NGOs and the illusion of a Cambodian civil society

Abstract

In early development economics (back to the 1960s), the interventionist state was considered the central and driving force of development; from the 1980s, the neoliberal counter movement in development theory has taken stage, seeing the state as the major drawback to development and giving a greater role to the market (Mohan and Stokke 2000). This dramatic shift, particularly in the wake of the Cold War, has triggered development policy and aid transfers to be framed under what Robinson (1994) terms a ‘New Policy Agenda’ (Edwards and Hulme 1995, 1996). Under the Agenda, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are considered central agents, playing an important role by exerting organized pressure on autocratic and unresponsive states, and thereby supporting democratic stability and good governance, providing welfare services to those who could not be reached by markets, and strengthening the thriving civil society (Edwards and Hulme 1995: 4; Mohan and Stokke 2000; Moore 1993; Pearce 1993; Robinson 1996). The agenda is not monolithic in that its content varies from one official donor to another; however, all cases are driven by two poles: neoliberal economics and liberal democratic theory (Moore 1993). The trend to utilize NGOs to fulfill those roles has led to the mushrooming of NGOs both in the north and the south,2 especially in the 1980s and 1990s (Carroll 1992; Edwards and Hulme 1995, 1996; Hulme and Michael 1997). In practice, the emergence of NGOs and roles in development ‘represent both an opportunity and a danger’ (Edwards and Hulme 1995: 5). One main avenue of criticism questions whether the creation of NGOs has actually translated into the building of civil society (see, for instance, Carothers and Ottaway 2000). Other critical questions have centred, inter alia, around the following issues: NGOs’ positioning between the public and the private sectors; for instance, (Uphoff 1995: 18) contends that ‘NGOs are best considered as a sub-sector of the private sector’ NGOs’ ineffectiveness in terms of sustainability and popular participation (Edwards and Hulme 1995) NGOs’ accountability orientation upwards, away from the grassroots (Desai and Howes 1995; Shah and Shah 1995) 188NGOs’ failure to democratize their own structures which impedes their downwards accountability to the beneficiaries (Carroll 1992) Local people’s manipulation of foreign aid in the name of NGOs for their own advantage (Sampson 1996).