Amanda Murdie’s new book takes on the difficult and important question of whether international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are actually doing more harm than good in their global efforts to promote development and human rights. Murdie focuses on the impact that INGOs have on human security, defined as freedom from want and freedom from fear. Until now, the literature on NGOs has followed a common path in academic research on new global issues: first wildly optimistic, then crushingly negative. Murdie’s book is a welcome step further—a clear-eyed, thoughtful, empirical investigation of the measureable effects of international NGO activity on human well-being around the world. Murdie gently points out that many scholars yearn to love NGOs; we are disappointed if they fail to live up to our expectations. Murdie does not fall into this trap. Instead, her analysis allows the data to speak for themselves, showing evidence that INGOs generally tend to do more good than harm, but that important factors make their success more or less likely, including support from the international system, support from the domestic community, working in a country with a government relatively free from corruption, and a domestic society relatively free to engage with NGOs.
This book makes several important contributions to our understanding about the impact of NGOs in developing countries. First, it is the first large-scale effort to empirically evaluate the impact of NGOs on people’s lives in developing countries. This is a challenging task—and the data available are not perfect, as Murdie is careful to note—but it is nonetheless an important descriptive and empirical effort, especially given the wildly divergent claims about the benefits and perils of NGO activities. This book offers a satisfying answer to the question of whether international NGOs do more harm than good, and NGO workers, scholars, and advocates the world over should breathe a collective sigh of relief that the answer is, “usually not.” Murdie’s analysis is rigorous and creative, and is an example of how to make the most out of limited data without overstepping.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, this book lays out the important factors which condition the effectiveness of NGOs in different issue areas. Murdie distinguishes between service and advocacy INGOs, both in her game theoretic set up of hypotheses and in the empirical sections. By starting with a game theoretic model, Murdie lays out clear, logically consistent hypotheses about the conditions under which INGOs are most likely to have the impact they seek. Service provision organizations have the greatest impact (measured as access to clean water—a very compelling basic measure of “freedom from want”) when INGOs work in countries without serious problems of state corruption, where organizations are willing to signal their commitment to best practices through voluntary accountability programs, and where the international community is involved in and committed to providing resources. Interestingly, INGOs also have the greatest impact when it is easier for domestic populations to work with organizations, either because of the density of urbanization or because of having the freedom to associate. Finally, development INGOs are most likely to improve service provision in countries where there is close alignment between the goals of the organization and the goals of the community.
Human rights issues and organizations are different. In this case, the issue area matters a great deal for the effectiveness of advocacy. For some issues, like physical integrity rights, INGOs have made great strides. In other areas, like women’s rights, change is less obvious. INGOs also tend to have more success in countries that are more vulnerable to pressure from internal and external forces. Similarly, INGOs tend to have the most success on advocacy issues when there are more INGOs sending signals of their commitment to domestic or international audiences, when the costs of information are low (freedom of association is high), or when the support of the international community is increasing. Interestingly, the international community is more likely to support advocacy INGOs where there are fewer domestically oriented INGOs working.
This last point speaks to one of the great strengths of this book: the willingness to tackle some of the thornier nuances of NGO activity. For example, Murdie points out that INGOs are often caught between multiple and conflicting interests, mainly between international donors on one hand and domestic audiences on the other. This is a great point, and one that is explored more explicitly in Peter Gourevitch, David Lake, and Janice Gross Stein’s edited book, The Credibility of Transnational NGOs: When Virtue is Not Enough (2012), but in very few other publications. Additionally, Murdie starts her analysis by relaxing the assumption that all INGOs are principled, instead setting up both her formal model and her hypotheses around the idea that some organizations are more principled than others. Recognizing that different organizations are beholden to different audiences and constituents opens the door for understanding the pressures these organizations face and the strategies they take to overcome them. It is high time that the scholarly literature on NGOs advances a more nuanced view of their motivations, strengths, and weaknesses, and abandons the assumption that NGOs are all benevolent. This book is a welcome step in that direction.
That said, I do wonder if the principled nature of an INGO is the most important factor shaping its impact. I should be clear that Murdie’s definition of principled is not a casual one—she does not mean whether an organization is generally good or benevolent, but rather that the organization is “motivated by principles of ‘shared values’ to help a domestic population with what that population wants but is not able to achieve on its own” (p. 74). Instead of assuming shared values, Murdie allows for the possibility that some organizations are more committed to their own ideals, or the ideals of international donors, than to what the domestic community truly wants. Coming from the perspective of comparative politics, I very much like this attention to preference congruence at the local level, but I imagine the reality to be much more complicated than Murdie suggests. Even if, on average, support for a particular issue is high, we know that there can be deep divisions in local communities on even seemingly non-controversial topics. For example, an INGO may want to provide clean water. Survey data may show that access to clean water is the number one priority for most community members. And still, there are questions of who gets the contract to build a water treatment facility, who gets credit for successful completion of the project, who decides where the facility is built, who sets the price or makes a profit… these are just some of the many ways local projects can be divisive and politically charged. Clearly, the degree of congruence between what INGOs want and what domestic audiences want is important, but it may not be straightforward.
Finally, as a comparative politics scholar, I am particularly intrigued by the findings about the quality of domestic governance and the ability or willingness of local communities to organize. I am curious how these relationships might evolve over time. Murdie’s attention to domestic governmental factors such as control of corruption is to be applauded, but I wonder how INGO activity shapes those factors. Many organizations explicitly work on issues of government transparency and corruption. In some cases, it seems they have had great success, but in others they have provoked a government backlash of restrictions on NGO activities. Murdie’s list of conditions is thorough and compelling, and she deserves credit for including factors at many levels of analysis, including the organizations themselves, the communities they work in, the domestic government, and the international actors they interact with. A great next step would be to explore how they interact with each other. How common is the best-case scenario vs. the worst? How many countries have made substantial progress on all these factors? How independent are these factors and how much does INGO activity influence them?
Overall, this is an excellent book that not only answers some very important empirical questions, but also opens to the door for exciting new research. I think the contributions to the international relations literature will be clear, but I highly recommend this book for scholars of comparative politics as well—both as a great example of how to make the most of limited data resources on important and difficult issues, and also because this raises issues that are worth continued investigation and exploration.
