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Stefan Toepler, a pre-eminent nonprofit scholar and professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, shines a light on the authoritarian playbook and a proposed philanthropic response. Following up on work about autocratic tendencies in Russia and in the West, Toepler and his coauthors explain in the first article in a special issue for Public Administration and Development that apolitical nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can fly under the radar in restrictive regimes, providing economic and social services while concurrently building the foundations for democracy in their local communities.
Over the last decade, countries ranging from Russia, Venezuela, and even the United States have introduced or passed laws designed to tighten restrictions on civil society organizations engaging in political advocacy. These laws are designed to create a cooling effect on oppositional civil society, often considered to be an important ingredient for a strong democracy. By marking organizations receiving foreign funding as dangerous foreign agents, these laws are designed to limit the power of civil society by creating ill-defined and onerous regulations—all allowing government to hold a proverbial axe over the heads of advocacy NGOs.
Toepler et al highlight that service-providing NGOs provide training and experience in collective action, building the foundations for future advocacy and laboriously growing the social capital necessary to spark democratization. As oppressive governments regulate advocacy NGOs out of operation, democratic advocates can focus on building civil society out of view.
Service-providing NGOs were one of the original catalysts for the field of nonprofit studies. During the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and early 90’s, service-providing NGOs led democratic revolutions. In 1989, Poland’s independent labor union Solidarity mobilized popular support and pushed Poland to become the first Soviet bloc member to hold open elections.
“My formative years were in the late 1980s, and I was in Berlin when the wall fell,” said Toepler when reflecting on his work. “I then came to the U.S. to study philanthropy and nonprofits at the beginning of the 1990s, when there was a push to expand the field to look outside U.S. borders. I began studying nonprofits globally and tried to figure out what the nonprofit sector looked like in other countries.”
Toepler and his collaborators’ early work inspired an explosion of attention toward the management of international NGOs. Since then, Toepler has emerged as a leading nonprofit scholar whose impact is widely felt. With an h-index of 41 (having published at least 41 articles with at least 41 citations each) and a best-selling textbook on nonprofit management, he has long been a passionate observer of civil society organizations and the surrounding philanthropy. Since the beginning of his career, foreign funding for NGOs has grown exponentially.
“One of the biggest shifts in the early 2000s was the recognition that bilateral donors like USAID are actually eclipsed in terms of the amount of funding they are providing overseas, when compared to foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates,” said Eleanor Bedford, a senior consultant at Acute Incite, who has worked in advocacy organizations, humanitarian response, and organizational development for 30 years. “I remember that sometime in the 2000s, USAID began including mention of how much money was being invested by other sources of funding.”
This funding came with a sense of urgency and expectations of rapid solutions.
“9/11 was a bit of a watershed. People said, building civil society capacity is all nice and well, but just takes too long to change societies,” Toepler said. “So, let's try something else. Let’s pump all this money into advocacy NGOs who promote our liberal values in these countries. There was a hard push. These organizations were essentially there to advance western values and were not about traditional service provision like education, health care, and sanitation.”
Twenty years later this accelerated process has not shown the desired results. Instead, authoritarian governments can more easily identify and expel these NGOs by following the foreign funding trail.
“The most important thing is understanding the context, first and foremost,” said Bedford, speaking on the role of outside donors. “When keeping the hope alive, it’s a matter of strategy for the local leaders and local communities to figure out how best to do that. The role of outsider donors is remembering to take the political context into account. I still think we make these mistakes—I think Iraq and Afghanistan are examples where we still haven't learned the lessons of the past in terms of taking local politics into account in our efforts to help.”
But, as Toepler argues, these purges of NGOs are not universal. Service-providing NGOs are often allowed to continue their work, filling holes in service provision when the government fails to deliver to the people.
“Under the mantle of economic development, you can still do some political work and organize people,” Toepler said. “Not necessarily to get on the streets, but the idea is that organizations involving the people on the ground are a little like ‘schools of democracy.’ Participants must learn to cooperate with each other, to coordinate, to find their voice. If the current policies are not really cutting it, and nobody has other great ideas, maybe we should return to the thinking of the 1990s. Go back to building civil society capacity and take the long road to democratization.”
The special issue tackles this core concept, with articles that build a framework for how service provision can concretely build democratic practices and highlight the important role of grassroots NGOs, and how NGOs networks can keep each other safe and accountable. Read the full edition on Wiley’s site.