Cut from a Different Cloth? Comparing Democracy-Promoting NGOs in Ghana and Indonesia

Abstract

This study compares donor-sponsored non-governmental organizations (NGOs) promoting democracy in Ghana and Indonesia. Starting from the idea that democracy and civil society are context-specific phenomena, we explore the question of what context-specificity means for individual NGOs. While donors and researchers alike stress the importance of context, context-specificity remains an ill-defined and elusive concept. Our study contributes to the debate by (1) constructing a framework which defines context-specificity at the level of organizational characteristics and (2) analysing to what extent NGOs in Ghana and Indonesia actually conform to this definition of context-specificity. Because Ghana and Indonesia represent very different contexts, we maximize the chances of finding differences in organizational configuration. Our fieldwork data from Accra and Jakarta only partly confirm this expectation. Although the mission statements echo national differences, we find remarkable similarities in terms of strategies, structures, and resources. These similarities lead us to conclude that the NGOs operate quite independently from their national contexts. In the discussion, we relate our findings to the debate on donor support to NGOs.

Keywords:

• Civil society
• NGO
• democracy
• context
• development aid
• comparative analysis
• Ghana
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our gratitude to anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Also, we would like to thank our respondents for their time and for providing us with information on their work. Finally, we thank the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for funding this research project.

Notes

Many bilateral and multilateral donor agencies started using this terminology in their policies after signing the Rome declaration on harmonization (2003), the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness (2005), and the Accra Agenda for Action (2008).

This criterion did not specify the number of donors, the type of donors, or the amount of funding. With regard to these aspects, the group is highly diverse both within and between countries. In terms of the number of donors, there are NGOs that have a large number of donors and NGOs with very few donors. CDD is an example of the former, as they have received grants from, among others, the UNDP, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. On the other hand, there is KID which depends for almost all of its funds on the Netherlands Institute of Multiparty Democracy, because ‘so far, beside the Dutch embassy, they are the only funders of KID's activities’ (Interview KID, April 2008). The researched NGOs are supported by a variety of types of donors, which include bilateral, multilateral, and nongovernmental funding agencies. Partnership, for instance, mainly relies on funding from bilateral donors who channel their funds through the UNDP (a multilateral donor), while ISODEC has a long-term funding relation with the NGO Oxfam NOVIB. Finally, there are big differences in terms of their budgets. For the year 2007, Abantu anticipated a budget of US$0.4 million as compared to the Partnership which had an estimated budget of US$10 million.