Introduction: why do NGOs need to negotiate knowledge?

Sophie King, Tiina Kontinen, Lata Narayanaswamy and Rachel Hayman

Abstract

Can knowledge and evidence work better for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? Throughout the world, NGOs are under pressure to demonstrate their legitimacy and credibility. How NGOs use knowledge and evidence forms both part of the critique of NGOs and part of the solution. This book unpacks ways in which NGOs – at international, national, and local levels – understand and engage with different forms of knowledge and evidence in their daily practice. This chapter introduces the key questions and themes that the book tackles, and provides an overview of the empirical chapters. It emphasizes the need for continuous self-reflection and negotiation of knowledge issues by practitioners, policymakers, and scholars.

Keywords: NGOs, civil society, international development, knowledge, evidence, result-based management, politics

Can knowledge and evidence work better for NGOs?

When asked what messages practitioners and policymakers should take away with them on reading this book, Kai Matturi (author of Chapter 7 in this volume) commented 'Action and reflection can co-exist in the busy and hectic NGO world'. This point reflects a perpetual dilemma for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): how to create time and space to stop, think, assess, analyse, and reconsider. Yet, there has never been a greater need for practitioners to find ways of underpinning their actions with better knowledge and better evidence. NGOs involved in development work, located in both the global South and North, are under fire from many angles. They have to negotiate a rapidly changing global political economy and operational environment, within which their perceived and actual roles are being placed under great strain. There is growing pressure to demonstrate their legitimacy and credibility at national and international levels as well as within the societies where they operate. In response to these pressures, many international and national NGOs are reinventing themselves and redefining their roles.

'Knowledge' is a central component of this reinvention. A survey by the UK network of international development NGOs in early 2015 (Bond, 2015) suggests that many development NGOs perceive a future role for themselves as 'knowledge hubs': as spaces for expert knowledge creation; as professional institutions with effective knowledge-management systems; and as proactive organizations that constantly create, use, and communicate knowledge and evidence in support of their developmental objectives. As one of this book's authors, Erla Thrandardottir, observed in preparing this book, NGOs have carved a reputation for themselves as experts in many areas. They are taken seriously as such by many governments and international institutions.

But how well do NGOs – from the very small to the very large – continuously reflect on what knowledge and evidence mean in their daily work, and on the power dynamics inherent in their use of knowledge and evidence? And could knowledge and evidence work better for NGOs? This book contends that they can and must.

The empirical studies and conclusions presented here challenge practitioners, policymakers and development scholars to unpack their assumptions about knowledge and evidence. They offer ideas drawn from practice about how to address knowledge pressures in positive and constructive ways. In an era when results and evidence are becoming unassailable orthodoxies, this book reminds practitioners that a counter-narrative is feasible and indeed is very much alive; that values-based, experiential knowledge remains vibrant, and that it is possible to think and act. At the same time it warns against the presumption that knowledge and evidence are inherently good things, arguing rather that the uptake and application of knowledge and evidence must be continually refreshed, negotiated, and justified.

Engaging with this debate and these issues matters, not just to NGOs. It matters also to policymakers and funders of NGOs, who need to recognize that the pressures on NGOs and practitioners to respond to demands and debates around evidence has implications for their structures and even their values and missions. This affects their legitimacy and accountability practices, as well as their relationships with local communities, authorities in other countries, and beneficiaries. The studies in this book offer empirically-based insights for policymakers and funders that can help ensure their expectations are realistic, and improve their understanding of knowledge, learning, and evidence as encountered in their work with NGOs. By taking up the recommendations proposed, there is a chance that knowledge and evidence can work better for NGOs and the populations they seek to serve.

Finally, scholars also have to engage with this debate, responding to the empirical and theoretical questions that emerge from the realities experienced by practitioners in relation to knowledge and evidence. By offering interdisciplinary insights into these questions, scholars can help the NGO and policy sectors to find ways of improving their understanding and use of knowledge and evidence.

Contextualizing the debate

The ways in which the broad spectrum of organizational forms grouped as 'development NGOs' have conceptualized, created, and employed different forms of knowledge and evidence over time are bound together with shifts in international political economy and associated trends in international development. However, over the last two decades, debates about knowledge and evidence have gained new currency. In the 1990s, the shift to network and knowledge societies (Bell, 1999; UNESCO, 2005; Castells, 2010) and the spread of new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) transformed approaches to tackling persistent development shortcomings. This transformation was encapsulated by the World Bank's 'knowledge-for-development' strategies outlined in their World Development Report of the same name in 1998/9 (World Bank, 1998). The premise was that it was a lack of knowledge that prevented countries in the global South from developing. This 'emphasis on a pervasive knowledge gap as the explanation for chronic underdevelopment represented a historical turning point in the evolution of development practice' (Narayanaswamy, 2015: 175).

