Religious Non-governmental Organizations Research Articles

International Discussions on Religious Factor in Global Bioethics

The article analyzes the cooperation of UN structures with religious non-governmental organizations, as well as with faith-based communities. The authors consider diff erent levels of the infl uence of the religious factor on the UN activity, and also articulate new directions of its development, outlined during the COVID-19 period. The authors focus on the latent semantic and structural confl ict nature of the global agenda, which is formulated by elites who recognize the “benefi ts” of religious institutions and seek to use the possibilities of religious networks, on the one hand. On the other hand, they point to internal disagreements characteristic of national religious communities, which, as a result of their participation in international dialogue, bring additional tension both to global discussions and to the internal processes of their countries. Global health, which has become an important part of international relations, puts on the agenda the search for a new ethic of global dialogue, of which religious values and religious actors are becoming a part. In the COVID-19 pandemic, trends have emerged that have made the role of religion more visible in the current global health and bioethics agenda. First of all, in connection with the threats of a global pandemic, the need to create new forms of global health management and response to epidemic threats, as well as the organization of a system of “assistance” to developing countries in the fi eld of public health.

Post-secularism muting controversy: school-NGO interactions in Israel through the prism of stakeholder salience theory

ABSTRACT Elaborating on stakeholder salience theory, this study aims to explore the different agendas and modus operandi of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within the Israeli public education system. This article is part of a larger study, focused on NGOs that offer services within the secular state education sector in the field of ‘Jewish (religious) identity.’ Through a case study of one such organisation in particular comprised of several units, we attempt to understand the different processes, actors and interests at play, based on data from semi-structured interviews with NGO representatives, school leadership and parents. Using a dynamic view of stakeholder salience theory, we identify the different actors involved and classify their roles in the various relationships. The complex Israeli context and focus on religious NGOs offer us a unique perspective on the role of organisations offering services within the Israeli school system and society in general. We find the expected controversy over these NGOs’ presence in secular schools to have been muted by a convergence of opinions resulting from Israeli ‘post-secularism.’

COP and the Cloth: Quantitatively and Normatively Assessing Religious NGO Participation at the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

How much is religion quantitatively involved in global climate politics? After assessing the role of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from a normative perspective, this descriptive, transdisciplinary and unconventional study offers the first comprehensive quantitative examination of religious nongovernmental organizations that formally participate in its annual meetings, the largest attempts to solve the climate crisis through global governance. This study finds that although their numbers are growing, only about 3 percent of registered nongovernmental organizations accredited to participate in the conference are overtly religious in nature—and that more than 80 percent of those faith-based groups are Christian. Additionally, this study finds that religious nongovernmental organizations that participate in the conference are mostly from the Global North. The results call for greater participation of religious institutions in the international climate negotiations in order for society to address the planetary emergency of climate change.

Whose Agency: The Politics and Practice of Kenya’s HIV-Prevention NGOs, Megan Hershey

Reviewed by: Whose Agency: The Politics and Practice of Kenya's HIV-Prevention NGOs by Megan Hershey Brad Crofford BOOK REVIEW of Hershey, Megan. 2019. Whose Agency: The Politics and Practice of Kenya's HIV-Prevention NGOs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 224 pp. $69.95 (cloth). In Whose Agency, political scientist Megan Hershey uses a mixed-methods research approach to argue that local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Kenya are highly adaptable and thus able "to thrive within the interplay of donor, state, and religious demands" (20). She balances discussion of academic works on NGOs with examples from participant-observation, interviews, focus groups, and surveys in nuanced and engaging ways. The first chapter summarizes the literature on NGOs and program evaluations of HIV-prevention programs as well as key terms and methodologies for the remainder of the book. Hershey focuses on local NGOs, as opposed to international NGOs or community-based organizations. She measures NGO success through its direct reach ("the number of individuals who attended a training program"), indirect reach ("the number of individuals with whom trainees shared HIV-prevention information"), the number of individuals obtaining HIV tests as a proxy for individual behavioral change, and the use of participatory approaches (15–17). She uses four case studies of local NGOs in Nairobi, Kenya: two each that operate in universities or informal settlements and two each that are faith based or secular. She conducted participant-observation and staff interviews at each site over a period of six weeks or more, surveyed youth in the NGOs' target areas, and interviewed youth who participated in the NGOs' programs. In chapter 2, she provides background information for future chapters, with a brief history of the NGO sector and HIV/AIDS contexts in Kenya. She discusses the settings of the four case studies: the Kibera and Mathare informal settlements, the University of Nairobi, and Daystar University. Chapter 3 details the four local NGOs Hershey studied, including their locations, work cultures, and programs. It includes survey results relating to the organizations' direct reach, indirect reach, and effects on behavior (as reflected in HIV testing rates) in their target areas. Hershey finds "NGOs are effecting real behavior change in addition to reaching people directly and indirectly" (70). The next chapter describes how the NGOs conduct their training and how they adapt "to attract and meet the needs of their target audiences," as by providing a small financial incentive in informal settlements or making the training entertaining to compete with other activities available to university students (90). Interestingly, Hershey finds that a lower percentage of survey respondents in informal settlements attended HIV training sessions, but those who did so shared the information more widely, reaching as many as twenty-six people per trainee. In chapter 5, Hershey focuses on participation, including "whether local NGOs were responding to community members' needs and whether these community members were meaningfully incorporated into the decision-making [End Page 97] process as participants" (91). She finds that the NGOs in informal settlements incorporated more participation into their processes, such as involving local youth groups, although neither they nor their university-based peers incorporated ideal amounts of participation. She attributes this to poor internal communication within the NGOs and donor restrictions, which may lead NGOs to prioritize the donor's desired outcomes over the community's participation or preferences. The following chapter examines the role of religion. Hershey reports that "faith is not a key element of NGO programs" for either the religious or secular NGOs, since religious NGOs downplay faith to align with donor restrictions and attract participants, while secular NGOs include some religious practices, like prayer, to boost their legitimacy in local contexts (123). There is thus no difference in programs, but there are nonetheless some differences in the NGOs' cultures, their approaches to networking, and their employees' perceptions of their own and their organizations' work. In chapter 7, Hershey discusses the relationship between HIV/AIDS NGOs and the Kenyan state. After providing a brief history of the state's response to HIV/AIDS, she argues that NGOs have "carefully cultivat[ed] positive relationships with the state in order to access more resources with which to better serve their communities...

