Academic literature on the topic 'NGO-governmentality'

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly important role in the process Foucault called ‘governmentality’. Drawing on the Foucauldian literature, this paper uses a case study of biodiversity conservation as well as indigenous people's ancestral domain in the Philippines to show how two quite different NGO-led conservation agendas nonetheless share a common underlying purpose: persuading indigenous people to internalize state control through self-regulation. Ironically, it is this sort of NGO contribution to the elaboration of government (in the Foucauldian sense) that may turn out be the most significant and lasting contribution that NGOs make to social change.

This article explores the contradictory and contested but closely inter- locking efforts of NGOs and the state in planning for land reform in South Africa. As government policy has come increasingly to favor the better-off who are potential commercial farmers, so NGO efforts have been directed, correspondingly, to safeguarding the interests of those conceptualized as poor and dispossessed. The article explores the claim that planned “tenure reform” is the best way to provide secure land rights, especially for laborers residing on white farms; illustrates the complex disputes over this claim arising between state and NGO sectors; and argues that we need to go beyond the concept of “neoliberal governmentality” to understand the relationship between these sectors.

This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organisations in Mumbai to address poverty—the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups.* It highlights key features of their work which include putting the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that develops new ‘legal’ solutions on the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about ‘slums’ which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organisations. The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalising themselves, creating networks of globalisation from below. Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted in local context and able to mediate globalising forces in ways that benefit the poor. In so doing, both within nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what governance and governability mean.

This paper examines how the patriarchal understanding of “women’s empowerment” in Indonesia instrumentalizes the notion of Ibu, a social construction of womanhood based on a societally determined idea of domestication and productivity. Through the establishment of a saving and lending cooperative, a group of Chinese Benteng women was subjected to a neoliberal development project that operated on the basis of a market-driven society and promoted a “gender mainstreaming” discourse to enhance this participatory project. They were introduced by a women’s NGO as their broker. The notion of “women’s empowerment” inspired a governmental operation aimed at these women, promoting the particular qualities of the dutiful housewife, devoted mother, and socially active member of Indonesian society. These characters were distinguished by their high level of devotion to community volunteering and to the state’s apolitical project, thus depoliticizing and deradicalizing the feminist view of women’s empowerment; this was simultaneously balanced with the promotion of the traditional gender roles of wife and mother. Such a discourse also molds women’s desires to voluntarily subscribe to such a social construction of womanhood and, at the same time, circumvents objections to any form of women’s subordination reproduced by the same rhetoric of “women’s empowerment”. By employing an ethnographic methodology, this article argues that the patriarchal view of “women’s empowerment” emerged as a deceitful doctrine to prompt Chinese Benteng women into internalizing certain qualities according to the gendered conception of womanhood in Indonesia. This article concludes that the patronizing and dominating aspects of State Ibuism have normalized Indonesian society’s expectations and desires with regard to women’s empowerment.

The relations between society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been relatively neglected in the field of China NGO studies, which remains largely wedded to a state–NGO problematic within a state–society framework. In this anthropological study of an NGO’s post-Wenchuan earthquake recovery programme, we adopt an actor-oriented approach to identify the main lines of tension between the strategies, rationalities, and techniques deployed by the different actors in the field. Focusing on NGO–society relations, we take the NGO not as an incarnation of society vis-a-vis the state, nor as an incarnation of the state vis-a-vis society, but as a key link in a shifting chain of state and non-state actors that aims to introduce to local society an assemblage of techniques, discourses, and values for the promotion of self-government. This ‘international development package’ is a specific form of what social scientists have theorized as ‘governmentality’. In this case study, the modalities of participation and cooperative self-government promoted within this development package are in tension with local values, social relations, and political structures. The case shows that dynamic tensions between the actors are mediated by the deployment of practices of governance that circulate between international institutions and networks, state agencies, NGOs, and local authorities and actors.

Abstract Over the last three decades, a system of European Union mental health governance (EUMHG) emerged, via instruments including strategies for action, joint actions, pacts and high-level expert groups. It sponsored multiple projects, initiatives and research, and involved state, non-state and European institutional actors. This paper attempts to understand how EUMHG operated and the structure of political relations within it, attending especially to opportunities for citizen participation. It adopts a global governmentality approach that focuses on practices and discourses. It finds that EUMHG practices including benchmarks, best practices and risk-thinking reinforced larger EU policy goals of market-optimisation, and that the central discourses of de-institutionalisation (DI) and community mental health (CMH) shifted meaning over time, first apprehending mental health as a public-health goal, then targeting mental ill-health as a burden to states. Finally, it finds that non-governmental organisations' (NGOs) work within EUMHG rendered them both objects and subjects of government. Through these dynamics, citizens usually were positioned outside governance, and NGO identities were altered, though CMH's transformative potential remained. Citizen participation in EUMHG was heavily conditioned. NGO and citizen power will need vigilant protection in any future EUMHG.

