After NGOs, NRBOs?
Mahmud Farooque
Features
Volume 2 Number 315
Fri. July 09, 1999
After NGOs, NRBOs?
IMMEDIATELY after independence, the government of Bangladesh decided
that the state should be the primary mechanism for implementing the
nation's economic development agenda. However, having limited financial
resources to carry out this agenda, Bangladesh was dependent on foreign
aid from the very beginning. As a result, the government's primary
responsibility was reduced to allocating aid money according to the
policy and guidance of its international donor community, the makeup of
which changed with successive governing regimes. In other words,
government was on the driving seat in terms of paper, and not in terms
of agenda.
By the mid 70s, attributable to a host of internal conflicts and
external manipulations, a consensus began to emerge that the apparatus
of the state was corrupt, inefficient and incapable of making proper
resource allocations let alone manage the process of development. It was
then that the international community of aid providing organizations
began looking for an alternate conduit for channeling the development
money. Non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh began to appear as
an intermediate institution to safeguard and manage donor's money,
predating their emergence in the Western nations at least by a decade.
When military dictatorship reappeared in Bangladesh during the 1980s, in
addition to the inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy arguments,
aid-granting governments and agencies could now impose their moral
prerogative not to deal with an authoritarian regime. At the same time,
leading NGOs were now able to demonstrate significant improvement in
performance characteristics that was above and beyond their government
counterparts. It is indeed doubtful that, sans the contributions from
the NGOs, the population-planning programme could have recorded the
success it did. Similar arguments could also be made for other social
service rendering organisations and programmes. Propelled by their own
successes and increased patronage from the donors, NGOs continued to
flourish during the 1980s and took command over a significant portion of
the socio-economic development landscape.
By that time, net outflow of knowledge capital from Bangladesh to the
industrially advanced countries had seriously depleted local repository
of expert knowledge and management capabilities. Rise of the NGO
movement in Bangladesh meant an increased dependency on expensive
foreign consultants and some overtaxed local experts who sometimes were
more interested in their own purse than solution of the problem at hand.
Between the consultants that provided the expertise and the NGOs that
implemented their recommendations, a mutual dependency was created,
which sometimes supported studies, conferences and projects of very
little or no actual significance.
Structural Problems
From the very onset NGO was an artificial construct that was difficult
to fit within the hierarchy of contemporary democratic governance.
Contemporary democratic governance begins at the top with an ideology,
manifested in the national constitution. At the bottom are the morals
and values embodied in the national culture that is hard to codify but
implicitly understood and agreed upon by the general citizenry. Between
the two are two distinct layers - institutions and civil society. The
former to address government and market activities based primarily on
the constitution and the latter to address the two dimensional gap
between the constitution and institution, and institution and
socio-cultural norms. The natural tendency is to place NGOs in the
category of the civil society, as complementary to government and market
institutions. The historical context contradicts this view and shows
that the role of the NGOs was substitutive from the very beginning.
On the other hand, the ability to bypass the state apparatus, however
convenient for the distribution and implementation of development
programmes, had a basic problem, which became more pronounced as NGOs
began to infiltrate every aspect of our socio-economic life. Returning
to our depiction of the basic structure of a traditional democratic
system of governance comprising of the state, market institutions and
the civil society, NGOs carry with them a fundamental deficiency in the
realm of accountability. As a non-market institution, it is shielded
from predatory competition in price. As a non-governmental institution,
it is also shielded from political competition, which makes governments
accountable to the general citizenry. However, unlike the religious
schools and the cultural organisations, NGOs are not a product of
spontaneous social formation; the stakeholders here are decision-makers
in foreign governments and aid granting agencies. Hence the fundamental
problem of non-governmental organisation is that of accountability -
they are not directly accountable to the government, the market or the
people. It is true that the NGO Bureau establishes limits and operating
guidelines, but the link between them and the general citizenry is
tentative at best.
Emerging Challenges
Given the historical context and structural problems, NGOs now face
three fundamental challenges. First, the initial advantage in project
execution came largely from the fact that NGOs were smaller in size.
They were flexible, easy to monitor, easy to change, and quick to
deploy. However, as they became larger, hierarchies needed to be
imposed. Being a competitor of the government, NGOs began recruiting
from the same pool as government organisations and in the process began
to inherit the same organizational culture that now plagues most of our
public sector institutions. Following this line of reasoning, recent
takeover of GSS based on evidence of mismanagement and misuse of
international donations is not terribly shocking. What is shocking is
that the entity that has taken it over is the very entity it was
supposed to replace.
