According to the All-Affected Principle (AAP), all and only those individuals who are significantly affected by a decision should have a say in, or influence over, that decision.² This principle is typically applied to questions about the boundaries of political communities and the scope of government institutions (Warren, this volume). Some scholars, however, have argued that it should be applied more broadly, for example to philanthropic foundations (Saunders-Hastings and Reich, this volume) and workplaces (Gould, this volume).³ Fung characterizes this extension as a shift from “governments” to “governance.” “We should,” he argues, “interpret the [all-affected] principle as applying not only to legislatures but also to administrative agencies, private corporations, civic organizations, and governments of other societies.”⁴

In this chapter I take up this invitation by considering whether and how the AAP ought to be extended to large-scale, Western-based INGOs such as Oxfam, Care, and Doctors Without Borders. These INGOs undertake humanitarian, development, and/or advocacy work across borders, either directly or by funding other organizations. I focus on the AAP’s relevance not to INGOs’ internal governance structures, but rather to their “external”⁵ relationships with their intended beneficiaries,⁶ donors, local community members, host governments, domestic NGOs and civic organizations in the countries where they work, and people affected by their advocacy campaigns (see Gould, this volume).

While they are sometimes celebrated as saints or heroes, these INGOs are also frequently criticized for being, in effect, undemocratic. As one prominent report based on thousands of interviews with aid recipients and community members in dozens of countries concluded,

What leverage does the AAP offer for recognizing and grappling with these sorts of issues? Would greater compliance with the AAP be a good way to address them? In response to these questions, I argue that efforts to extend the AAP to INGOs (and other non-state actors that engage in governance) almost always analogize them to governments. This analogy deploys what I call the AAP’s “inclusive face”: it tells us that like conventional governments, INGOs should include those they significantly affect in their decision making. For example, Oxfam should include those significantly affected by its advocacy campaigns in its decisions about those campaigns. Yet because inclusion is a rather conservative political project, the AAP’s inclusive face offers only a limited basis for critique.

There is, however, another way to extend the AAP to INGOs that has gone virtually unacknowledged: rather than analogize INGOs to governments, we can analogize them to unaffected individuals (or any other unaffected entity). This analogy deploys what I call the AAP’s “exclusive face.” It tells us that INGOs such as Oxfam should not have a say in or influence over decisions that do not significantly affect them; they should be excluded.⁸ The AAP’s exclusive face offers a more radical basis for critique of INGOs than its inclusive face.

However, even the AAP’s exclusive face has serious limitations in the context of INGOs. These limitations are due to INGOs’ social position as elites seeking to address social problems that they have good reasons to help address, but that primarily affect others. INGOs in this position run up against what I call the involvement/influence dilemma: they can be involved in addressing social problems or they can avoid undue influence, but it is difficult for them to do both simultaneously.⁹ I therefore turn to three organizations that directly and intentionally address the question of how elites should help address social problems that primarily affect others: SURJ, Thousand Currents, and the Solidaire Network. These organizations do not fully reject the AAP, but they reinterpret and recast it in ways that are relevant to, and generative for, other entities in a similar situation, such as Western-based humanitarian, development, and advocacy INGOs.

Before turning to the argument, I briefly sketch how I am interpreting the AAP for the purposes of this chapter. I interpret “affected” to mean having one’s basic interests significantly affected. I also conceive of affectedness as proportional: the more one’s basic interests are affected, the more influence one should have. While still quite vague, these specifications help to prevent the AAP from having highly regressive and inegalitarian implications, such as wealthy US corporations having a say in Mexican environmental policy because it will slightly reduce their profits.

As noted above, the AAP is typically taken to apply to formal decisions. However, if the point of the AAP is to give people meaningful influence over the forces shaping their lives, limiting its scope to formal decisions – like limiting its scope to conventional governments – is too narrow.¹⁰ In response to this worry, Hayward recommends a “focus on, not decisions, but [structural] power relations” (this volume). While Hayward acknowledges that her conception of the AAP is so broad that it might be difficult to implement, some expansion of the AAP beyond formal decision making is necessary for the principle to have force or relevance in the context of INGOs. I thus adopt a wide conception of decision making that extends beyond discrete decisions. (I discuss what this might look like in more detail below.) To summarize, I conceive of the AAP as a claim that people should have influence over decisions (and other processes and practices) that significantly affect their basic interests, to a degree that is roughly proportional to how much their basic interests are affected.

