Abstract
European non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) have used naming and shaming extensively in their advocacy to push the EU and member state governments to implement international norms on foreign aid. The paper analyses the contents of NGDO advocacy publications, with the goal of gaining insight into how and why these organisations engage in naming and shaming. The exercise reveals that NGDOs are highly selective in the norms they promote through naming and shaming: they shame governments heavily for not implementing norms on aid quantity, but are less vocal on norms related to aid effectiveness. The paper shows that NGDOs strategically select norms in their naming shaming activities which have higher resonance with the public and are less costly to monitor, criteria which aid quantity norms fulfil. There is also some evidence that NGDOs promote increasing the quantity of aid because it would enhance their own access to donor funding.
Highlights
European non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) have used naming and shaming extensively in their advocacy to push the European Union (EU) and member state governments to implement international norms on foreign aid
The paper aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the motivations and strategic drivers of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) engaged in naming and shaming activities, by focusing on organisations in the field of international development
The paper examined the naming and shaming practices of European NGDOs towards the European Commission and national governments, by empirically focusing on CONCORD’s AidWatch Reports and comparing the norms promoted by the NGDOs in these to the body of norms generally seen as accepted in the international development system
Summary
‘Naming and shaming’ has become a highly visible tool in the advocacy arsenal of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in recent years, involving the use of reports, analyses and press releases to bring negative publicity for governments not complying with their commitments. We propose three independent variables to explain why NGOs in the field of international development may promote certain norms through their naming and shaming activities over others: funding concerns (based on the conceptualisation of NGOs as self-interested, rational agents); norm resonance (based on the literature on norm entrepreneurs); and monitoring costs (based on an asymmetry of information between the NGOs and the donor countries) All three of these variables link to the motivations of NGOs. The literature has generally tended to provide rather one-sided explanations of NGO motivations, and neglected the fact that NGOs, just like any other organisations, face a whole range of incentives that may shape their behaviour. The three proposed variables are able to capture a wide range of these incentives, while keeping the analytical framework concise
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