The fact that there haven't been many furors with the government
takeover of one of the larger NGOs goes to show how the social climate
has changed from that of only a decade ago. Return of the democratic
government, no matter how superficial in terms of governance and how
insignificant in terms of the lives of the average citizen, introduces a
second fundamental challenge for the further growth of non-governmental
organizations in Bangladesh. Aid granting agencies and governments can
no longer use the "dictatorship" clause to bypass the mechanism of the
state. In fact, having used such clause to promote the non-governmental
sector, donors are now bounded by their own logic to show their
commitment to democratically elected governments. Recent consolidation
by USAID of the family planning service providing NGOs have reinstated
the government apparatus in the supply chain, showing a dramatic
departure from the prevailing paradigm.
The third fundamental challenge for the NGOs is promulgated by
technology. Proliferation of information technology now makes possible
for the 'lost part of the brain' to impose checks and balance and loosen
the thread of the unwelcome dependency between expensive foreign and
overtaxed local experts and their NGO counterparts. Points are now being
made that the flood action programme, if implemented, would bring in
more miseries in the next iteration. Points are now being made that
arsenic detection equipment in use are imprecise and should be withdrawn
immediately. Points are now being made that lead content of Dhaka's air
is highest in the world and that TSEVs and leaded gasoline should be
banned immediately. In other words, through Internet based networks of
non-resident experts, a mechanism is slowly developing to curtail the
virtual free ride for the handful of foreign and local consultants that
supported projects of limited or no impact and indirectly contributed to
the existence of inconsequential NGOs.
Implications for Public Management
The preceding discussion have eluded to three stylised facts, which are
worth summarising:
1. NGOs' role in Bangladesh is substitutive and not complimentary. They
are not a product of spontaneous social formation and cannot be grouped
in the category of civil society.
2. NGOs' are a misfit for the traditional mode of governance. They are
not directly accountable to the government, market, or the general
citizenry. They distort the lines of control and authority and add to
the complexity of an already complex system.
3. Erosion of local knowledge and expertise base due to brain drain has
allowed some NGOs to contribute to a vicious cycle of unwanted
dependency between them and expensive foreign and overextended local
experts. The output of this dependency is not necessarily leading to
desirable social outcomes.
The discussion has also pointed out three fundamental challenges for
further growth of NGOs in Bangladesh:
1. NGOs have lost their size advantages and are crippled by the same
organization culture that plagues most public sector institutions.
2. Presence of democratic government means a reduction of unqualified
donor patronage for funding of NGO operations.
3. Proliferation of information technology has created an opportunity
for non-residents to scrutinise the "expert opinions" of unqualified or
uncommitted experts and impose restrictions on the dependency between
them and some NGOs.
To proceed with some conjectures as what could be some interesting
development in the foreseeable future, we have to begin by recognizing
that NGOs appeared in Bangladesh to offer a correction to the role of
the government. A change in the external context means that some NGOs
have outlived their utility and need to be either absorbed in the public
sector or operate as market institutions. The unattractiveness of the
first option prompts one to suggest that a more active role on the part
of the government is necessary in setting up the agenda for non
government organizations, thus minimising the influence of donor's
priorities. Having a democratic government at least on paper, allows the
government the leverage to bargain on issues of national priorities.
However, the lack of competency in expert knowledge could be a
significant drawback in establishing such priorities with proper vision,
analysis and commitments.
It could very well be the case that emerging networks of non-resident
Bangladeshi organizations (NRBO) could be the missing piece for solving
this puzzle. Having learnt from the NGO experience, NRBOs are refusing
donor money so that they can exercise full control over their own
agenda. This could be a very positive development if it was possible to
construct effective platforms so that the energy and expertise of the
non-resident community could be harnessed to provide the required
expertise to the government. Just like the NGOs were an essential
correction to government failures, NRBOs could also be a necessary
correction for the failings of the NGOs. However, goodwill alone will
not be enough to overcome the structural barriers. Success of the
non-resident community would depend on how much they are actually able
to learn from the past experiences. Afterall, there still remains the
structural problem of accountability and NRBOs could end up resembling
the NGOs more so than the civil society.
Nevertheless, the possibility for an NRBO-led structural transformation
of the economic development scene in Bangladesh is not completely
unlikely. Back in 1975, who would have thought that the BRACs, the
Proshikhas, the Grameens, or the GSSs of Bangladesh would cover so much
of the nation's economic development landscape? No one doubts the
effectiveness and the significant contributions of many well managed
non-governmental organisations. However, it is also true that there are
many imitators who are not going to survive the three fundamental
challenges and overcome the inherent structural problems at the same
time. The rise of NRBOs and slowdown in the growth of NGOs could produce
some fundamental structural transformations in the Bangladesh economy
that should make the turn of the century very interesting from a public
management perspective.
The writer is a doctoral candidate in science and technology policy and
a coordinator of EB2000 (http://www.eb2000.org), a strategic alliance of
Bangladeshi expatriates dedicated to comprehensive development of
Bangladesh.
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