Studies of the new middle-class often write about the anxieties of falling behind with its members acquiring their middle-class status from uncertain and unpredictable market values. This type of anxiety is typical for members of the white-collar middle-class who often deal with pressures to maintain a conspicuous consumption level to remain in the middle strata. I argue that some of the anxieties associated with wealth experienced by the new middle class in Vietnam are also the result of a mode of governmentality that is used by the state to boost individual self-reliance and economic efficiency with the appeal of public contributions. Governmentality, in Foucault’s proposition, consists of technologies that allow the state to govern individuals from a distance with the vision of correct conduct. This mode of governance is done in Vietnam through the idea of “moral conduct”, by which the state guides the autonomous economic activities of individuals with the moral appeal of public contributions. This paper looks at the performance and experiences of Vietnamese female NGO professionals in the process of marketisation and privatisation in Vietnam. I show that their economic and professional performances demonstrate the morality of domestic responsibilities and public contributions, resembling the symbol of the virtuous woman in Vietnam’s Confucian and socialist tradition, a symbol which continues to be applauded by the state. The findings in this paper are drawn from my PhD research project at the University of Leeds, with data collected from a six-month fieldwork study conducted in Hanoi between 2016 and 2017.

As sites of global environmental degradation continue to emerge and pose significant threats to life on the planet, the world's natural resource managers persist in attempts to mitigate and reverse this degradation. While approaches to conservation have evolved over the years to include locals in the policy-making process, the experiences of those policies by locals - once in place - are often overlooked. This dissertation examines the socioeconomic and political changes associated with conservation projects from the perspectives and experiences of the people most affected by these projects. Through 128 individual interviews, 25 focus group discussions, and participant observation, I compare two approaches to Irrawaddy dolphin conservation: one in Myanmar that focuses on preservation of livelihoods and the other in Cambodia that focuses on economic development. I endeavor to bring local experiences and perceptions of these projects to the forefront to examine their impacts on livelihoods and to help identify potential gaps in policy intentions and effects. I also draw on political ecology theory to assess and critique the relationship of capitalism to international conservation. After explaining the unique issues and barriers associated with this project, I lay out the direct socioeconomic and ecological effects of each conservation project by comparing participant experiences and perceptions of the projects with those of conservation officials. I then compare conservation projects to examine the indirect effects of each approach. I trace the pathway of the capitalist conception of nature as commodities upward from 'developed' countries to its global institutionalization through the process of eco-governmentality and then downward to 'developing' countries through the delivery system of NGO governmentality. I explain how Myanmar blocked this delivery system while Cambodia embraced it and attribute the apparent shift from a 'communal ideology' to a 'consumerist ideology' in Cambodia, and lack of such a shift in Myanmar, to these opposing tactics. I then focus on the capitalist approach to conservation in Cambodia and show how this approach has led to the subsequent exacerbation of environmental and social problems it intended to fix. Lastly, I offer specific recommendations for each project, as well for international conservation in general, based on findings.

Chapter 7, Against Sovereign Violence reveals that the collusion between feminism and sovereign violence is contested even when it seemingly wins the day, and that NGO workers and civil servants themselves turn “against the state” (Clastres 1989) in form of what I refer to as “governmentality against itself.” By way of an ethnography of the arrest, trial, imprisonment, and pardon of two circumcisers, I show that civil servants and NGO workers’ participation in law enforcement eventually brings the fetishization of law into crisis and leads to a disidentification, not only from sovereign violence but also from the imperial order of things.

What does the nature of social associations between documentary filmmakers and documentary participants reveal about the social relations imagined and constructed by the practice of independent Indian documentary. Particularly in the industrial and social context of the NGO-dominated production and distribution environments where governmentality produces specific subject relations and discourses of subject positions (donor, recipient, client, expert), these relationships function as a lens to bring into focus the re-organisational scope of independent documentary practice and its potential to challenge socially assigned identities, relations, functions and thus social relations. In the practice and works of the filmmakers examined, alternate grounds of “interdependent filmmaking” are noticeable, often formed between socially disparate groups by means of reorganised processes such as “negotiated consent”. When projected alongside broader historical practices of documentary, the relationships point towards “interdependent filmmaking” predicated upon horizontal linkages between filmmakers, individuals and communities.