The AAP’s Inclusive Face and the Government Analogy

The AAP is, most obviously, a principle of inclusion; Dahl calls it “very likely the best principle of inclusion you will find” (see the introduction to this volume). The AAP’s “inclusive face” focuses on bringing individuals into decision-making processes that affect them; it offers remedies for members of disenfranchised groups (e.g. women and African Americans in the US context), colonial subjects, and individuals harmed by the activities of foreign governments.

Scholars who extend the AAP to non-state actors have focused almost exclusively on the AAP’s inclusive face. This is because they analogize INGOs to governments. The logic of this government analogy proceeds as follows: the AAP applies to conventional governments. Some non-state actors function like conventional governments in that they engage in governance. Humanitarian INGOs, for example, are sometimes said to engage in “humanitarian governance.”¹¹ Just as individuals should have a say in decisions made by conventional governments that significantly affect them, they should also have a say in governance decisions by non-state actors that significantly affect them.

While they do not necessarily use the vocabulary of the AAP, many INGOs have tried to comply with its inclusive face. They have done this by, for example, hiring and promoting employees from among the populations with which they work, consulting more closely with (reasonably) legitimate political leaders of those populations, and holding “listening sessions” with members of especially vulnerable social groups, such as disabled or lower-caste people. They have instituted complaints mechanisms and local ombudspersons, and undertaken surveys to solicit feedback. While some of these efforts have had little practical effect – e.g. complaints mechanisms sometimes go unused because they require literacy in places where literacy rates are low – they have, on the whole, gone some ways toward addressing the criticisms of INGOs cited at the outset of this chapter. But beyond whether it suggests incremental steps in the right direction, does the government analogy leading to the AAP’s inclusive face offer a compelling and persuasive vision for how INGOs might act more consistently with democratic norms?

In one sense, the answer to this question is clearly yes. For at least three decades, scholars, aid practitioners, and others have argued that INGOs are not merely collections of well-intended, virtuous individuals engaged in acts of charity. They are, instead, political actors that engage in governance activities.¹² Analogizing INGOs to governments brings this argument to life. It suggests that INGOs should be analyzed as political actors and held to democratic norms such as transparency and accountability.

In the context of the AAP, however, analogizing INGOs to governments has at least two drawbacks. First, the idea that INGOs should govern more inclusively normalizes governance by INGOs. Focusing on how INGOs govern (i.e. more versus less inclusively), shifts attention away from whether they should be engaged in governance in the first place and how to reduce their governance role. This is troubling because compared to conventional governments, INGOs are severely limited with regard to both their democratic legitimacy and their ability to provide services at large scales for extended periods.¹³ Even if INGOs are the only entities able and willing to serve a governance function in a particular place at a particular time, a focus on making their governance activities more inclusive can further entrench their governance role and undermine relationships of responsiveness and accountability between populations and their conventional governments.¹⁴

Second, as noted above, the government analogy deploys the AAP’s inclusive face, and inclusion – while sometimes crucial¹⁵ – is in many respects a rather limited and conservative political project.¹⁶ As one commentator wrote, echoing more academic critics of inclusion:

While this statement is perhaps overly sweeping, it captures the ways in which inclusion as a political project frequently leaves too much unquestioned and unchanged.

The AAP’s Exclusive Face and the Individual Analogy

Given the limitations of the AAP as a principle of inclusion, it is noteworthy that the AAP is also a principle of exclusion: it tells us not only that individuals who are significantly affected by a decision should have a say in that decision, but also that those who are not significantly affected should not have a say. Both intrinsic and instrumental justifications for including the affected in decision making are undermined if the unaffected are also included.¹⁸ This exclusive face of the AAP focuses on excluding unaffected individuals (and other entities) from decision-making processes that don’t affect them; it rejects unwanted meddling by outsiders, e.g. unwanted “humanitarian” military intervention.¹⁹

While analogizing INGOs to governments leads to the AAP’s inclusive face, analogizing INGOs to unaffected individuals (or simply recognizing that they are themselves not relevantly affected) leads to its exclusive face; just as individuals should not have influence over governments’ decisions if they are not affected by those decisions, non-state actors such as INGOs should not have influence over governments’ decisions if they are not affected by those decisions. (An exception is if INGOs are acting as legitimate representatives of those who are significantly affected.) This individual analogy flips the government analogy on its head. While the government analogy demands that Oxfam include people who are affected by its decisions, the individual analogy demands that Oxfam be excluded from decisions that don’t affect Oxfam.

