Wikipedia
NGO-isation refers to the capacity of so-called non-governmental organizations ( NGOs) to depoliticize discourses and practices of social movements. The term has been used by a few authors, including the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who speaks about the NGO-isation of resistance, and more generally, about the NGO-isation of politics. Across the world, the number of internationally operating NGOs is around 40,000. The number of national NGOs in countries is higher, with around 1-2 million NGOs in India and 277,000 NGOs in Russia.
More precisely, NGO-isation is a process resulting from neoliberal globalization. It consists of the flourishing of NGOs founded on issue-specific interventions associated with the rising centrality of civil society where NGOs are in charge of social services that used to be fulfilled by the public sector. As a result, some have described this process as an outworking of foreign policy (from countries in the Global North) that is redefining the relationships (in the Global South) between society, the state and external actors.
From a political point of view, NGOS are sometimes referred to as a third sector that has the capacity to balance the power of the state. The broadening of the political configuration suggests a better governance where NGOs are enabling a real “bottom-up democracy” that promotes pluralism and the development of a civil society. Joseph Stiglitz referred to this process as the emergence of a “post-Washington consensus”. From an economic point of view, some have argued that NGOs are able to provide social welfare services to the most vulnerable “at lower cost and higher standards of quality than government”. However, many scholars have been very critical towards the process of NGO-ization as the case studies below suggest. Indeed, some argue that the disadvantaged communities that supposedly benefit from the services of NGOs are first and foremost “the products of neoliberal policies expressed in privatization and decentralization of state institutions”.
In addition, some scholars have argued that NGOs represent a new kind of dependency on countries from the Global North and stand as a form of neocolonialism towards countries from the Global South. Similarly, there are on-going debates concerning the actual interests and legitimacy of NGOs considering their links to the states that funded them in the Global North. For this purpose, the social scientist Sangeeta Kamat pointed out that “NGO's dependence on external funding and compliance with funding agency targets raise doubts about whether their accountability lies with the people or with the funding agencies”