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Practice of religious rites and accounting standards compliance overcome the decoupling of transparency in religious non-governmental Organizations

Governing Through Partnerships: Neoconservative Governance and State Reliance on Religious NGOs in Drug Policy

This article examines states’ pursuit of partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a strategy of governance in drug policy. State actors have used partnerships with religious NGOs to provide treatment services and disseminate messages about prevention. I investigate the emergence of such partnerships, drawing attention to neoconservatism as a political rationality associated with the rise of the New Right. I analyze officials’ justifications and strategies for including religious NGOs in such partnerships, using archival data on drug policies in Ohio and beginning with the formation of the statewide addiction services agency in 1989. The results demonstrate how officials have increasingly recognized the characteristics of the religious community by emphasizing their social service delivery and by framing religious leaders as health educators. Given the results, I consider the impacts of partnerships for the autonomy of organizations, the oversight of care, and the generation of images of an engaged community.

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development.This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

The Implication of Corruption on Economic Progress of Nigeria

The issue of corruption is a universal challenge and has denied many emerging economies good business opportunities. This study makes use of the position of Nigeria in the country corruption ranking captured by Transparency International and the rate of corruption prevailing in the country to assess the degree of influence corruption has on economic growth of the country. The study employs secondary form of data obtained from World Bank Development Indicators and Transparency International which cover a period from 2008 to 2018. The regression result indicates that the country corruption ranking has a significant negative influence on economic growth in Nigeria while the rate of corruption prevailing in the country has a significant positive impact on economic growth in the country. The two results are significant and so the study concludes that the image of the country has been tarnished globally due to the high level of corruption in Nigeria and as internationally perceived. As a result, important investment opportunities elude the country even though the economy is growing with the high rate of corruption prevailing in the country. The study thus, recommends among others that the religious leaders and non-governmental organizations should assist in curbing the menace of corruption by inculcating moral values in the young generation who should grow up to say no to corruption and its attractions. This will go a long way to salvage the future of this great nation.

Recycling Stories: Mantras, Communication, and Organizational Materialization

Religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) are becoming powerful organizational actors, but how are these organizations enacted through the communicative practices of their members? To address this question, this article offers a conceptual framework for investigating how the terse retelling of an inspirational organizational story, encapsulated in a mantra, contributes to materializing a Buddhist NGO’s ethos and worldview. The value of this framework is subsequently demonstrated through an in-depth naturalistic case study of a mantra’s constitutive force in the enactment of a large international Buddhist NGO that is increasingly focused on environmental protection. By showing how a mantra acts as a textualization, substantiation, and invocation device in mass, social media, and face-to-face communication, this study makes important contributions to the literature on the intersection between religion and organization as well as the communicative constitution of organizations.

Nongovernmental organizations and postprison life: Examining the role of religion

This article examines the relevance of religion for nongovernmental organizations that work with formerly incarcerated people. Despite the increased visibility of religious nongovernmental organizations working with criminalized people, research on the nongovernmental sector and criminal justice still largely focuses on secular organizations. This article argues for the conceptual importance of religion and its role shaping work in this sector, and draws from the sociology of religion to theorize the importance of discourses and practices in organizational settings. I present a typology identifying nongovernmental organizations’ religious approaches, which I developed using archival, interview, and observational data from 18 nongovernmental organizations in Wisconsin. I differentiate among nongovernmental organizations that I call secular, which stay away from religion, religiously inspired, which operate based on religious principles, and reciprocally religious, which hold expectations of religious practices from program participants. Moving beyond single-case studies enables a comparative analysis of the ideas and practices among actors that serve and seek to shape people leaving prison, whose work varies in terms of predominant denominations, assumptions about morality and sin, and relationships with churches and the medical profession. The results encourage further inquiry into what religious nongovernmental organizations do, why, and how, given the distinctive discursive and material resources and practices that they bring into work with criminalized people.

