NGOs in South Asia: An Alternative Story

Sailen Routray

 

The book under review is a self-consciously ‘political economic’ study of NGOs in the Global South. It takes Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as the two geographies from within which to mount a critique of the NGO sector. It does so by historicising the growth of NGOs in these countries and by undertaking analysis informed by Marxism. It also provides background material regarding the growth of associational life including that of NGOs in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh NGOs and associational life of the modern type are new phenomena. Associational politics has had a rich history in undivided Bengal in British India. But the eastern part of Bengal (which later became Bangladesh) was underdeveloped, and its thin associational life was one aspect of its underdevelopment. Christian missionaries played a key role in the development of NGOs in the country in the early parts of the last century.

NGOs have played key service delivery roles with respect to sectors such as credit, primary education etc in independent Bangladesh. During the colonial period in Sri Lanka, the growth of associations took place earlier in the areas of the country dominated by Tamils. Missionaries had a role to play in the development of associational life and NGOs in Sri Lanka as well.

From the history of these two countries Fernando draws the lesson that NGOs and states are related aspects of the development of capitalism across the world, especially in the Global South. According to him, NGOs do not critique the neoliberal refashioning of the world. They mount criticisms of statist developmental agendas and discredit states. They organize on the basis of either target groups or ‘narrow’ identities, and delegitimize class-based analysis and practice. 

This makes the intrusion of global capital into countries easier. Thus, in many ways Fernando sees NGOs as playing a critical and effective role, both ‘discurssive’ as well as ‘practical’ in the sustainability of global capitalism.

At the same time he also sees NGOs as being ineffective. He sees NGOs, both local and international, being unable to impose even a limited human rights or peace building mandate on states even when they try and mount internationally coordinated campaigns. In a similar vein, he sees the inability of NGOs to contain ethnonationalism in Sri Lanka as a sign of their toothlessness.

The author proposes that discussions surrounding NGOs congeal into a discursive formation that he terms as ‘NGOism’. According to him, NGOism allows us to account for this strange and simultaneous effectiveness/ineffectiveness of NGOs, and the critical role that NGOs play in the reproduction of capital and in managing challenges to the capitalistic socio-economic system.

As an intervention in the field of development studies this book is a critique of post-development theorising. Fernando is deeply skeptical of this kind of theorising that sees development as a depoliticising discourse linked to statism to which localised resistance can be mounted. At the same time, the story that he tells reassesses the role of Christian missions and missionaries in furthering development and associational life in the South more or less positively. 

This volume provides a much needed comparative angle to discussions of the relationship between NGOs and states. It also provides a well-documented history of associational life in two important countries in South Asia and deserves wide circulation amongst scholars of development in the region. 

Details About the Book: Jude L. Fernando. 2011. The Political Economy of NGOs: State Formation in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. London: Pluto Press. xii+338 pp., ISBN – 9780745321714.  

Note: This review was first published in 2012 in the journal Contemporary South Asia 20(4).