NGOs and Civil Society at the End of a World

Nidhi Srinivas, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 343 pp. £ 42.00 hardback.

Jenna H. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility and the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 232 pp. £ 76.00 hardback.

The invitation to write an essay1 on Srinivas's Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management and Development reached me as I was revisiting the Tanzanian village where I had begun my own research on NGOs 30 years before. Only that village was now a district headquarters and burgeoning urban centre. The state and ruling party dominated the scene architecturally, aesthetically and economically. The modest cluster of houses and shops I remembered from 1993 had morphed into a paved main road lined with electrified supermarkets, bars, restaurants and ATMs. The ancestral wells, which had provided water for Maasai people and livestock for generations immemorial, were surrounded by urban sprawl and said to be going dry. The dusty offices of community-based NGOs had disappeared, along with the flags of opposition parties. While this modern main street certainly bustled, it no longer crackled with the nervous energy of an emergent land rights movement.

One day, during this visit, I sat talking with a Maasai elder I had not seen since the 1990s. In the friendly way of people who had known each other once but never well, we waxed nostalgic about the heyday of Tanzania's Indigenous NGOs: short courses in participatory research methodologies, land rights workshops, grassroots protests and a community-based FM radio station. He then asked my professional opinion as to what had become of those promising NGOs and their dynamic leaders. Sad to be dampening our enthusiasm, I described how donor agendas and reporting requirements had moved NGO leaders away from their communities. Moreover, the state systematically harassed the most influential leaders, and competing donor agendas turned NGOs against each other. Many donors were quick to lose interest, making it difficult for Indigenous NGOs to sustain their own agendas and activities on behalf of their constituent communities. Under these pressures, some leaders burnt out, fell ill and even died. Others left for more secure opportunities in the development sector, academia and officialdom. Others faded into obscurity. Considering this, my old acquaintance asked if I thought such days could ever come again. Since they happened before, I reasoned, they could happen again. ‘Let us pray that they do’, he said. ‘Yes’, I agreed, ‘let us pray that they do’.

On my flight home, I recalled this conversation, noticed that it coincided with my agreement to review a book about NGOs that I had yet to read, and wondered if and how they were related. Back in my department at the University of Virginia (UVA), in Charlottesville, I found Against NGOs in my faculty mailbox. Throughout the fall term, I read through its 300 pages of far-ranging, though meticulously organized, arguments in fits and starts between my ample responsibilities as department chair. In retrospect, this intense reading experience was fundamental to my analysis in this essay. First, however, I needed to re-read the book. In the opening pages, Srinivas proposes moving away from normative NGO-centric analysis toward ‘a gaze that lingers on historical shifts in capitalism and their contemporary implications for development and management’ (p. 17). While this proposition struck me as straightforward enough, I was challenged by the extraordinary detail of his presentation in tracking the interconnections of capitalism, management and development through the heart of the book. I sometimes found myself losing track of his arguments while wondering about the relevant actors and intended audience.

In my second reading of the book, I concentrated on following Srinivas's arguments through the elaborate details of each chapter, facilitated by an accompanying table tracking elements of common sense (more on which below) across development doctrines through colonialism, state capitalism and financialization (pp. 292–93). Among other things, this focused approach helped me to situate and reconsider my own experiences and analyses of NGOs. As an aspiring development anthropologist in the 1980s, I came of age during the period of financialization on Srinivas's table, when NGOs were heralded as the ‘magic bullet’ solution (Edwards and Hulme, 1996: 5) to the failure of neoliberal market reforms. During my first semester of graduate school, my advisor was Allan Hoben, a prominent development anthropologist. He informed me that both the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank had established ‘NGO desks’ and told me that I should make NGOs the topic of my dissertation research. This turned out to be excellent advice.

The scholars who trained me began studying development in the 1960s, the United Nations's First Decade of Development. Their graduate school experiences corresponded to the apogee of modernization theory and management, as labelled by Srinivas (pp. 118–27). They then embarked on their professional careers during modernization's decline (pp. 138–41), a period marked roughly by the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the fall of Saigon in 1975 (see Ross, 1998). They made their names working for and critiquing USAID and the World Bank. Their research centred on the organizational imperative of ‘moving money’ efficiently and cost-effectively, in keeping with funding cycles (Hoben, 1980). Development bureaucrats coveted ‘fundable projects’ so much that they resorted to creating them. They were obsessed with their recipients’ ‘absorptive capacity’ and favoured high-profile infrastructure projects that could be funded by a few large loans to minimize their substantial processing costs (Tendler, 1975).

