Three Problems Facing Civil Society Organizations in the Development Sector in Adopting Open Institutional Design

Abstract

Over the past forty years, one enduring source of criticism of the contributions of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the development sector has been their increasing neoliberalization as alternative and more efficient channels of development aid delivery (Desai and Imrie 1998; Hulme and Edwards 2013). Wallace and Porter (2013) went so far as to argue that this trend has created a crisis of representation. It is a crisis because CSOs were often considered to be working in the public’s interest because of their geographic proximity to their relevant publics, their use of alternative participatory methods, and their public advocacy work (Bebbington, Hickey, and Mitlin 2008; Lewis and Kanji 2009). Yet, the neoliberal approach to development has increasingly dominated CSO practice over the decades, encouraging managerial forms of program design, implementation, and evaluation (Eyben 2013). This mode of development practice is not seen as being compatible with representing a relevant public’s interest, thus inducing a crisis of representation. The more powerful and standardized managerial approaches become, the easier it is for researchers and practitioners to accept that there can be no alternatives. Collectively, we have been driven to think about development projects as a series of activities listed in a document table, along with bubble diagrams representing some abstract theory of change, without questioning it further. This is not the reality that Singh, Gurumurthy, and Chami (chapter 10, this volume) subscribe to by any means. They present a new open institutional design that could effectively resolve the crisis of representation that development CSOs face. Open institutional design encourages “use of ICTs 13 Three Problems Facing Civil Society Organizations in the Development Sector in Adopting Open Institutional Design