NGOs- not elected, not accountable- but ready to save the world?

When the Yale University's U.S. Health Justice Collaborative recently organized an event under the title “Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex" they hit a nerve. The event space wasn't large enough to hold the nearly 1,300 people that had declared interest and had to watch a live-stream of the event.

Yale event

In September of 2017 the Haitian government announced that it had banned the operations of 257 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Haiti because they were disconnected from the priorities and needs of the Haitian people, according to the announcement.

The Minister of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE), Aviol Fleurant, [said] that it was necessary to get Haiti out of the conceptual state of welfare, to move it into real development, [he]said that the 257 organizations had violated a September 14, 1989 decree regarding their functioning.

Mr. Fleurant said that these institutions must finance what the Haitian people need and not what they, themselves, consider necessary. “And the interventions must be carried out, in front, by the leadership of the government,” said the minister. (Source)

In just a few decades non-profits and NGOs seem to have fallen from savior (Greenpeace) to pariah status for not being accountable and rejected for their very notion of seeing themselves as saviors.

Concerns about the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a weak country like Haiti ("Haiti: A Republic of NGOs") have been present for decades. These issues reached a fever pitch following the January 12, 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of Port-au-Prince.

The dominance of international NGOs has created a parallel state more powerful than the government itself. NGOs in Haiti have built an alternative infrastructure for the provision of social services, creating little incentive for the government to build its capacity to deliver services. A “brain drain” from the public sector to the private, nonprofit sector is also observable, pulling talent away from government offices and resulting in the Haitian concept of the “klas ONG” (NGO class). Huffington Post

The growth of Non-Profits in the US 1980-2010 (Source)

But Massachusetts? On first blush there doesn't seem to be much that Massachusetts (median income $75,297 in 2016) and Haiti (Gross National Income per capita at Purchase Power Parity $1730 in 2014) have in common. But a look at the sheer number of non-profits in the US (just under 1.5 million) and the sharp increase of about 40% since 1990 makes one wonder if there isn't a common thread after all,  not only in Massachusetts but in the US in general. 

In some ways the US is also a "Republic of NGOs". Here, just as in Haiti, the public interest organizations have been created because government has become ineffective in dealing with many real problems.

The creation of these outside forces sets in motion a vicious cycle: Their sheer presence can prevent government from becoming stronger, the most urgent needs now being fulfilled without it. The ballooning US non-profit sector is a reflection of government that can't or won't fulfill its traditional obligations any more and as a result creates a parallel universe which in turn prevents government from doing its duties. But unlike government, people still unhappy about the services they get or don't get cannot vote out the non-profits and NGOs. Communities especially ravaged by disinvestment and poor services begin to look in anger at non-profits populated by people that don't look like them and often don't seem to care about equity. The boards of environmental organizations in particular have been notoriously all white and continue to struggle with their lack of diversity.

The inflated balloon: Stanford illustration

All told, the more than 1.4 million registered nonprofit organizations in 2013 employed over 10 percent of the domestic workforce and accounted for around 5 percent of GDP. (Non-Profit Quarterly, Oct. 2016)

The savior mentality may be especially strong in Haiti (white NGOs in an almost entirely black country) but as the Yale event shows, American non-profits are questioned about their lack of proper representation of minorities as well.

There are plenty explanations why Haiti after a long history of colonial conquest has trouble with effective governance or why the previous colonial powers are especially prone to sending their non-profits.

But why the US? Why can't the government of the richest nation on earth not deal effectively with its social problems such as health, homelessness, environmental justice or transportation to begin with, be it federal, state or local? Why do we need so many NGOs to take up the slack on almost anything that would normally considered as basic obligation of government, such as street cleaning now frequently in the hands of non governmental organizations funded by tax surcharges? This is especially puzzling given that government continues to collect and spend at levels that are drastically higher than a hundred years ago and about on par with what it spend in the 1970s, a time of high social consciousness. (The fight to end poverty).