Studies like these challenged my young expectations of development, and even more so, as I learned about projects like the Chico Dam in the Philippines, the Transmigration Project in Indonesia and the Polonoroeste Highway Network in Brazil. These projects, cited by Srinivas (pp. 211–25), illustrate the effects of high-management hegemony in the latter half of the 1970s and were funded by the World Bank. I was particularly moved by Before the Bulldozer: The Nambiquara Indians and the World Bank (1989) by anthropologist David Price,2 who violated his confidentiality agreement with the World Bank to publish this ethnographic exposé of Polonoroeste. Development, as I was coming to know it, was less about the betterment of humanity than rapacious profiteering, which left borrower countries with debts they could not pay and harmed the environment while displacing and dispossessing Indigenous communities. In light of all this, a promising antidote appeared to be coalitions of Indigenous communities and NGOs.

Between portrayals of NGOs as vanguards of democracy and my professors’ assurances that they were the future of development, I was inspired to make a career of studying this putatively novel entity. My enthusiasm intensified after arriving in Tanzania in the early 1990s and learning that Maasai communities were starting their own NGOs as vehicles of community-based development and land rights advocacy. Over the following years, I was present through moments of NGO exuberance and NGO disappointment. Three decades later, I still ponder the dissonance between them, and I have had many conversations like the one recounted above. Through these, I have become convinced that those moments of exuberance manifest, however fleetingly, desirable futures for the constituents of Maasai NGOs.

Relative to this possibility, I am intrigued by Srinivas's call for a critical approach to these questions, which focuses less on NGOs per se than on what they reflect, and sometimes challenge, about broader capitalist formations, which are racial capitalist formations to be sure (Robinson, 2021). Jenna Hanchey's The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility and the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO offers a generative complement to Srinivas's Against NGOs, with its careful ethnographic attention to interactions between NGO dissolution and the decolonial possibilities that NGO emergence once promised. In the following section, I juxtapose the complementary perspectives of these two works to reassess remarkably enduring associations of NGOs, civil society and desirable futures.

While Srinivas's and Hanchey's respective books turn on remarkably different styles and perspectives, together they reflect a shared recognition of the importance of tending to both the specificity of NGOs and their communities, on the one hand, and the broader networks, processes and related concepts that reciprocally inform and influence specific NGO situations, on the other. Srinivas presents a broad history of NGOs in the immanence of their morphing capitalist milieus from their 19th-century colonial origins to the present day. His narrative is enriched by a wealth of curated examples of management doctrines, development practices and civil society (pp. 4–5). Hanchey, by contrast, delves into the nuanced history of a single Tanzanian NGO, which she calls Little Community, drawing from the discipline of rhetoric to connect her ethnographic narratives to wider structures and relationships. She characterizes rhetoric as ‘girdled by the nation-state in the formulations of public and civic life’ and endeavours to extend it ‘toward communal life as a global network’ (p. 12). Her framework and approach resonate with Srinivas's concerns regarding the common conflation of NGOs and civil society, which he sees as confounding the nuanced analysis needed to challenge the current backlash against NGOs as they fail in the impossible mission of managing capitalist development's socio-ecological contradictions.

Both scholars explicitly refrain from attributing these dynamics to some inherent pathology of NGOs. They emphasize instead their interactions with ‘broader structures of power’ (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre, 2020: 66, cited on p. 12). Srinivas directs his attention to global capitalist formations and their management regimes, encompassing the doctrines and practices that influence the perception, functioning and current pathologization of NGOs. Conversely, Hanchey highlights the impacts of ‘global flows of racial and colonial power’ (p. 5) and their manifestations in specific NGO situations. She vividly portrays Little Community as a site of decolonial contestation, detailing the struggles of community leaders and NGO workers against the oppressive actions of Mr Giles, a British lodge owner and co-founder of the NGO. These actions involved his tyrannic control of the NGO board, exploitation of their labour and self-serving land deals that he ostensibly undertook on behalf of his NGO and community, but which ultimately benefited his lodge.

