The anachronistic category of non-government organisations: Moving from normative to empirical-based definitions for identifying organized interest groups in forest policymaking

Abstract

NGOs take many shapes and forms, operating at various governing scales and levels. As a categorical form, NGOs often emerged as benevolent philanthropists or as antagonistic actors. Relative to governments, NGOs are envisioned to fill a void of unmet public services, exposing shortcomings, or in extreme cases, gain notoriety by applying aggressive campaigns in confrontational ways. However, more recent manifestations of NGOs are maneuvering political strategies in more elegant and reflexive ways that do not always match their more classical categorizations. Notwithstanding the proliferation of literature indicating the evolving role of NGOs, the theorizing of existing definitions and the usage of NGO as a category in the scientific literature remain anachronistic, recalling a particular imaginary of a rather simplistic idea. Indeed, as a category of analysis, the academic literature and associated political commentary refer to NGOs in normative terms that invoke benevolent, independent, and non-profit agents striving for common goals to foster societal betterment. We argue that such normative definitions of NGOs no longer reflect the empirics, and indeed obscure the overall role that such actors perform. By more closely examining NGO activities and the strategies they employ to achieve political goals, we argue that NGOs, like other interest groups, are highly political actors that pursue self-interests in ways that we might not otherwise recognize.