Interest Groups,NGOs or Civil Society Organisations? The Framing of Non-State Actors in the EU

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Scholars have used varying terminology for describing non-state entities seeking to influence public policy or work with...     

NGOs, ‘Straddler’ Organisations and the Possibilities of ‘Channelling’ in Indonesia: New Possibilities for State–NGO Collaboration?

The Badan Keswadayaan Masyarakat (BKM—Board for Community Self-reliance) are organisations established by the state as implementing agents of a community-driven development programme in Medan, Indonesia. Members are elected from the local population, but they continue to be supported by, and associated with the state. They are therefore ‘straddler’ organisations: organisations that span the state–civil society divide. This paper seeks to answer two questions. First, can BKMs’ positioning between the state and civil society facilitate new forms of state/non-government organisations (NGO) collaboration, and if so, what is the nature of partnerships established through such collaborations? We find that straddle organisations offer a way for NGOs to collaborate with the state in the achievement of development objectives. Second what is the possibility and desirability of arrangements in which NGOs ‘channel’ funds to BKMs as a means to ensure the sustainability of the latter? We argue that while there is considerable promise in such arrangements, these should be designed around a model of ‘working together’ rather than merely ‘channelling’.     

Heading South: Time to Abandon the ‘Parallel Worlds’ of International Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and Domestic Third Sector Scholarship?

Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained—in common with many other social science disciplines—between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called developing world. Whilst internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of ‘non-governmental organizations’, those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms ‘non-profit organization’ or ‘voluntary organization’, even though both subsectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organisations and activities. Whilst there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ category can also be criticised as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries become less clear-cut, and global interconnectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach.     

Aid Reduction and NGDOs’ Quest for Sustainability in Ghana: Can Philanthropic Institutions Serve as Alternative Resource Mobilisation Routes?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In recent years, there has been an increasing concern about non-governmental development organisations’ (NGDOs)...     

Does the Media’s Anti-Western Bias Affect its Portrayal of NGOs in the Muslim World? Assessing Newspapers in Pakistan

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The media has a major influence on public opinions and legitimacy for NGOs, which can have a serious impact on the...     

Self-Employment or Government Work? Blacks’ and Whites’ Responses to Long-Term Joblessness during the Great Depression

Investigations of survivalist entrepreneurship often fail to adequately examine displaced workers who suffer exceptionally long unemployment spells. The present study addresses this oversight by analyzing Census data on large northern cities during the Great Depression, exploring how unemployment duration is related to two presumably competing responses to joblessness: self-employment and government relief work. The analysis shows that among persons looking for work two years or more, blacks’ unemployment is positively associated with the odds of self-employment, whereas whites’ unemployment is positively associated with the odds of public emergency work. These findings accord with the theory that when resource-disadvantaged minorities face extraordinary labor market obstacles, they are more likely to become survivalist entrepreneurs than are majority-group members, who have a wider variety of options in the mainstream economy. Yet the results also imply that survivalist entrepreneurship was a viable option for only a small number of displaced black workers.     

“So They’ll Have Somewhere to Go”: Establishing Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) for Children with Autism in the People’s Republic of China

Despite policy calling for compulsory education in China, many children with autism are not in school. This article examines the establishment of autism-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China to meet needs not being met by the state. We focus on the background and motivation in founding and running these NGOs, after first considering the broader context of state decentralization and NGOs roles in supplementing welfare needs in reforming societies, and the educational policy context of China. This study used mixed methods, including questionnaires with open-ended and limited choice questions, and follow-up discussion email. The goals of NGO leaders—more than 50% of whom are parents of children with autism—are to make up for where government implementation of educational policy is insufficient; help others and advocate for inclusion in society; and do meaningful work. Implications from these findings are discussed.

     

Who Contributes to the Provision of Public Goods at the Community Level? The Case of Potable Water in Ghana

This article offers an analytical framework to explain participation in the provision of drinking water in communities in Ghana along with empirical evidence of the individual factors that influence this provision. Framed in the context of the debate about the devolution of responsibilities from the government to the users of public goods to increase management efficiency and sustainability, the study analyzes how individuals respond to potable water participation activities. Distinguishing activities by the type of participation incentives they offer, the study finds that social exclusion is more likely in activities that lack effort complementarities and which have larger impacts on output allocation. Appropriation of social benefits is found to determine participation more strongly than the appropriation of the natural resource itself.     