In concluding The Center Cannot Hold, Hanchey invokes one of the organizing concepts of Against NGOs: common sense, as formulated by Antonio Gramsci. In his explication of the concept in Against NGOs, Srinivas highlights its connections to civil society in Gramsci's (1971) Prison Notebooks while labouring to distinguish it from the related concept of hegemony (p. 30). He describes common sense as ‘incomplete efforts of perception on the part of interest groups, where some of these perceptions become naturalized within knowledge groups as perceptions of the world’, further arguing that ‘when these perceptions are acted upon, and attached to epistemic foundations that gain purchase within powerful networks of actors, they become hegemonic’ (p. 289). Bolstered by the power and resources of the ruling classes, hegemony is made to appear coherent, universal and unassailable. However, it is at least as fraught with contradictions and untruths as any other system of common sense. Civil society, in these formulations, is the realm in which hegemony is articulated and imposed and where its contradictions become vulnerable to contestation and transformation.

In the case of Little Community, Hanchey concludes that ‘decolonial dreamwork emerges from the gaps, from the holes in hegemony, in the spaces elided by “common sense” (p. 189). As ‘the act of imagining impossible futures in order to bring them into being’, Hanchey argues that conditions for decolonial dreamwork are enhanced as NGOs come unravelled by their colonial contradictions and ‘new potentialities are revealed’ (p. 19). In comparable terms, Srinivas relates common sense to the contradictions of capitalist accumulation. He argues that ‘its productive character is its capacity to naturalize a growing sense of administrative crisis and thus prevent it from becoming a legitimacy crisis’ (p. 291), as reflected in the current hegemonic celebration and pathologization of NGOs. Like Hanchey, he points to the increasingly visible unravelling of previously taken-for-granted arrangements, contemplating ways they might catalyse radical transformations in common sense. He notes that ‘the political potential of common sense and the activity of knowledge production work together’ (ibid.), invoking potential alliances between knowledge workers and civil society actors. I now turn to these possibilities, which have been my continuous motivation and frustration in the recent years of my career.

In my everyday work life at UVA, I have learned that the prevailing common sense regarding development revolves around two concepts: the global and engagements. Together, they turn on a distinct here and there. The global literally means far from a here that is iconically represented by Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda.3 Communities in need of development are imagined as somewhere out there, most likely in other countries. Engagements revolve around the imperative of students leaving the familiar here of UVA ‘grounds’, going out there in the ‘real world’, and having a ‘global experience’. The power of these concepts is reflected in the dramatic growth of Global Studies at UVA over the past decade. This pan-university programme turns on the hegemonic ‘global’ while aspiring to engender critical capacities and skills to challenge its hegemony and navigate the complex relationships and liberatory possibilities it elides.

Growing numbers of similar educational programmes worldwide represent critical emergent locations for the kinds of knowledge work that Srinivas sees as essential to ‘working through common sense perceptions of development and management’ so that ‘the current global spectres of capitalism can be exorcised’ (p. 300). His concern with the problematic equation of NGOs and civil society is especially salient here. In the hegemonic cartographies of institutions like UVA, where NGOs are imagined as out there in the ‘real world’, it follows, according to the prevailing common sense, that the academy and civil society should be regarded as separate realms.

In such contexts, it is essential to bear in mind that Gramsci's analysis is fundamentally grounded in the concept of social class (Crehan, 2016: 4). Accordingly, he viewed civil society as the realm of class struggle, in which some classes gain influence and become hegemonic (Mouffe, 1979), while others are marginalized as subalterns (Gramsci, 2021). ‘Civil society is the arena wherein the ruling class extends and reinforces its power by non-violent means’ (Buttigieg, 1995: 26) and one in which the ‘prevailing common sense’ (Wainwright, 2013: 165) might be contested and transformed by subaltern coalitions. Thus, as Srinivas asserts, it makes little sense to equate NGOs with civil society, as held by the prevailing development common sense. Likewise, the academy should be considered a pivotal site in the realm of civil society, in which intellectuals labour to produce the ideas and paradigms underpinning ruling class power and occasionally contest them.