Buddhist Religious Non-Governmental Organizations in Mongolia

Buddhist Religious Non-Governmental Organizations in Mongolia

Religiöse Sedimente im Menschenrechtsdiskurs. Zur Dynamik der Konstruktionen „des Religiösen“ und „des Säkularen“

This article discusses present-day trends in the debates around the notions of ‘secularization’ and ‘de-secularization’. It starts from David Martin’s most recent critic of the idea of a resurgence of religions as a mere inversion of the classical secularization paradigm. First, the article puts this critique into the wider context of more traditional critiques of secularization theories (primarily in the tradition of Thomas Luckmann and Talal Asad). Second, it applies this framework to the analysis of human rights discourses inside so called ‘Religious Non-Governmental Organizations’ in the context of the United Nations Organization. In the end, the author refers to the notion of a ‘sedimentation’ of the religious and the secular – as put forward by Linda Woodhead – in order to propose a new approach. It shows to what an extent, the idea of sedimentation helps to more adequately grasp the processes at hand and to open an avenue for future research in the field.

Navigating Uncertainty: The Survival Strategies of Religious NGOs in China

This article looks at the strategies religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) with strong transnational linkages use to maintain a continued presence in mainland China. It does so by utilizing neo-institutional theory as an instrument for analysis, with an emphasis on outlining the coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures RNGOs face. One of the key findings of the study is that there is creative circumvention of isomorphic pressures by working with local agents, fostering trust with the local government, and keeping a low profile. Moreover, RNGOs dealt with the uncertain institutional environment in China through staff exchanges, denominational supervision, tapping into global platforms, and undergoing a professionalization process.

Navigating Uncertainty: The Survival Strategies of Religious NGOs in China

This article looks at the strategies religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) with strong transnational linkages use to maintain a continued presence in mainland China. It does so by utilizing neo-institutional theory as an instrument for analysis, with an emphasis on outlining the coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures RNGOs face. One of the key findings of the study is that there is creative circumvention of isomorphic pressures by working with local agents, fostering trust with the local government, and keeping a low profile. Moreover, RNGOs dealt with the uncertain institutional environment in China through staff exchanges, denominational supervision, tapping into global platforms, and undergoing a professionalization process.

Civil Society and the Gender Politics of Economic Competitiveness in Malaysia

Malaysian government planning and policy-making have increasingly come to recognise the role of women and the household in the promotion of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. Government planning documents emphasise the need to boost women's labour market participation, increase women's levels of entrepreneurship, and the need to strengthen and support the family unit—developments that can be understood in terms of a market-building agenda in which women's labour and the household are viewed as untapped resources in the struggle to maintain international competitiveness. This article explores an important dimension of this policy turn: the role of civil society in both promoting and resisting this market-building agenda. The paper focuses in particular on two case studies: religious non-governmental organisations involved in implementing ‘family strengthening’ programmes and civil society engagements with the issue of women's representation on corporate boards.

Understanding the Effects of Faith: A Comparison of Religious and Secular HIV Prevention NGOS in Kenya

AbstractReligious non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) are active in development efforts, yet the role faith plays in these organizations—and its effects on programs—remains unclear. Drawing on evidence from a study of Kenyan NGOs, I find that faith rarely emerges in the programs of Christian religious NGOs. I argue that both secular and religious NGOs are constrained by donor restrictions and a need for legitimacy that simultaneously remove religious elements from religious NGOs and promote minimal religious practices within secular organizations. The second half of the article discusses the nuanced ways in which faith does manifest within the organizational characteristics and practices of NGOs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Christo-Islamic Perspectives on Abortion and the Challenges of Globalization

The world is witnessing a tremendous change in every sphere in every facet of its social, political, economic as well as in the religious sphere. These changes have affected the orientation of people towards certain behavioural patterns that were hitherto regarded as sacrosanct and but which has now witnessed and is still witnessing serious changes due to the effect of globalization and this has eroded religious beliefs and practices. One such is the issue of abortion which has been legalized in some nations of the world and there has generated a lot of controversies among different religious groups, individuals and Non-Governmental Organizations. The basis for this lies in the fact that human lives are regarded as sacred and should not be taken at the whims and caprices of people irrespective of the circumstance except when such causes serious danger to the life of the woman. The modern trend of committing abortion and even its legalization is regarded as preposterous and inhuman and urgent steps need to be taken to avert the danger(s) caused by this dastardly act. Also religious groups need to rise to the challenges posed by this dastardly act in order to avert imminent danger to the global community.

Religion and Sustainability in Global Civil Society

This paper presents basic empirical research about the role of religion and religious actors in the global politics of sustainability. Drawing on insights from three overlapping fields of study—environmental politics, religious transnationalism, and religion and ecology—this study analyzes data gathered through ethnographic interviews with representatives of religious non-governmental organizations at the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20. These interviews asked respondents to discuss their understanding of the meaning, role, and position of religion within civil society efforts to address sustainability concerns. Content analysis of interview responses suggests that religious actors hold divergent views about the salience of religion to global sustainability politics. The central finding is that the boundary between religious and secular civil society groups is a permeable one.