To summarize the argument so far: the government analogy centers INGOs’ governance role and says that those who are significantly affected by their decisions should be included in those decisions. It invokes the AAP’s inclusive face, articulating a complaint about exclusion, the remedy for which is inclusion. In contrast, the individual analogy centers governance by conventional governments. It says that if INGOs are not significantly affected by those governments’ decisions, it should not have a say in those decisions. Invoking the AAP’s exclusive face, it articulates a complaint about meddling and interference, the remedy for which is exclusion. While INGOs more frequently acknowledge and seek to demonstrate their compliance with the AAP’s inclusive face, they also sometimes acknowledge and seek to demonstrate their compliance with its exclusive face. For example, human rights and humanitarian INGOs sometimes describe themselves as (1) witnesses engaged in témoignage who simply report what they see, (2) technical experts, (3) “microphones” that “amplify” the voices of those who are significantly affected by a given issue, and/or (4) connectors that help other actors find and network with each other. These formulations of INGOs’ role suggest that they exercise limited independent power and influence.

There are, however, limits on how much INGOs can comply with the exclusive face of the AAP, even when they construe their role in these ways. That is, there are limits on how much they can limit their own influence. This is because it is difficult for powerful elites be involved without also having influence. Like King Midas they change what they touch, in ways that sometimes undermine their intentions. For example, in part to reduce their own influence, INGOs frequently fund local organizations. But in so doing, they empower some organizations but not others, and create incentives for local organizations to anticipate and conform to INGOs’ own expectations and preferences.²⁰ Likewise, INGOs that try to “amplify” the voices of others choose which voices to amplify. One striking example of this phenomenon is cash transfer programs. Cash transfer INGOs such as GiveDirectly are explicitly committed to the value of non-paternalism and minimizing their own influence. However, even cash transfer programs can have unintended negative effects; there is some (contested) evidence that people who do not receive cash transfers, but who live near people who do, experience reduced life satisfaction, asset holdings, and consumption.²¹ GiveDirectly is also involved in policy discussions with governments about cash transfers, efforts to test universal basic income programs, etc. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this – but it does mean that GiveDirectly has influence.²² The broader point is that virtually all involvement by the powerful entails influence, with the result that it is difficult for INGOs to be involved without violating the AAP’s exclusive face.

If this is right – if INGOs cannot be involved without also exerting influence – then the AAP’s exclusive face has much more radical implications than its inclusive face. The AAP’s exclusive face suggests that in some circumstances INGOs should simply not exist, at least not in anything like their current form, because they can’t avoid exerting influence even when they are not significantly affected. INGOs addressing important issues should instead be replaced by local organizations run by people who are significantly affected by those issues.²³

While its implications are radical, the exclusive face of the AAP also does not offer adequate guidance to INGOs. As this chapter’s epigraph implies, there are sometimes good reasons for privileged entities to help address social issues that don’t significantly affect them. For example, INGOs and their donors (which can be individuals, governments, corporations, foundations, etc.) sometimes cause, contribute to, benefit from, and/or exacerbate the large-scale problems that INGOs seek to address.²⁴ They also sometimes have an especially strong or specialized capacity to address these issues. These can be good reasons for INGOs and/or their donors to be involved in addressing them, by contributing resources, time, expertise, or labor, or taking on some of the risk involved in doing so.

If this is right, then the implication of the AAP’s exclusive face – that unaffected INGOs should not have any influence – is not only too simple, it might let would-be donors off the hook from helping to address problems they helped to create. INGOs therefore face what I call the involvement/influence dilemma: a choice between a) being involved, and thereby exerting undemocratic influence, or b) abstaining from any influence, but as a result not doing what they (or their donors) should to address large-scale problems.

The foregoing two sections suggest two conclusions. First, anyone seeking to extend the AAP to INGOs via the government analogy should explain why the government analogy is more appropriate than the individual analogy. That is, why, from a democratic perspective, is making INGOs more inclusive better than excluding them? Second, even if the exclusive face of the AAP offers more critical leverage than its inclusive face, it does not offer sufficient guidance for navigating the involvement/influence dilemma. In the next section I turn to some organizations that have grappled with this dilemma and offer some helpful guidance in how to do so. First, though, I mention two additional aspects of the AAP that exacerbate the involvement/influence dilemma and are also problematic in their own right.

