologies of those designing the development project:

For many working in development, getting theory right is the key to addressing the failures and disappointments of development ... better theory, new paradigms and alternative frameworks are constantly needed (Mosse, 2005: 1).

Debates continue about which theory or framework will hold the key to success and enable aid to be most effective. The tensions between very different aid paradigms are referred to in this book; however, our key concern is to explore an area that has largely been neglected until recently, namely whether the existing aid processes widely used by NGOs are effective in tackling poverty and exclusion. We believe that the way aid is disbursed (the procedures and conditions of aid) affects the implementation of NGO policies on the ground and shapes the way they work, that is, their development practice.

We begin with the observation that aid too often follows routes and is accompanied by practices that mirror and reinforce the structural inequalities that it is there to challenge. Foreign aid, including aid that passes through international (usually northern-based) NGOs to contribute to development activities conducted by NGOs based in the south, often comes with conditions, stated or not, that limit its positive impacts. Answering the question of how much aid to whom must, in our view, be accompanied by greater attention to the mechanisms of aid and their effects on the organizations and individuals involved in the aid project. It is also important to understand what drives the constantly changing aid agenda and associated procedures, to see how far they are rooted in learning from practice and how far they are driven by the changing ideologies and perceptions of those with power. Attention must be paid to the theory and paradigms that underpin current aid practices. Yet research on NGOs rarely engages seriously with the relationship between theory, policy and practice:

Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate (Mosse, 2005: 1).

In an era when impact is all, the disregard for the impact of changing aid processes is interesting. However, studies are starting to appear, with increasingly sophisticated theoretical, empirical and ethnographic approaches to studying NGO practice and the way in which aid shapes it (Lewis, 2003b; Brehm, 2001; Mawdsley et al., 2002). These studies are critical in a field where much previous research has been normative and carried out by people closely involved in the NGO sector.

The research on which this book is based fits well alongside this growing literature. We explicitly attempt to understand the impact of the globally dominant aid procedures on development work, using empirical data. Our research explores how aid policy and procedures, and the values and analysis they carry within them, originating from donors and NGOs in the north – specifically in this book from the UK – shape the work of those receiving aid funding. It explores how far recipients can change the terms and conditions of that funding, and the nature of the interactions along the aid chain (Simbi and Thom, 2000) that help to explain how effectively aid is being used on the ground.

The research focuses only on NGOs that are part of the international aid chain, which receive some or all of their funding from institutional donors – governments, the EU, the UN, the World Bank and other multilaterals – to promote development in Africa. The data used are primarily drawn from donors and NGOs based in the UK, Uganda and South Africa (SA), but the findings apply widely and the trends uncovered occur in many other aid chains in the global arena. In focusing only on NGOs incorporated into international aid chains (Martens, forthcoming 2006), the research does not look at voluntary and not-for-profit organizations that raise all their funds locally, i.e., from members or supporters. Their motivation, values, behaviour, focus, accountability mechanisms and the roots of their legitimacy may be very different. Our focus is on NGOs deeply involved with global aid funding, as recipients, as donors and also often as lobbyists for change. These NGOs (in the north and south) are part of the global aid chain, which deeply influences the way they conceptualize, implement and account for development work. In understanding the way these influences work we employ two concepts to guide the analysis: coercion and commitment.

Coercion and compliance

The first concept, coercion, is a dynamic often touched on in discussions of development. Since donors, and increasingly international NGOs (INGOs), have control over funds, many say that this inevitably means they call the shots. Compliance with, or consent to, the terms and regulations of a grant are seen as an inevitable outcome of the aid chain. The concept of coercion, while it can include force, is also used to communicate the way dominant and accepted norms lead to compliant behaviour. A framework of norms can exist that shape behaviour and ways of working, that are rarely questioned or challenged; indeed many would see them as the right and best way to approach development because they are so universally accepted and used (Martens, forthcoming, 2006).

This compliance may happen in a context where a contrasting discourse, which professes to promote local ownership and the participation of southern partners, is also in play: a participatory approach implies that there is room for negotiating conditions and moderating the unequal financial power of different parties to a grant. These competing frames of reference, meeting the international conditions of aid and opening up space for a more responsive and locally owned way of working, suggest a need to investigate empirically how compliance and coercion work in practice, how far NGOs feel obliged or coerced by the existing funding norms and how far they feel able to change these and challenge accepted international development practices.