The 1990s were also the dawn of a new era in development, in the form of the twin agendas of poverty reduction and good governance. This shift was given various titles, including 'the Post-Washington Consensus' and 'inclusive neoliberalism' (Craig and Porter, 2006: 12). In both rhetoric and reality, development NGOs came to occupy a new space as innovators, mediators, and representatives of alternative forms of knowledge that were meant to act as the drivers of these development processes. Participatory poverty assessments aimed at bringing 'the voices of the poor' into poverty reduction policymaking via civil society mediation, and increased political space for civil society participation in national and decentralized decision-making, were cornerstones of this 'new paradigm' (Stiglitz, 1998). The challenge of establishing a more 'inclusive' liberalism led to increasing questions being raised about NGO legitimacy and credibility in creating such spaces. Representing a shift towards empowering states, it brought into question the role of NGOs and their relationship with wider civil society and 'people' themselves (Banks et al., 2015).

This new paradigm was also tied into the spread of 'third-way' public managerialism (Murphy, 2008) from North to South, and results-based management, as private actors were increasingly drawn into the provision of public goods. As a result, notions of 'knowledge gaps' became tied up with the pursuit of decision-making in a number of policy domains on the basis of scientific evidence of what works (Davies et al., 2000; Sutcliffe and Court, 2005). The evidence agenda, and the use of methodologies drawn from science and public health research practices, now emphasize scientific knowledge as a basis for policymaking. Thus objective 'facts' about what works inform the kinds of policies made and interventions designed. Although one should be cautious in drawing straightforward analogies between science and the knowledge practices in development, this way of thinking has gained increasing currency in impact analysis in international development. This can be seen, for example, in the idea of randomized controlled trials as the 'gold standard' for rigorous knowledge creation (Duflo and Kremer, 2005; White, 2014).

Results-based management has also emphasized the need for knowledge creation and knowledge management systems within development NGOs. NGOs are increasingly challenged to provide evidence of their effectiveness and ability to promote, for example, grass-roots development (Lewis, 2014). Closely knit with donor demands for value for money and accountability, organizational knowledge creation systems such as monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are also supposed to feed into learning and improvement (Eyben and Guijt, 2015; Guijt, 2010; Ebrahim, 2007). Designing systematic ways of measurement, information collection, and analysis has been at the heart of this discussion (Roche, 2010). Both large and medium-sized NGOs have invested significant resources into developing effective management, reporting, and learning systems such as Action Aid's Accountability, Learning and Planning System (ALPS), World Vision's Learning through Evaluation with Accountability and Planning (LEAP), or Oxfam's Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) approach with its Global Performance Framework.

However, this trend has been contested on the basis of both methodological and ethical arguments. As Eyben et al. (2015) argue, the evidence-based agenda in international development, no matter how rational and objective it claims to be, is inherently political when it comes to defining what counts as evidence and results. This reflects long-standing concerns about the political versus the technical nature of knowledge and its uses (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007); about the relationship between indigenous and expert knowledge and the role of participatory knowledge production in development practice and policy (Chambers, 2008, 2009, 2014; Holland, 2013); about whose knowledge counts (Mawdsley et al., 2002) and how an inclusive knowledge society is meant to function; and about power relations and power/knowledge nexuses within and between the global North and South (Eyben, 2006).

Critiques have also pointed to the frequent paternalism in knowledge encounters, notably in the translation of local knowledge to meet the needs of development interventions (Mohanty, 1984; Eriksson Baaz, 2005). Knowledge in development is generally produced in complex interactions between a number of actors, organizations, local contexts, and development systems (Long, 2001; Mosse, 2014). The question of power is especially relevant to NGOs' role as both service deliverers and supporters of transformative change (Bebbington et al., 2008). In development practice, tools and mechanisms like logical frameworks, performance indicators, and theories of change can, on the one hand, enable learning and reflection. On the other, these tools tend to normalize particular 'ways of knowing' that may be in tension with NGOs' efforts to engage with the complex and transformative changes that might emerge as part of, for instance, the widespread use of rights-based approaches (Eyben, 2015).

To conclude, the new international development context consists of a heightened emphasis on using knowledge to generate research and evidence that is in turn linked to concerns about results and demonstrable impact within particular political–economic environments. This creates new ethical, managerial, and methodological challenges for development NGOs from the global to the local level, across a diversity of contexts.

