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Abstract
This paper explores the growing role of national NGOs in the interventions of western governments in conflict-affected regions. Using three case studies of national NGOs working in Sri Lanka, it focuses on the complex relationships between national NGOs, donors and a range of domestic stakeholders. These relationships involved competing demands, interests and expectations and were characterised by tensions, reversals and trade-offs. The paper argues that although donors have increasingly favoured national NGOs in their peacebuilding interventions, these organisations have been particularly vulnerable to crises of legitimacy. This tendency has disrupted NGO programmes and limited the capacity for donors to meet stated objectives.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Dr Zoë Marriage and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The fieldwork was supported by grants from the University of London Central Research Fund and the School of Oriental African Studies.
Notes
1. This paper draws on field research conducted in Sri Lanka between September 2006 and May 2007. The research was principally based on interviews with over 100 representatives from international, national and local NGOs, government officials, political parties and analysts in Colombo, Ampara, Galle, Kandy, Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Anuradhapura districts. More in-depth studies were undertaken of four national NGOs that were based on a review of NGOs' publications, secondary literature, and interviews with staff, donor partners and field observations.
2. CitationDuffield, Global Governance and the New Wars.
3. ‘Track one’ interventions involve government to government diplomacy, ‘track two’ interventions include more informal negotiations conducted outside official ‘track one’ channels while ‘track three’ interventions refer to broader efforts which aim to improve damaged community relations.
4. For the purposes of this paper, I have avoided an operational definition of the term ‘peacebuilding’. This analysis looks at projects labelled ‘peacebuilding’ (or related terms) by either donors or NGOs. This approach emphasises the political functionality of the term, which, like the associations attached to the term ‘NGO’, became increasingly important as Sri Lanka slid back to war after 2005.
5. In an evaluation by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the peacebuilding efforts undertaken by the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany in 2004, for example, Sri Lanka had the most projects with 42 out of a total number of 336 undertaken by the four countries in all areas. Afghanistan had the next highest number of projects with 37 followed by Cambodia (36), Bosnia-Herzegovina (34) and Guatemala (30). CitationSmith, ‘Towards a Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding’, 22.
6. CitationRichmond, ‘The Dilemmas of Subcontracting the Liberal Peace’.
7. For a good overview of the main claims for NGO peacebuilding, see CitationWorld Bank, Civil Society and Peacebuilding.
8. CitationLister, ‘NGO Legitimacy: Technical Issue or Social Construct?’.
9. See, for example, CitationPouligny, Peace Operations Seen From Below.
10. CitationBarnett and Zuercher, ‘The Peacebuilder's Contract’
11. CitationHilhorst, The Real World of NGOs.
12. Interviews with NGO representatives 20 September 2006, 29 September 2006.
13. The existing literature tends to identify three main types of NGOs involved in development activities: community based or grassroots organisations (CBOs), national NGOs (also known as intermediary NGOs) and international NGOs. See, for example CitationCarroll, Intermediary NGOs; and CitationFisher, Nongovernments.
14. CitationIRED, Developmemt NGOs of Sri Lanka: A Directory.
15. CitationBryant, Nongovernmental Organisations in Environmental Struggles.
16. CitationDe Mars, NGOs and Transnational Networks, 9.
17. Some NGOs are membership-based and are directly accountably to their members, but these tend to be local community-based organisations.
18. In Sri Lanka, for example, NGOs can register under three different parliamentary Acts and most register as private companies. See CitationFernando, The Landscape of NGOs in Sri Lanka.
19. Lister, ‘NGO Legitimacy: Technical Issue or Social Construct?’, 179.
20. CitationAlagappa, Political Legitimacy in South Asia, 13–14; cited in CitationBryant, ‘False Prophets?’, 631.
21. CitationEdwards and Hulme, NGOs, states and donors: too close for comfort?, 7.
22. See CitationMoore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka; and CitationOrjuela, ‘Civil Society in Civil War’, 123–124.
23. Fernando, The Landscape of NGOs in Sri Lanka, 27. More NGOs were founded before this but many struggled in the much-changed funding environment of the 1980s and 1990s. More popular civil society organisations in Sri Lanka such as the YMCA, YMBA and the Temperance Movement have a much longer history, which stretches back to the nineteenth century. See CitationBastian ‘The Failure of State Formation’, CitationSaravanamuttu ‘Sri Lanka: Civil Society, the Nation and the State-building Challenge’, CitationWickramasinghe, Civil Society in Sri Lanka.
24. In February 2007, there were 1073 NGOs registered at the NGO Secretariat in the Ministry of Social Services, the national coordinating body for NGOs. This figure only includes INGOs, Sri Lankan NGOs receiving foreign funding or Sri Lankan NGOs working in more than one administrative district. It does not include the estimated 10–12,000 local NGOs registered at the district or sub-district level (interview with NGO secretariat representative, 2 February 2007). The estimated number of active organisations was reached after crosschecking NGO secretariat figures with data from the government Centre for Non-Governmental Sector, OCHA and the Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies (a Sri Lankan umbrella body).