Traditional intellectuals in this passage are ‘trained in the conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas and shaped as intellectuals within the existing academic infrastructure and its knowledge producing practices’ (ibid.: 22). However, they do not constitute an independent class with shared identities, autonomous institutions, and the resources necessary to pursue their collective interests. A key question here, therefore, is whether knowledge workers connected to development may indeed be construed as a distinctive social class. From a Gramscian perspective, Srinivas's distinction between knowledge workers and civil society actors appears to construe the former as traditional intellectuals without organic ties to civil society. Admittedly, that seems correct since Gramsci himself associated traditional intellectuals with academic and mid-level functionary professions, which these days include NGO workers. In light of Srinivas's central emphasis on the rise of management professionals, however, it is worth exploring the possibility that this group may constitute a distinct class and, if so, what their relationships with other classes might be like.

I am thinking specifically of the professional-managerial class (PMC), which had risen to prominence in the US and elsewhere in the period Srinivas (pp. 192–230) calls the short reign of high management common sense in the late 1970s. Moreover, the PMC's formation in the US coincides with his accounts of the ascendancy of management theory and practice over the 20th century. Barbara and John Ehrenreich first proposed the existence of the PMC (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1977a), arguing that it consisted of ‘salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations … as manager of capitalist enterprises (such as) corporations, government agencies, and universities’ (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1977b: 7). NGOs, at least large ones, should be added to this list today. The PMC's core professions — including economists, doctors, lawyers, social scientists, accountants and design professionals, such as engineers and architects — have been essential to the creation and functioning of development across its various iterations.4

While the PMC has played a significant role in progressive struggles from the 1960s to the present day (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 2013), its relationships with other classes are fraught with antagonism. Contemporary critics characterize members of the PMC as ‘opportunistic’ (Frost, 2019) ‘virtue hoarders’ (Liu, 2020), appropriating the creativity, initiative and spaces of other labouring classes (Graeber, 2014). While the PMC has gained significant influence through realms of civil society traditionally associated with progressive social movements, all but its most privileged members have been losing ground in academia (Cowan, 2014), arguably the realm most essential to the PMC's reproduction and influence (Graeber, 2014). By no coincidence, growing numbers of college graduates are finding themselves saddled with student debt without meaningful career opportunities. The PMC's future is thus imperilled as its members lose their coveted status as independent professionals. Nevertheless, their ability to enter effective class coalitions remains hampered by their perception of their inherent superiority and competence vis-à-vis other classes (Ehmsen and Scharenberg, 2013).5

Given the current growth of aspiring management professionals entering the field of development, it is little surprise that Jenna Hanchey describes similar dynamics between Western volunteers and the Tanzanian people whom they imagine themselves to be saving. In the first part of The Center Cannot Hold, she engages the cultural fantasies and conditioned subjectivities of Western volunteers, which turn on their presumed superiority to others. Many volunteers she interviewed talked about ‘the white saviour complex’ and its role in reproducing colonial attitudes and relationships at Little Community. While seeing this complex in others, however, they consistently denied it in themselves. Hanchey analyses the psychological and rhetorical moves they make to navigate these realities while avoiding the painful confrontation of facing their own part in them, all the while reflecting on her own experiences in doing the same.

When volunteers experience disconcerting encounters with legacies of colonial violence, they tend to project onto African people, which Hanchey calls running towards innocence. Thus, they fail to hear what those others are trying to tell them at the time and through their memories of those encounters. In so doing, they actively maintain their ignorance of African ways of being and knowing, which is the basis of epistemic injustice. Regarding NGOs, this translates to a profound lack of recognition and appreciation for the competency, creativity and knowledge that African people bring to bear in making and running them. It also feeds normative and unrealistic perceptions of what NGOs should be doing. Their inevitable failure proves that they are ‘no-good organizations’, as a Mr Giles figure I once knew liked to call them playfully.

Both Hanchey and Srinivas conclude their books on NGOs with world-ending reflections. In the final section of his book, ‘Imagining Beyond the End’, Srinivas acknowledges the apparent hopelessness of our current situation, pointing to the proliferation of apocalyptic scenarios around us, and admits that ‘we appear to lack a conceptual vocabulary or confidence, as planetary inhabitants, to think through or past the crisis of contemporary capitalist force’ (p. 298). Nevertheless, he encourages us to explore non-utopian present possibilities for the pursuit of a more just future. With a nod to Walter Benjamin, he advocates a revitalization of critique as a means to ‘open the present by recognising other interpretations of the past’ (p. 299). He does this laudably through his reinterpretations of the past of development and management common sense.