Structure of the book

This book offers new evidence about how NGOs are engaging with knowledge and evidence creation, management, and use within this evolving international development context. It draws on a diversity of scholarly and practitioner research across three continents, informed by different academic disciplines, and a number of case study civil society organizations operating within local, national, and global spheres. In academic terms, our overall idea of negotiated knowledge comes close to the principles of social epistemology. This emphasizes the empirical subjects, social interaction, and situations that determine how knowledge is produced (Longino, 2002: 10).

In pursuit of practical lessons and progressive opportunities, the contributions are framed by three overarching questions:

1. How are NGOs conceptualizing and interpreting knowledge and evidence within their internal and external practice?

2. How are different kinds of NGO at global and local levels using knowledge and evidence to create, sustain, challenge, or reshape the operation of power, and with what implications for legitimacy, accountability, and democracy?

3. How are knowledge and evidence-based agendas shaping the internal and external practices of development NGOs and the outcomes they are able to achieve on the ground?

The chapters are grouped together in three parts in line with their primary focus relative to these questions. In the following sections, we explore the fresh insights that these chapters bring to existing debates. By clustering the contributions in this way we are able to build up a rich picture from very different disciplinary perspectives and socio-political contexts, teasing out common themes and contrasting stories. The final chapter offers a final analysis of the major conclusions emerging from the entirety of the chapters, re-examining the overarching questions that frame the book.

Part I. Understanding knowledge and evidence

Part I of the book scrutinizes how organizations interpret and conceptualize terms like evidence and knowledge, and the implications for practice where a lack of common understanding exists. In international development in general (Cornwall, 2007) and in development NGOs in particular (Tvedt, 1998), concepts often turn into buzzwords. Terms such as 'gender', 'empowerment', 'poverty', 'democracy', 'civil society', 'results-based', and 'monitoring' are circulated in workshops, plans, and documents, yet they have many, often conflicting meanings. Often such terms are introduced by the most powerful development institutions, and are then gradually, through donor agendas, appropriated by organizations in different corners of the world. In this process they end up functioning as what Laclau terms 'empty signifiers' (2005: 40): labels that generalize, thus 'stripping these terms and associated categories of their diversity'.

'Evidence' and 'knowledge' are prime examples, and several of the chapters in this book refer to this issue. Civil society organizations (CSOs) do not have one stable definition of knowledge or evidence; instead these concepts are characterized by ambiguity. Two chapters, in particular, focus on this question. Together they offer analysis of ways in which NGOs understand the notions of knowledge and evidence in very different contexts. From this we can see how these 'fuzzy' notions are used and articulated by employees, activists, and volunteers of CSOs in an effort to implement their organizational agendas related to service delivery, community empowerment, and advocacy.

In Chapter 2, Kate Gooding investigates meanings and uses of 'evidence-based advocacy' amongst Malawian NGOs. Evidence-based advocacy is an example of a terminology that has gained increasing attention in international development. Conversations with NGO staff in Malawi revealed a surprising variation in how this term is understood, which led Gooding to delve deeper into what NGOs understand by it and how this informs their actions.

Gooding highlights how ambiguity characterizes both the organizational understanding of what constitutes evidence, and what is meant by advocacy itself. She unpacks the role that evidence plays in the work of NGOs and the value attached to evidence in different types of research. She demonstrates how the very connection between evidence and advocacy can be understood, on the one hand, as sharing results, and on the other as actually using the evidence to promote policy change. Consequently, she shows how 'research' can be used to justify key areas of concern, or to define the advocacy goals in the first place. This observation implies a close connection between evidence and organizational goals, including the normative and value-based ideas of what should be done in the first place.

In Chapter 3, Tiina Kontinen focuses on different perceptions of knowledge in one Finnish organization and its partners in an international NGO network. Drawing on organization theory literature on the negotiated nature of knowledge in organizations (Czarniawska, 2003), she employs the notion of organizational sense-making and shows how knowledge has multiple interpretations. This emerged from observations during Kontinen's research into the different ways that staff within one organization spoke about knowledge and knowledge production, with people voicing often contradictory definitions. She analyses how knowledge is constituted through a number of different vocabularies of practice, including those of project management, community, and friendship. The chapter shows the dominance of the project management vocabulary, and the ambiguous stand vis-á-vis that of community knowledge, this being seen as simultaneously valuable and in need of change. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the marginal position of research in what constitutes relevant knowledge for action-oriented development workers.