25. See IRED, Development of NGOs of Sri Lanka, 10.
26. This figure can be contrasted with similar data from 1991 when a sample of 182 NGOs showed the funding of the largest organisations constituted a much smaller proportion of total funding. IRED, Development NGOs of Sri Lanka. The NGO secretariat has presented data related to a similar sample to the one mentioned here on their website. See http://ngosecretariat.gov.lk/pdf/Total%20funding.pdf
27. Data on aid received to large Sri Lankan organisations was gathered from individual organisations' annual reports and reports on tsunami response. Total aid channelled through NGOs in 2005 was around $400million. See CitationCentral Bank of Sri Lanka, ‘Funds Received by Non-Governmental Organisations’.
28. CitationGoodhand, Aid, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka, 30.
29. CitationFernandez, NGOs in South Asia; CitationWanigaratne, ‘The State-NGO Relationship in Sri Lanka’; Fernando, The Landscape of NGOs in Sri Lanka.
30. Emergency regulations invoked during times of conflict (such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act) have restricted NGOs' room for manoeuvre even further.
31. CitationNeff, in his report for the ICJ on the Presidential Commission on NGOs in 1992 argues that this feeling is widespread among Sri Lankan officials and relates to all NGOs, not a select few: ‘NGOs are said to be aloof, cut off from the lives of the bulk of the people of the country. The implication is that they have thereby become somewhat arrogant, that they are in danger of losing …the ability to appreciate what the people of Sri Lanka really need’. Neff, Sri Lanka: The Activities of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, 39.
32. CitationDeVotta, ‘Civil Society and Non-Governmental Organisations in Sri Lanka’.
33. Funding for NGO peacebuilding projects came largely from the multilateral, US and Europe donors. These included UN agencies, the World Bank, embassies and government aid agencies. Often donors themselves lacked the capacity to distribute funds to national NGOs and to monitor them and increasingly relied on INGOs or other national NGOs to perform this role (interviews with donors 18 September 2006, 20 September 2006, 30 November 2006). These donors tended to emphasise different goals. While, for example, some would focus on building a peace dividend, others would concentrate on building popular support for the peace processes.
34. CitationBastian, ‘Sri Lanka: No War, No Peace?’. CitationPugh and Cooper (War Economies in a Regional Context, 6) have defined ‘liberal peacebuilding’ as ‘an ideological mix of neo-liberal concepts of democracy, market sovereignty and conflict resolution that determine contemporary strategies of intervention’.
35. See CitationTelford et al., Joint Evaluation of the international response to the Indian Ocean tsunami.
36. Interview with representative from a European Embassy in Colombo, 5 October 2006.
37. CitationGoodhand and Klem, Aid, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.
38. Bryant, Nongovernmental Organisations in Environmental Struggles. Bryant examines NGO behaviour in the less contested national political arena of the Philippines. He demonstrates how two large NGOs were able, through a variety of financial, political and territorial strategies, to sustain perceptions of themselves as effective moral actors, in spite of the efforts of ‘reputation entrepreneurs’.
39. A number of highly publicised NGO ‘misappropriation’ scandals emerged in Sri Lanka during 2006, fuelled by government capture of several abandoned LTTE bases in the East where resources provided to communities by several NGOs and INGOs were found.
40. My appreciation of this strategic aspect of NGO behaviour draws heavily on the work of Bryant. Bryant, Nongovernmental Organisations in Environmental Struggles.
41. Interviews with NGO staff 26 September 2006, 14 February 2007.
42. These local dynamics have been explored by CitationGoodhand and Lewer, ‘Sri Lanka: NGOs and peacebuilding in complex political emergencies’ and CitationKorf, ‘Dining with Devils?’
43. For example, with the Prime Minister's wife, Mrs Bandaranaike who visited the Kantoluwa village, the first village where Sarvodaya worked.
44. CitationBond, Buddhism at Work, 23.
45. CitationLiyanage, Revolution under the Breadfruit Tree. Liyanage argues that in 1974, almost half of all the MPs opposed Sarvodaya and in particular, it's pre-school system. In 1974, Felix Bandaranaike, the powerful Minister of Justice, launched an all out attack on Sarvodaya, in which he told Sarvodaya to stop working in his Dompe constituency. When Ariyaratne refused, he launched an investigation into the organisation, on the basis of spurious claims of corruption. This campaign also saw the first systematic anti-Sarvodaya campaign in the government media.
46. Bond, Buddism at Work. Bond (72) cites Ariyaratne's own justification for working with the government: ‘The active participation of two Prime Ministers and the first elected Executive President … in important Sarvodaya events has further established the bona fides of the Movement in the minds of the people’. This new relationship, however, as Bond has argued, represented both opportunity and risk for Sarvodaya. While it provided Sarvodaya with the opportunity to expand its work and spread its message wider, it also risked identifying the Movement with the elite political class which dominated Sri Lankan society, something Sarvodaya's philosophy had always aimed to undermine. It also led to internal divisions within the organisation.
