AID to Democracy NGOs: Mend it Don't End It Posted by Suzanne Nossel

There’s some interesting discussion at washingtonmonthly about the role of aid to NGOs and other civil society organs in the promotion of democracy.

Dan Drezner and Marc Lynch suggest that such aid is being over-emphasized in light of the problems associated with it. The problems include: that aid recipients get too closely associated with the U.S. which taints them and can undercut their relationships to local constituencies; that the wrong NGOs get funded; that its hard to know who to fund; and that local groups can wind up bending their agendas to suit funders, rather than the other way around.

The implication of their analysis is that NGO support should play only a bit part in efforts to promote democracy. The corollary is that there’s nothing wrong with the fact that Bush’s steamroll into Iraq was buttressed by only paltry efforts to build an infrastructure to support the democracy he claims to be trying to spread.

Its important to raise questions about how well ideas that sound great on paper actually work on practice.  But the better answer is not to scale back work to build civil society, but rather to rethink how we do it. I was very involved with a number of NGOs in South Africa in the early 1990s, a time when the civil society sector had taken over many of the functions of government –dispute resolution, law and order, city planning, economic development - filling the gap left when the apartheid state had been totally discredited, but elections to replace it had not taken place.

Virtually all the pitfalls Drezner and Lynch cite were manifest, albeit maybe not as deep as they are in the Middle East. But none of that negated the importance and value of support for local NGOs. The solutions are not simple, but how about looking at these for starters:

• funnel money through organizations that are seen as more independent and less controlling than the USG (for example, the American Bar Association, which has done a huge amount of valuable work of this sort, mainly in Eastern Europe, relying overwhelmingly on US government funding);
  
  
• set up a division of labor whereby the U.S. funds schools and businesses and the Scandinavians and others with less baggage focus on the NGOs;
  
  

• hire locals and those with language proficiency to conduct the program evaluations so that groups don’t feel they must over-cater to the West.

That there are problems with the way this work is done today means that we need to problem-solve, not that we should turn away from programs that are indispensable if the democracies the U.S. wants to claim a role in creating are to last.

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