The Stories They Tell: What INGO Mission Statements Reveal about their Authority

ABSTRACT

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) play an increasingly important role in global governance. Without coercive capacities, INGOs must build their authority to be heard, and ideally, influential in global governance. However, we know little about how INGOs build and defend their authority in practice. We argue that mission statements characterise how INGOs make authority claims to their audiences. Drawing on existing research on INGOs and global governance, we identify five dimensions of authority: accountability, representativeness, effectiveness, legality, and universal morality. We analyse the mission statements of 11 leading INGOs (high status) and 46 other INGOs (low status) from 2003 and 2013. We find that leading INGOs are more likely to emphasise accountability and legality while other INGOs are more likely to highlight representativeness. Our findings open up an exciting research agenda to study how authority relationships are constructed in global civil society.

KEYWORDS:

• International nongovernmental organization (INGO)
• global civil society
• authority
• mission statements
• status

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the editors of Global Society and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. We are grateful for the participants of the Workshop on Transnational Social Movements amid Global Crisis and Change at the University of Pittsburgh (2018) and International Studies Association Annual Conference (2019) for their constructive feedback on the earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For similar efforts, Fyall, Kathleen Moore, and Gugerty (2018) code mission statements by issue area and Waters and Jones (2011) code YouTube videos by objective.

2 Balboa (2018) and Carpenter (2014) provide alternative methodologies.

3 This number only includes INGOs that were observed both in 2003 and 2013. If we include short-lived organizations, the number becomes even larger.

4 In other words, we collected 57 INGOs, 28 of which had mission statements from both 2003 and 2013.

5 In a boxplot, the box indicates 25–75 percentile, the whisker indicates the largest value within 1.5 times the box range, the line in the middle is the median, and dots are outliers.

6 “FERN has a diverse funding base, meaning that our workplans are not tied to individual funders’ philosophies or public perceptions” (European Rainforest Movement, 2013).

7 To raise a few examples: “Medecins Sans Frontieres staff ‘used local prostitutes’” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44523086 (Accessed: March 24, 2021); “Oxfam criticised over Haiti sex claims” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48593401 (Accessed: March 24, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Takumi Shibaike

Takumi Shibaike is Postdoctoral Associate in the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, where he studies global governance, civil society, environmental politics, and public opinion on foreign policy.

Wendy H. Wong

Wendy H. Wong is at the University of Toronto, where she is Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society, Professor of Political Science, and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Sarah S. Stroup

Sarah S. Stroup is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. She is author of Borders Among Activists (Cornell University Press, 2012) and co-author (with Wendy H. Wong) of The Authority Trap (Cornell University Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 ARNOVA Outstanding Book Award.

Alfred Oduro

Alfred Oduro is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he studies African civil society, NGO membership in international organisations, global governance, pan-African norms, and politics of the African Union.