Willing but unable? Extending theory to investigate community capacity to participate in Ghana’s community-based health planning and service implementation

While primary health care programmes based on community participation are widely implemented in low- and middle- income settings, empirical evidence on whether and to what extent local people have the capacity to participate, support and drive such programmes scale up is scant in these countries. This paper assessed the level of community capacity to participate in one such programme – the Community-Based Health Planning and Service (CHPS) in Ghana. The capacity assessments were drawn from Chaskin’s (2001) theorised indicators of community capacity with modifications to include: sense of community; community members commitment; community leadership commitment; problem solving mechanisms; and access to resources. These capacity measures guided the design of an interview guide used to collect data from community informants, frontline health providers (FLP) and district health managers. Key qualitative themes were built into a questionnaire administered to households selected through systematic sampling approach. Findings showed that growing individualism, low trust in neighbours and apathetic behaviours undermined the capacity of mutual support for CHPS. The capacity to support CHPS was high for local leadership and community social mobilisation groups who often dedicated time to working with FLP to promote maternal and reproductive health service use, and in advocating broader support for CHPS. Within the wider community, commitment to voluntarism was low as members perceived CHPS to be owned by, and run on government funds and resources. Poor voluntarism was compounded by poverty that crippled the capacity to provide needed resource support for CHPS. Findings have great implications for building strong capable communities for participation in community oriented health programmes.     

Does Talk Lead to Action? An Examination of the Relationship between Debate and Funding for NGOs in Canada

All organizations, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), need funding to survive and fulfill their mandates. What is the best strategy for securing that funding? Should groups work to attract government attention and be a focus of government debate or should they avoid this type of scrutiny? This article uses innovative data to systematically examine how being the subject of debate in parliament is related to NGO funding for Indigenous, women, and environmental groups. We also examine if the relationship between debate and funding is dependent on the political party in power. We use data collected from Canadian Public Accounts, which lists all grants to groups by the federal government, and the index of Hansard, a full record of parliamentary debates at the federal level in Canada. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between debate and funding is dependent on the issue area. While debate is positively associated with funding in all areas, it is a stronger predictor of funding for environmental and Indigenous groups than for organizations focusing on women. In addition, the party in power is critical for shaping how debate is related to funding. Debate has a much stronger effect on environmental funding when Liberals are in power than it does when Conservatives control the Prime Minister's office. This research shows that NGOs must be strategic when garnering attention to their cause as more debate does not necessarily lead to more funding across issue areas and contexts.     

One (Multicultural) Nation Under God? Changing Uses and Meanings of the Term "Judeo-Christian" in the American Media

Although little more than a century old, the idea of a unified "Judeo-Christian" tradition has a noteworthy and tremendously varied history in American culture. In this article we use a content analysis of media coverage and commentary (sampled from the LexisNexis® database) to examine how and in what contexts the term has been deployed in public discourse in the last 2 decades. In the middle part of the past century, the Judeo-Christian concept was often controversial and advanced primarily for liberal social causes; in the contemporary era, meaning and usage shifted dramatically. By the 1980s, the United States was widely believed to have a core Judeo- Christian culture; the term appeared primarily as a reference point in the so-called culture wars and was most often appropriated for conservative purposes. This usage surged across the 1990s. The post-9/11 era brought another set of transformations, with overall references declining markedly and the term now associated mainly with discussions of Muslim and Islamic inclusion in America and renewed concerns about church–state separation. These results are discussed in the context of a society struggling with boundary issues in the face of increasing diversity and an evolving commitment to ethno-religious pluralism, as well as with the rise of religiously oriented politics in the new millennium.     

‘Generation boomerang’ in Germany? Returning to the parental home in young adulthood

Leaving the parental home is not always a one-off event in the course of a person's life. Young adults can return one or more times before leaving home permanently. The aim of this article is to analyse the social and economic transition markers and socio-demographic factors which play a role in the return to the parental home of young adults in Germany. The analysis is based on the survey AID:A, conducted by the German Youth Institute in 2009. Data from 4300 young adults, aged 18–32 years, who left the parental home at least once, are used. Young adults are differentiated by their current residential status: living with at least one parent again (returners) or living outside the parental home (leavers). The results show that, the more financially and socially independent a young person is, the less likely they are to return to the family of origin. Furthermore, growing up in a two-parent family in West Germany as well as a strong relationship between fathers and sons increases the likelihood of returning to the parental home after leaving. Notably, it was also found that young adults of Turkish and Eastern European origin are more likely to return than those of German origin.     

Following the ‘hype’: The role of leisure practices during ‘homeland’ visits in transnational youth's way of relating to Ghana

Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Ghana, this paper combines ‘return’ mobilities literature and youth studies to analyse the role of leisure practices during ‘homeland’ visits in transnational youth's way of relating to Ghana when they are entering into adulthood. Using the notion of mobility trajectories, the paper shows that leisure practices facilitate young people's ability to establish and renew intimate transnational relationships with diasporic friends, and Ghana-based same-generation relatives and romantic partners. Differing from earlier stays in Ghana, young people expressed their emerging sense of independence by exploring alternative sides of the country with these peers, based on common interests and belonging to the same life-cycle cohort. The findings add complexity to the notion of the ‘homeland’ as a monolithic place of reconnecting with family and roots by drawing attention to the intersection between young people's pathways to adulthood and transnational mobility.     

