L.W.M. Schulpen

Decision Making in Partnerships for Development Explaining the Influence of Local Partners

This article examines decision making in the partnerships between three private aid agencies and their local partners in Ghana, India, and Nicaragua. Drawing upon a mixed methodology, the article maps the relative influence of these partners vis-à-vis the agencies and reveals the processes underlying decision-making outcomes. Three main findings are advanced: (a) Institutional rules regulate per topic the extent in which partners can participate in the decision making, ranging from exclusion to full decision-making authority; (b) four clusters of decision-making topics were identified reflecting the different degrees to which partners are allowed to participate in the decision making; and (c) while partners’ ability to influence decisions above all is affected by the institutional rules, some have more influence than others depending on their organizational capacity and their respective project-officer.

How to allocate public funding to nongovernmental development organizations: A critical assessment of the Dutch co-financing system

The Dutch co-financing system for nongovernmental development organizations (NGDOs) is unique in Europe. Almost a quarter of public development aid is channeled through a selective group of NGDOs that have to satisfy a broad range of institutional and operational criteria. The procedures for defining the eligibility of these co-financing organizations have recently been streamlined to enhance competition and to guarantee more objective fund allocation. This article provides a critical review of the current system for allocating public funding to private development organizations and discusses the criteria used for comparing institutional performance and assessing the quality of submitted multiyear co-funding requests. Even though important progress has been made in cross-organizational appraisal of development agencies, the operationalization of selected indicators still suffers from ambiguities and arbitrary weighing procedures. Past performance and demand-side criteria are not yet considered, thus reducing the potential relevance of the assessment system for improving the effectiveness of development projects.

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

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.

Understanding the Sustainability of Private Development Initiatives : What Kind of Difference Do They Make?

Abstract In the Netherlands, there is a large group of small-scale, voluntary development organisations, referred to as Private Development Initiatives (PDIs). By classifying PDI interventions based on their potential sustainability, we aim to enhance our understanding of PDIs as alternative development actors and to get insight into the diversity within this group. We rely on detailed data of 49 Dutch PDIs active in Kenya and Indonesia. The classification is based on a combined analysis of both the intervention type (‘what’ they do) and the intervention manner (‘how’ they work) of PDI activities. This results in a typology that outlines the potential sustainability of PDI intervention strategies. We find that diversity regarding the potential sustainability of PDI interventions is large. Whereas several organisational characteristics influence the choice of the intervention strategy (e.g. independence local partner, budget), intrinsic drivers such as motivation and the personal or professional background of PDI members tend to be of great influence for the potential sustainability of the intervention strategies adopted by the PDIs.

Thinking and Writing About Global Poverty

Journalistic coverage informs audiences about poverty in developing countries. However, little is known about the contribution of individual journalists to the frame building of this topic. This study explores the cognitive frames of 54 journalists from the Netherlands who regularly write about the issue. The results are compared with the media frames in their articles. Additionally, the study identifies factors that influence the frame-building process. The findings suggest that journalists’ cognitive frames are weak predictors of the frames in their articles. According to the journalists, the framing of their stories is specifically influenced by news values and sources.

Editorial: Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity. The New Face of European Solidarity

