Suchergebnisse

Examines costs, benefits, and problems of corporatist arrangements involving NGOs, business, national governments, and international institutions created for participation in global decision-making, and in response to exponential growth in the number of NGOs.

The authors make use of a data set, collected by one of them, on characteristics of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in Bombay, to develop a data-based typology for urban NGOs. Application of statistical classification techniques points to three main dimensions of variation in the features of urban NGOs, which are interpreted as reflecting scale, scope, and stance towards local involvement and funding sources. These factors are used to interpret a clustering of Bombay NGOs into four relatively homogeneous groupings. In the arising typology the sector is divided into three types of service-delivery NGO, which are distinguished mainly by scale of operation and funding source, and a fourth group of NGOs which are involved more in policy advocacy.

Empowerment of women by means of micro-credit-based income generation programs is a new orthodoxy in the development discourse. The first part of the article appraises this phenomenon in a broader historical context. It shows how women's interests are being subsumed by and subordinated to the priorities of mainstream development in ways detrimental to the radical aspirations of the NGOs' empowerment project. The second part is a critical evaluation of the current approaches used in studies on micro-credit and empowerment. These studies have mostly focused on the final outcomes of micro-enterprises rather than the process through which they are achieved. The third part, based on field research in Bangladesh, demonstrates that the widely documented successes of micro-enterprises are a result of the activities of the very institutions that are considered to be oppressive to women. In this process, NGOs contribute to further legitimization of the same institutions that their micro-enterprises desire to transform.

Address before the Am. academy of political and social science, Philadelphia, Apr. 8-9, 1949.