47. Bond, Buddhism at Work, 79.
48. Neff, Sri Lanka: The Activities of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry in Respect of Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), 30–33.
49. CitationPerera et al., A People's Movement Under Siege.
50. The most famous incident was a demonstration in 1992 against the opening of a tourist hotel in Kandalama near Dambulla which the government had granted support (Bond, Buddhism at Work). Interestingly, this incident saw Sarvodaya ‘jockeying to be seen as the true supporters of Buddhism’ not only with government, but also with the local temple who joined the protest. In response, the government media carried a story that played on a photograph of some Catholic nuns carrying a cross in front of the famous Dambulla cave temples. Posters were also displayed which read ‘Sarvodaya profiteering businessman (mudalalis) Ariyaratne and the rogue monk (hora sangeya) Sumangala took the cross to Dambulla’ (Bond, Buddhism at Work, 84–85).
51. Interview with analyst 15 March 2007.
52. Deshodaya's ‘Vision Declaration’ called for a radical overhaul of the existing political system. These demands contrast with the demands of other campaigning peace organisations such as the National Anti War Front, whose manifesto included a range of concrete proposals for reforming the existing political system.
53. Interview with Sarvodaya representative 27 March 2007.
54. Evidence for Sarvodaya's ‘popular legitimacy’ came from interviews with representatives of other NGOs, government officials and a survey of the English language press.
55. The two most notable reprisals against Sarvodaya's semi-independent youth ‘peace brigade’ or shanti sena came from the LTTE. These were death threats before an ‘amity camp’ in Jaffna in 1981 and threats towards the Jaffna shanti sena coordinator in 2007. Interestingly, when conflict in Sri Lanka had an intra-Sinhalese dynamic, particularly during the second JVP uprisings of the late 1980s, Sarvodaya's deep popular appeal among the Sinhalese did encourage politicians to see it as a threat and did not insulate the organisation from suspicions that they were terrorist sympathisers. During the time, Sarvodaya (and in particular its youth ‘peace brigade’ or shani sena) were forced to keep a low profile for fear of being targeted by the JVP or being accused of being JVP sympathisers by government forces. Interview with staff member, 24 February 2007.
56. See Bond, Buddhism at Work, 98–102.
57. CitationHaug, Combining Service Delivery with Advocacy within Humanitarian Agencies, 4; and CitationUniversity Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘A Tale of two Disasters and the Fickleness of Terror Politics’.
58. See, for example, CitationUniversity Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘A Tale of two Disasters and the Fickleness of Terror Politics’; ‘The Race for Infamy in Sri Lanka's North-East’.
59. University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘The Race for Infamy in Sri Lanka's North-East’.
60. TRO worked as an implementing partner for the NECORD (North-East Community Rehabilitation and Development) Project in Killinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar, Vavuniya, Trincomalee and Ampara in 2003.
61. The Karuna faction was strengthened by support from the government and the security forces. By 2007, after a sustained military campaign in the East, the LTTE's position was significantly weakened. The Karuna faction shared tactical and strategic intelligence with the Sri Lankan government and in 2006, Karuna established a political wing called the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TVMP) with offices throughout the east and in Colombo. See CitationSmith, ‘The Eelam Endgame?’.
62. CitationPhillipson and Thangarajah, ‘The Politics of the North East’, 45, A report prepared for the governments of the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. This interpretation is supported by University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘A Tale of two Disasters and the Fickleness of Terror Politics’.
63. Phillipson and Thangarajah, ‘The Politics of the North East’, 45.
64. These included shelling of the Trincomallee office in April 2006, the arrest of TRO drivers in Batticaloa in June, hijacking of a TRO truck in Valachennai in July, grenade attacks on and later destruction of the TRO Jaffna Office, intimidation of TRO staff in Batticaloa by Karuna group representatives. CitationJeyraj, ‘The tragic fate of TRO employees abducted by Karuna cadres’. See also University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), ‘The Race for Infamy in Sri Lanka's North-East’.
65. The remaining 65% from sister organisations and ‘local contributions’. These figures come from TRO's annual reports.
66. The total funds frozen amounted to around $800,000. TRO, ‘18 Month Tsunami Report’, 6.
67. This view was illustrated, for example, by the comments of Mr Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the Defence Minister made in March 2007: ‘I'm always against these INGOs, NGOs and even the diplomatic missions interfering [in the North and East]’. CitationTamilnet, ‘Acrimony flares, US says diplomats not LTTE's target’.
68. Interview with NAWF staff member 28 November 2006.
69. Interview with FCE staff member, 24 November 2006.
70. Orjuela, ‘Civil Society in Civil War: The Case of Sri Lanka’, 134.
71. Interview with NGO leader 14 February 2007.
72. Interview with NGO staff member 23 September 2006.
73. Interview with NGO staff member 21March 2007.
74. CitationGoodhand, Aiding Peace, 93; CitationMosse, ‘Is Good Policy Unimplementable?’, 663.
75. Interviews with national NGO representatives 26 September 2006 and 12 October 2006.
76. See Barnett and Zuercher, ‘The Peacebuilder's Contract’.