NGOs and Development: Small is Beautiful?

This chapter maps the rapid ascent of non-governmental organizations in international development in the second half of the twentieth century. How and why did NGOs rise to prominence? What kind of development did NGOs do? What were the ideas and concepts that shaped non-governmental attitudes to development? To answer those questions, the chapter adopts two analytical frames. The first, cross-cutting, approach is to view the role of NGOs in development through a constructivist lens. The NGO model of development was embedded in ideas of charity and civic responsibility that had their origins in the West. But it also borrowed ideas from a variety of other sources, including economists, philosophers, theologians, and prominent thinkers, politicians, and activists from the Global South. Second, and related, this chapter describes NGO-style development as the product of a series of accelerations: Transformative moments in which the sectors practices changed radically while also retaining many of the characteristics that had defined its attitudes in earlier periods. It identifies four such moments the expansion of empire, the emergence of a new international development regime post-1945, the re-definition of development in the 1970s, and the post-Cold War period as vital to explaining the rise of non-governmental development.