Who's Afraid of the Big,Bad Wolf? Young People's Responses to the Conflicts Over Large Carnivores in Eastern Norway*

Abstract Controversies over large carnivores are often interpreted as clashes between rural traditionalism and urban modernity. Rural communities, however, have never been culturally monolithic, and modernization will increase the diversity. To probe such diverse and changing attitudes towards nature, I conducted a qualitative study of young people in a rural community in eastern Norway. Contrary to popular images of such communities as unified against “pests,” all typical views of the carnivore issue were present. Those in favor of the large carnivores were typically middle‐class youths with a strong “outward” orientation, while those who wanted to shoot the predators were mostly working‐class boys with strong ties to the local hunting culture. This pattern was interpreted as a conflict between dominant and subordinate forms of knowledge, and between abstraction‐oriented and production‐oriented cultural forms. Aside from the growth of the pro‐carnivore middle‐class segments, the most significant effect of modernization appeared to be the removal of many young people from the subject matter of the conflict. A “subculturalization” of the working‐class hunting culture also could be discerned, however.     

Is Mothers’ Work Related to Childhood Weight Changes in the United States?

Taking family structure, father’s work intensity, and children’s developmental stages into consideration, this study examined the effect of a mother’s previous and contemporaneous work (employment and weekly work hours) on their children’s weight and their likelihood of having weight problems such as obesity, overweight, and underweight. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), this study adopted a fixed effect model and found that for 3rd to 5th graders, an increase in mothers’ previous work hours among two-parent families below the federal poverty level (FPL) increased the risk of the child being obese, while the current employment of single mothers below the FPL reduced the risk of the child being obese. Surprisingly, the employment of single mothers below the FPL increased the risk of the child being underweight, especially for 1st to 3rd graders.     

Proud to be poor? Untangling identity politics with the families portrayed in the photobook Courage (1998)

In the early 1990s, several European welfare states embraced the idea that the voice and life knowledge of people in poverty should be recognised in policymaking. In that regard, many authors proclaimed a paradigm shift from advocacy to self-advocacy, emphasising the agency of people in poverty to speak for themselves. Emblematic in these developments in Belgium was the photobook Courage, published in 1998 by an NGO called Movement for People with a Low Income and Children (BMLIK). Through documentary family photography and oral testimonies, Courage develops a visual rhetoric on the citizenship of people in poverty while reframing poverty as a violation of human rights. Historical research demonstrates, however, that Courage was produced by middle-class volunteer allies and is therefore a rhetorical tool for self-advocacy but certainly not a product of self-advocacy. Moreover, many authors have been highly critical of identity politics, since positive imagery can equally be disempowering in reinforcing neo-philanthropical principles of self-help and willpower which ultimately lead away from redistributive policies. This article therefore examines, through oral history with photo elicitation, how the people involved experienced being portrayed as the protagonists of self-advocacy on the poverty problem. The findings show how the portrayed people fluidly (dis)identified over the past 20 years through three intertwined subjective processes involving Courage as an artefact: for remembering (historical function), for assessing (evaluative function) and for advocacy (persuasive function). As such, they appear not as passive objects of others’ campaigning strategies, but as active co-constructors of self-advocacy rhetoric. Some of the pitfalls and potentials of identity politics in the struggle against poverty are discussed.     

The perfect storm? How to explain the rise of intergovernmental conflicts in Spain? (1984–2014)

As in other federal-like countries, intergovernmental relations in Spain are characterised by a series of conflicts between central and regional governments. But, which factors explain this dynamic of contention? This investigation operationalises intergovernmental conflicts through a specific dataset constituted by the volume of contestations between regional and central executives (and vice versa) in Spain before the Constitutional Court. This research demonstrates that from 1984 to 2014 the periods of absolute majority at the Congress and the victory of peripheral nationalist parties at the head of autonomous communities increased the level of intergovernmental contestations.     

“He’s My Dad Because He Just Is!”: Cohabiting (Step)Children’s Responses to Discursive Challenges

Cohabiting (step)families have become one of the fastest growing family forms in the United States. This study explored the types of discursive challenges experienced by cohabiting (step)children, as well as the ways in which cohabiting (step)children might respond to potential challenges of legitimacy. In this study, we interviewed 28 (step)children who resided with 1 biological parent and their parent’s nonmarital partner for at least 2 years. Results demonstrate that despite recent increases in prevalence and acceptance of unmarried partner households, cohabiting (step)children are often called on to explain their family’s legitimacy through accounting strategies when they experience discursive challenges to their (step)family’s form.