Within a single aid chain and set of funding conditions, coercion and consent may play out in multiple ways. Relationships and conditions may be experienced as compatible at one level, where unequal power may not be a major issue, but become coercive and restricting at another level in the chain where relationships of power are much more unequal. For example, donor conditions that can be willingly accepted at senior management level in UK, where incorporation into the aid chain is seen as mutually beneficial, can become heavy demands or impositions when they are passed down to field staff and partners. Individuals at distinct points in the aid chain, and different agencies that have uneven status and access within the aid chain, do not experience the conditions uniformly: while some find considerable room for manoeuvre and negotiation others find little, often depending on the existing relations of power.

Power is often mentioned but rarely analysed in NGO relationships (Chambers, 2004), yet the funders define the rules and regulations to which NGOs must adhere. INGOs, in turn, have the power of funding but also of global knowledge networks and superior communication channels that make them feared competitors of local NGOs; their power is often used to set the terms and conditions of funding and accountability for their partners. Power privileges some voices to be heard and others ignored; it underlies international aid behaviour along the aid chain. Organizations and the individuals in them can sometimes fall back on insidious forms of power, based on past histories of colonialism, racism and gender inequalities, to shape behaviour and sap confidence. The use and misuse of power can undermine the ability of the less powerful to challenge the status quo (Gaventa, 1980; Chapman et al., 2005). Often their responses are limited to full compliance or passive resistance and there is evidence of covert subversion in reaction to the coercive nature of the prevailing agenda. Resistance shows that NGOs are not simply clones of the aid industry and they can take independent action in opposition to the dominant development paradigms. The relationships of unequal power, generating compliance and resistance, are found all along the aid chain and exist between local NGOs and their communities as well as between donors and INGOs.

This broad concept of coercion allows us to explore a wide range of issues around how the norms of development work are set, how power is negotiated at different levels, and how far different strategies and responses support or undermine development work in practice. It is interesting that while NGOs advocate widely on many issues concerning the dominant development paradigms coming from the World Bank and others, there is little overt protest at the terms and conditions of donor aid to the NGO sector; this is an area where NGOs seem reluctant to challenge the major players.

Commitment

The second concept is commitment, which brings the analysis to a more subjective level. NGO work rests on a sense of individual and organizational commitment to change and the mission of the organization. Without commitment, often manifest in long hours of unpaid or unremunerated work in difficult conditions, much development would never take place. Volunteers remain an important source of labour – and goodwill – for many NGOs, and donations, again rooted in a sense of individual commitment, trust and faith, are crucial to many organizations.

Commitment, however, goes beyond good intentions and includes working to achieve change in a professional and accountable manner, guided by values or a vision of positive change. It is the reason for doing the work that goes beyond day-to-day monetary or status rewards, or even organizational survival. In development NGOs this commitment is often founded on beliefs in justice, equality, inclusion and participation, and the rights of marginalized people to have voice and access resources.

In reflecting on commitment, issues of agency and trust become important. The concept of commitment implies a wide range of responses is possible based on the agency of the individual or the organization. Strong interpersonal relations of trust can be built that go beyond the requirements of modern aid systems (Kaplan, 2000; Mawdsley et al., 2002). New ways of working can be developed to ensure that development workers listen and respond to the needs and voices of those most affected by poverty or HIV/AIDS, for example (Cornwall and Welbourn, 2002). NGO actors can and do exert influence through advocacy and policy-level lobbying and by deciding how to act differently in any given situation. Agency is a concept with many meanings, but for our purposes this definition is useful:

agency refers not to intentions people have in doing things but to their capacity of doing things in the first place ... agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence ... act differently. (Giddens, 1984, quoted in Seckinelgin, 2006)

Actions may be based on commitment to the values and mission of the NGO, individual staff motivations and relationships, or analysis that takes account of the needs of local government or other civil-society actors. Commitment also refers to the positive relationships that can be created between individuals and organizations in the aid chain, which extend beyond the temporal and contractual limits of funding agreements. Forging relationships – between northern and southern NGOs, or NGOs and community groups – characterized by trust and mutual learning requires a commitment to the other and to a vision of development that opens up new opportunities and ways of behaving (Kaplan, 2002; Harding, 2004, Said, 2003).