The tens of thousands of refugees entering Europe since mid-2015 have led to heated debates not only in political circles within the European Union but also on the streets. For fear of home, security and work, citizens all over the EU express their concern with the unprecedented influx of refugees and asylum seekers. At the same time, others put up banners welcoming refugees and many are doing substantially more. In many countries, citizens spontaneously set up initiatives in response to the refugee crisis. Tourists on the Greek islands close to Turkey take care of refugees by driving them to the nearest port from which they can catch a boat to mainland Greece. Others start collecting goods to hand over to refugees or ship it to Calais for the hundreds of refugees whose main goal is to travel across the Channel. Welcome Shops are opened to act as collecting points for the goods that citizens want to donate for refugees and others again use social media to set up meetings with residents or to find rooms and houses for refugees. Under the heading of ‘amateur aid: the limits of good intentions’, Wall (2015) analyses these ‘spontaneous citizen and civil society-led initiatives in response to the refugee crisis’. Many initiatives, she states, ‘started with one person and an idea and have snowballed’. These initiatives are then characterised as ‘small, unofficial, unstructured’ without ‘legal status’ set up by people who ‘have never done anything like this before’. Still, many ‘have come together within hours’. Naturally, not all goes well. Apart from receiving ‘stained suits, high heels and erotic lingerie’ and the emergence of secondary markets where refugees resell donated goods, some of these citizen initiatives (CIs) raise ‘more money than they can spend or handle’ and many simply lack the experience and expertise in handling the work they have set out to do. For the authors in this volume, these characteristics and challenges are very recognisable as they are central to what are called CIs for global solidarity, private (development) initiatives, MONGOs (My Own NGO) or personalised aid. Notwithstanding the different names or abbreviations, all of these essentially refer to small-scale development organisations set up by private persons in the global North and aimed at improving the living standards of people in the global South. As such, this ‘vertical solidarity’ (Wilkinson-Maposa et al., 2005) refers to an actor in development that is still very much under the radar but deserves a much more central place in the discussion about development aid.

An exploration of individual-level wage effects of foreign aid in developing countries

The key research question that this article aims to respond to is: what are the individual-level effects of wages financed by development assistance? Our hypothesis is that these effects are substantial and overall positive, depending on the level of analysis. This article theorizes about unintended wage effects at the individual level, spillover effects, and those at the macro level, yet focuses its research on individual-level effects. The empirical part consists of two case studies. One takes a sample of grants from a donor agency, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a starting point, following these grants through the aid chain to determine local staffing costs. The other case study consists of a comparative wage analysis in a developing country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. As this field of research is rather fresh, instead of answering relevant questions with respect to wage effects, this study merely aims to identify questions that merit further research.

From Favoritism via Abundance to Austerity—NGDO-government Relations in the Netherlands

In the relationship between the Dutch government and non-governmental development cooperation in the Netherlands, a few years stand out: 1965 (when large-scale government funding for Dutch non-governmental development organizations (NGDOs) started); 1980 (the introduction of core funding for Dutch NGDOs); 1999 (the opening up of the cofinancing system to a wider range of Dutch NGDOs); 2003 (the first step in restructuring the funding of NGDOs with the introduction of major new grant schemes); 2006–2007 (the next step in the restructuring, with the merger of the two most important schemes); 2008 (with a more polarized political debate on the future of NGDO funding in the Netherlands); and 2011-2013 with cutbacks in government subsidy and announcements of even further reductions from 2016 onwards. This list shows that more changes have been introduced in the grant systems since 2000 than in the thirty-five years before.1

National dialogues as an interruption of civil war – the case of Yemen

ABSTRACT Yemeni tribes have traditionally used dialogues to prevent clashes. At national level this tradition has been applied to prevent civil wars. This article discusses whether national dialogues are suitable instruments for setting disputes at national level, looking at the circumstances under which these dialogues could lead to successful results. Several criteria are considered, of which building an environment of trust and ownership of external interventions seem to be the most significant. Trust-building before entering into formal negotiations is important, but it is unclear whether this should be a separate phase, or can be part of a reconciliation stage, which the literature on dialogues singles out as highly conducive for success. Local ownership is an important precondition for success in the theoretical discourse, but (direct) international and regional involvement is required, as external bodies are often the cause of internal conflicts in Yemen.

Putting promises into practice: The New Aid Architecture in Uganda

Via the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action the international donor community has delivered a set of promises on ownership, harmonization and co-ordination. Uganda is an interesting case for assessing progress on Paris Principles and seeing the New Aid Architecture in practice. This article provides a historical overview of the implementation of ‘Paris’ in Uganda from the late 1990s up to 2010, showing that implementation is laggardly and, in more recent years, that earlier progress has been reversed. This is due to donors’ perceptions of Ugandas political structure, and particularly its rampant corruption, and also to different views among donors and their internal adaptability in terms of truly measuring up to the Paris Principles.