This review surveys current literature concerned with the growing numbers, changing functions, and intensifying networks of nongovernmental organizations which have had significant impacts upon globalization, international and national politics, and local lives. Studies of these changes illuminate understandings of translocal flows of ideas, knowledge, funding, and people; shed light on changing relationships among citizenry, associations, and the state; and encourage a reconsideration of connections between the personal and the political. Attention is given to the political implications of discourses about NGOs, the complex micropolitics of these associations, and the importance of situating them as evolving processes within complexes of competing and overlapping practices and discourses.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2952530.pdf

Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices

Preface 1. Unfamiliar words 2. Catalysts 3. Cosmocracy 4. Paradise on Earth? 5. Ethics across borders 6. Further reading.

Global Civil Society

From Santiago to Seattle: transnational advocacy groups restructuring world politics / Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink

Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms

One of the most striking features of the anglophone literature on NGOs is the diversity of NGO sectors and their contributions to civil society and democracy; yet, exploration of this complexity is often eschewed in favour of a normative approach in which the apparently mutually enhancing relationship between NGOs, civil society and the state is underpinned by liberal democratic assumption rather than an engagement with wider debates about the politics of development. Following a critique of this approach to NGOs, civil society and democracy, the paper argues that the role of NGOs in the politics of development is far more complex than much of the NGO literature would suggest, and calls for a more contextualized and less value-laden approach to the understanding of the political role of NGOs.

NGOs, civil society and democratization: a critical review of the literature

This paper examines recent policy discussions on non-governmental organiz­ations (NGOs) and their central role in the democratization of civil society. The author argues that the policy debate on NGOs exemplifies the conflict between liberalism and socialism, or more specifically between private interest and public good. The contemporary context of neoliberal economic policies and structural adjustment represents a vindication of liberal norms, and the ascendancy of NGOs is theorized in this context. An analysis of recent policy positions on NGOs and their role in promoting governance and development is illustrative of the complex ways in which NGOs, at local and international levels, are being incorporated into the neoliberal model of civil society.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4177492.pdf

The privatization of public interest: theorizing NGO discourse in a neoliberal era

A comparative study of two Kenyan NGOs, the Undugu Society of Kenya and the Green Belt Movement, demonstrates that civil society may either oppose an oppressive state or accommodate it. These examples demonstrate the disparate roles NGOs can take in the context of contemporary African politics.

Stephen N. Ndegwa

Papers

The two faces of civil society : NGOs and politics in Africa