NGOs, Civil Society, and Development: Is There a Third Way?

Abstract

F or more than a decade, there has been talk by politicians, academics, and others of a "third way," referring to means and principles of social organization other than the State and the market (Giddens, 2000).Most of this discussion about a third way for development focuses on the roles that can be played by NGOs and other elements of civil society.The overarching question that guided this journal issue, "Are NGOs Overrated?"relates very closely to whether there really is a third way.For this paper, I was asked to reflect on the paper I wrote ten years ago (Klees, 1998) in response to that same overarching question.While that paper, entitled "NGOs: Progressive Force or Neoliberal Tool?," did not discuss the idea of a third way, it was implicit in the examination of NGOs as a progressive force for development.Looking back on that paper, I find that the main points still apply today.However, what I find missing from that paper is the ways in which NGOs are embedded in the "dialectic of the global and the local."[1]Below, I discuss both what was in that earlier paper and some of what was missing from it.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.