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Government is certainly not spending less than it did when there were fewer non-profits, quite to the contrary. Spending has remained around 20% of GDP  with a peak of 25% in 2008 at the financial crash, no matter that non-profits increased by 40% sind 1990. The numbers suggest that government has become quite ineffective.

The paralysis and poor performance of policy makers as well as the seemingly endless stream of scandals involving public officials and a bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy have led the public to question the very legitimacy of their governments. We live in a period when the nation-state is distrusted, or more precisely, its institutions are considered ineffective and unreliable.  (Global Policy Forum, The Power Shift and the NGO Credibility Crisis, 2006)

The growth of non-profits isn't unique to the  Haiti or the US, countries where government is either historically weak or viewed with suspicion. Non-profits balloon worldwide, just as government withdrawal from central functions coupled with unabated spending appears to be universal as well. At the same time the gap between rich and poor increases and minority populations continue to suffer in many places. No wonder there are many questions.

World politics has undergone a radical and often-overlooked transformation in the last fifteen years, resulting .... from the unprecedented growth of non-governmental organizations around the globe. NGOs ... have moved from backstage to center stage in world politics, and are exerting their power and influence in every aspect of international relations and policymaking. NGOs have been a positive force in domestic and international affairs, working to alleviate poverty, protect human rights, preserve the environment, and provide relief worldwide.
After 9/11, however, the specter of terrorists using NGOs as a front for their operations and some highly publicized cases of abuse have made this a critical issue that needs to be addressed by the NGO community.... the increasing power of NGOs has prompted .. questions about the roles and responsibilities of these new global, non-state actors. [such as]: how many NGOs actually exist, and what are their agendas? Who runs these groups? Who funds them? And, perhaps most significantly, to whom are NGOs accountable, and how and what influence do they actually have on world politics? (Global Policy Forum)

While governments tend to collect money without being entirely in the hand of donors, this can't be said about non-profits and NGO's who are almost completely depending on donors, foundations or grants. With loads of private money sloshing around the globe there is plenty opportunity for the rich to fund non-profits and shape the world to their liking. This may be for a good cause, but it can just as easily be done for mischief such as destabilizing governments intentionally.

“Just how much influence are the givers wielding these days, and to what ends?How should we feel about that clout here in the world’s oldest democracy?" (David Callahan) 

David Callahan wrote an entire book titled "The Givers" about Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age.  Callahan mentions Mark Zuckerberg's pledge to spend 99% of his wealth on charity and what it means when $45 billion are dispatched by one hand. The amount exceeds the budgets of 66% of US State budgets, in essence showing that 2/3 of America can back off when it comes to determining what big ideas get proffered, what research gets supported and which big investments will be made where. $100 million to Newark's embattled schools? No problem for Zuckerberg, but as the experience showed, no solution for this rustbelt city's children either. The United States Treasury estimates that all the charitable giving of the super rich will cost the public $740 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade, establishing another vicious cycle in motion in which once again the act of compensating for a weak government once again weakens government further.

From wealthy people donating to a museum or hospital and getting their name on the wall philanthropy  has moved to bigger pastures such as shaping ideas political, discourse, education policy, health care research and thus not providing necessarily a physical domaine but an arena in which entire lines of thought are generated or pushed into certain directions. The Yale event title "White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex" differs from Callahan's book title only in that it adds race into the mix, rightly so, non-profits serious diversity problem. Whether we call it "gilded age" or "industrial complex", those terms are ultimately inept metaphors from a long gone history, too benign to describe the scale of private influence today.

No doubt, many non-profits perform excellent and necessary work, especially since government keeps divesting itself from central tasks such as building affordable housing, roads or transit or viable open spaces to name just a few things that increasingly are handled by non-profits or even for-profit organisations. But the day of reckoning is drawing close. The Yale event and the mass expulsion from Haiti are good indicators of a growing uneasiness about the role of non-profits and their intention to save the world, here as well as in the developing world.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Yale News: “Paved With Good Intentions: White Panel condemns “white saviorism” in nonprofits
Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.”

Why More Nonprofits Are Getting Bigger, Stanford Innovation Review, Spring 2012