Many thanks to Carew Boulding for her careful and flattering review, and to Jeffrey Isaac for arranging this dialogue. As Boulding and I both point out in our reviews of each other’s work, NGO research would benefit from more discussions that cross subfields.
Boulding’s review brings up a number of interesting points that I hope will help spur on future research that builds upon both of our reviewed books. First, I agree wholeheartedly with Boulding that we need to further unpack domestic preferences to INGOs. I would also hope that future work unpacks the international community’s preferences to INGOs. Understanding that international and domestic community preferences often differ to INGOs is one important step but, as I stated in the conclusion of my book, “there are situations…where these actor groups may be bifurcated to the extent that including more communities would be useful” (p. 242). Like Boulding contends, the work of INGOs often include difficult decisions about not only which goods and services to focus on but on who gets the limited goods and services that INGOs can provide. Future work that focuses on how domestic preferences to INGO programs could vary by geography or demographics would be helpful not only for scholars but for the practitioners proposing and carrying out these projects themselves.
Second, I hope that future work follows Boulding’s suggestion and examines how government backlash and restrictions on the workings of INGOs influences human security outcomes. Many countries have moved to restrict international funding and curtail the activities of INGOs; this may in fact be due to earlier incongruence between INGOs and domestic preferences. It could also be an effort to limit the successes human rights INGOs have had in constraining government repression. Regimes often cite a few examples of INGO “bad apples” in their justifications for why to restrict the activities of all INGOs in their country. Because all INGOs could thus be negatively affected by the behavior of a few, this rising phenomena of INGO restrictions could be due in part to the non-principled INGOs I focus on in my work. By further examining the causes and consequences of restrictions to INGOs in specific countries, scholars may be able to better understand the changing process of INGO-state relations. Future work on this growing trend of government restrictions to INGOs is also necessary to understand any deleterious effects such restrictions could have on human security outcomes, especially in repressive regimes already working to thwart domestic advocacy attempts.
As Boulding’s review makes clear, research on NGOs is having to “make the most out of the limited data” we have. Her review offers some great ideas for data projects that would be useful for the field and could help NGO scholars coming from both comparative politics and international relations. In particular, I would think that future public opinion work on the preferences of domestic populations to INGOs and INGO projects would be very useful. Future data collection on what government officials, both in donor countries and in developing countries, think of INGOs could also be extremely valuable to the larger literature. Ideally, these data efforts would need to be longitudinal so that we can understand whether, when, and how preferences to INGOs change and what affect, if any, these changes have on the likelihood of human security improvements and political participation.