Regarding his conclusion, however, I kept returning to a previous passage from just a couple of pages earlier, in which he raises a series of questions: ‘What now compromises a credible unit of development besides a nation-state? If professionals, including managers, no longer offer a credible claim to trusteeship, to whom should we turn? And with what knowledge?’. He concludes that these are indispensable questions for ‘tribal communities around the world, resisting disenfranchisement, as further material value is extracted from their territories’ (p. 297). There is much that I would like to raise in response to these questions, which is beyond the scope of this essay, regarding state power and ethnonationalism, knowledge sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination. Here, I will limit myself to noting that living onto-epistemologies of Indigenous and other historically marginalized peoples turn on possibilities well beyond the historical dialectics Srinivas promotes at the end of his book, including what is meant by the end of the world.

I deeply appreciate this open-ended ending and the crucial works of decolonial scholarship from which it is derived (Berry et al., 2017; Gumbs, 2018; Thiongo, 2014). It calls me6 to haunted reflections of my own time in Tanzania and wherever else I may be. It likewise calls me to revisit la paperson's (2017) ‘uncovering the decolonizing ghost in the colonizing machine’ in A Third University is Possible and renewed consideration of decolonial possibilities at UVA in connection to the situations and relationships addressed in this essay.

In ending, it is also important to remember the potential of undoing to disrupt ‘the capacity to persevere in a liveable life’ (Butler, 2004: 1) in relation to ‘collective continuance’, which refers to a community's capacity to flourish intergenerationally (Whyte, 2013: 10). When I arrived in Tanzania in 1991, NGOs presented exciting possibilities for Indigenous collective continuance, and many people experienced them in these terms. Thus, they grieve at the undoing of NGOs and long for their redoing. Today, Maasai NGOs are embroiled in conflicts surrounding the removal and relocation of their communities from near Serengeti National Park and inside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Oakland Institute, 2022; PINGO's Forum, 2023). NGO leaders are being harassed and surveilled by the state, and some have withdrawn into exile.

It appears civil society is contracting as a realm of consent and contestation, while coercive state power is on the rise in conjunction with competing strains of populist ethnonationalism and technocratic progressive neoliberalism. This is the case not only in Tanzania but also in interconnected locations worldwide. Gramsci and others have noted that such arrangements are impossible to sustain and should be regarded as signalling endings. However, many people suffer as worlds are destroyed. Decolonial dreamwork orients and labours toward ‘a world in which many worlds could co-exist’ (Mignolo, 2007: 499) through situations of despair.

In his ending of Against NGOs, Srinivas cautions against conflating pessimism and despair. Pessimism, he argues, is to ‘constantly interpret the present in terms of a fixed understanding of the past, one that offers precious little purchase for imagining other futures’ (p. 298). Despair is a ‘misrelation to a present … that can invigorate and impel change’ (ibid.). It is difficult to say how civil society paradigms may continue to matter to such endeavours. Robbie Shilliam (2015: 8), for one, urges maintaining ‘the democratic impulse’ of Gramscian genealogies while setting aside their framing concepts. ‘The seedbed of a decolonial project would not then be found in academic discourse but in the living knowledge traditions of colonized people … [that have] retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of the retrieval of thought and action that addresses injustices in ways otherwise to the colonial science of the gaze’ (c.f. la paperson, 2017: 33). These, Shilliam (2015: 30) avers, already constitute a ‘global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’.

As for NGOs, they appear poised to persist as constituent elements of global institutional infrastructure for years to come, along with their distinctive, although unevenly distributed, potential for anti-colonial connectivity. Based on the insights gleaned from the studies reviewed in this essay, it is fair to say that normative understandings of NGOs — how they should be and what they should do — pose significant dangers. The studies also underscore the pivotal role of relationships in and around NGOs — as distinct from the NGOs themselves — emphasizing their necessity in conceiving and realizing futures that eschew hegemonic expectations of continuing capitalist and colonial realities. In the course of this essay, I have also attended to the growing connections between NGOs and universities, both with respect to the professional aspirations of the current generation of students and the rise of engaged decolonial scholarship. I end here in the spirit of the excellent studies that it has been my pleasure to read, review and engage — undone and unfinished.