Theorizing NGOs: States, feminisms and neoliberalism ed. by Victoria Bernal, Inderpal Grewal (review)

One of the promises of theorizing is capturing the complexity of contextual difference in terms that readily resonate across space and time. In the 1990s, the story about nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that resonated widely in scholarship and activism was that NGOs are handmaidens of neoliberalism, doing the state’s work as structural adjustment programs and liberalization policies cut social services and safety nets. For some, including Western governments, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in this brave new post-1989 world, NGOs were celebrated agents of efficient decentralization and participatory democracy. For others, including activists and social justice scholars, the promise of new social movements and state-formation seemed to be foreclosed by the NGOization of political action itself. In offering a new story about NGOs, the contributors to this edited book build upon this origin story most usefully by “pry[ing] open the ‘black box’ of NGOs” (O’Reilly, 154). The essays refuse easy narratives on NGOization by shedding light on the historical emergence of the NGO form to explore the hybrid formations, complex histories, blurred boundaries, and ambivalent effects of NGOs practices.

The new story revealed here is that there is no single story to be told about the NGO form across space and time. NGOization is not a homogenous force of neoliberalism overtaking feminism and states across the world because what counts as an NGO itself is heterogeneous and locally specific, and evolves over time, notwithstanding origins. Indeed, NGOs are one space through which state-formation and feminist political action is constructed. Apart from this spatial decentring of a transnational process, a provocative essay in the volume by Saida Hodžić draws on the Ghanaian experience to refuse the transition narrative which imagines a pure political origin of feminist politics subsequently sullied by debased NGO politics. Sabine Lang and Sonia Alvarez, who powerfully shaped such critiques of NGOization, contribute essays reassessing their prior arguments in light of the present. While Lang finds that experts in intergovernmental agencies and the European Union continue to shape feminist agendas, Alvarez finds that Latin American NGOs have carved out a space for feminist action beyond the neoliberal terms of depoliticised inclusion. In the Bosnian case, Helms refers to such NGO potential as the movementization of NGOs, and in the Indian case, O’Reilly notes the ways in which dialogue expands the spatial normalization of feminist discussion and commitments.

Crucially, contributors’ methodological attention to history and context productively unsettles the assumption about clear-cut boundaries between state and NGO, between progressive political action and NGO action. The ethnographic and historical evidence presented by authors (see especially Sharma, Leve, Hemment, and Hodžić) disabuse us of such tidy binaries by revealing the power-laden, heterogeneous, hybrid and evolving meanings of what counts as political action, feminism, gendered identity or struggles. For example, the boundary between state and NGO is far from stable in the case of Sharma’s hybrid governmental NGO. She demonstrates how NGO workers cunningly foreground governmental authority at times and NGO identity at others. In Sharma’s theorization, women’s everyday negotiations of this hybrid formation produces the state-NGO boundary as an effect, spelling potential for feminist political action as much as producing neoliberal feminist subjectivity. In Leve’s case, an apparently neoliberal empowerment project of an NGO in Nepal which used adult literacy to popularise income-generation and microcredit for women had the surprising effect of bolstering women’s support for Maoist revolutionaries.

Usefully, there is no overarching consensus across contributions on the normative value of such hybrid evolutions. If Sharma and Leve’s accounts of blurred boundaries and hybridity spell political potential, Hodžić and Costa suggest the importance of attending to the complex and divided history of feminist movements within Ghana and Thailand respectively. Perhaps the most trenchant critique of blurred identities and complicities comes from Karim, who contradicts the popular belief about the empowering potential of microcredit in Bangladesh. In practice, microcredit NGOs are not only...