Strategic Issues Facing NGOs into the Foreseeable Future

Abstract

Working on issues of relief and development creates an almost infinite number of challenges for any organization. Given the impossibility of listing the vast array of economic, social, scientific and political challenges development entails, as a sort of opinion piece, this chapter focuses on the strategic issues organizations are likely to face in the foreseeable future. This choice does not seek to deny or underestimate the daily problems found in political repression, inadequate health care provision, effects of environmental shifts, insecurity and so on. Rather, a strategic approach is adopted because missing from many contemporary debates is a reflection on whether global factors – such as climate change and the transfer of a geopolitical axis from the Atlantic to somewhere between Mumbai and Shanghai – will impact on the world of international development as we know it. In my view, it is already apparent that macro factors of climate change, geo-economic and geo-political reordering are having wider-spread impacts: food security, conflict and deteriorating quality of (global) governance being but three examples. It does not, therefore, follow that new challenges will necessarily be met by the existing architecture of aid, where new entrants with large budgets such as the global funds, new mega-philanthropy and non-OECD donors are already disputing accepted ways of ‘doing development’.

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