First, the AAP is entirely forward-looking. It asks, at t₁, who will be affected at t₃ by a decision at t₂. This approach excludes, or at least downplays, the relevance of the past for who should have what kind of influence in the present. This is objectionable insofar as histories of exclusion matter for how influence should be allocated in the present and the future. Not only do these histories remind us of patterns of exclusion and domination that have been perpetuated over time, but for political reconciliation to be achieved, compensatory or rectification-based allocation of influence might sometimes be necessary.²⁵ It is beyond the scope of this chapter to show that it is necessary; my point is just that the AAP leaves no space for incorporating considerations of past exclusion or injustice into determinations of how to allocate influence in the present or future.

Second, the AAP is dyadic. Especially when “decision” is interpreted more narrowly, the AAP conjures a series of dyadic linkages between discrete individuals and a given decision. Those individuals should each have a say in the decision if they will be affected by it; they should not have a say if they will not be affected. The lines of connection run between each individual and the decision, like spokes of a wheel or arms of a starfish; they do not run among individuals, understood as individuals or as members of social groups. The AAP thus downplays ongoing relationships among actors, including structural relationships of domination and oppression. Rather than seeing decisions themselves as effects that emerge out of ongoing power relations, the AAP focuses on the “downstream” question of who should have a say in those decisions once they are being made. (This problem is less acute when we adopt a “wide” conception of decision making, but as Hayward notes in this volume, widening the AAP too much can make it difficult to apply.)

I have argued that the involvement/influence dilemma, future orientation, and emphasis on dyads are all serious limitations of the AAP. However, these limitations do not – to my mind at least – nullify the democratic intuition at the heart of the AAP: the idea that everyone should have a say in matters that affect their basic interests. Rather, these limitations of the AAP suggest the need to think more about how it might be enacted in ways that are responsive to the complexities of influence and involvement under conditions of extreme power inequalities, historic injustice, and ongoing oppressive relationships.

Social Justice Organizations and INGOs as Outsider Elites

To take up this task, I turn to three social justice organizations that explicitly thematize the role of powerful elites in addressing social problems: Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a “national network of groups and organizations organizing white people for racial justice”;²⁶ Thousand Currents, an NGO that “funds grassroots groups led by women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in the Global South”;²⁷ and, Solidaire, a “community of individual donors and foundation allies … [that] work together to address the deep systemic causes of injustice and inequality [by increasing] resources for those who are fighting for a world where everyone can live with dignity.”²⁸ All three organizations are based in the United States and participate in or fund activist social movements in the United States and elsewhere.

These organizations differ from each other and from the INGOs that are my main subject here. They vary in their purposes, structures, and funding sources; they operate at different scales and in different political and social contexts. But despite these differences, they wrestle explicitly with a question that, I have argued, INGOs also confront: How might the AAP’s central democratic intuition be recast in a way that is sensitive to the difficulties that arise when relatively privileged elites seek to address social problems that primarily affect others?

SURJ, Solidaire, and Thousand Currents’ responses to this question are relevant to INGOs not as models to be rigidly replicated, but rather as exemplars that INGOs might learn from and build on creatively. In particular, these organizations suggest how the AAP might be revised in ways that move (1) from the involvement/influence dilemma to accountability for influence, and (2) from forward-looking and dyadic to temporally expansive and relational. The reconstruction that I offer here most closely tracks arguments made by SURJ, but elements of it run through the statements and practices of Solidaire and Thousand Currents as well.

Conclusion

The idea at the heart of the AAP – that everyone should have a say in decisions that significantly affect them, and not interfere excessively in decisions that don’t – is a powerful democratic ideal. I have argued that what it actually implies, in the context of INGOs, depends on whether it is extended to them via the government analogy, which deploys the AAP’s inclusive face, or the individual analogy, which deploys its exclusive face. The latter offers a more radical basis for critique than the former. But because INGOs are elites seeking to address social problems that primarily affect others, even the AAP’s exclusive face does not provide them with adequate critical tools or normative guidance. In particular, it doesn’t acknowledge or offer tools for navigating the involvement/influence dilemma, it is too forward-looking, and it is too dyadic.

Turning to three social justice organizations that explicitly thematize the involvement/influence dilemma – SURJ, Solidaire, and Thousand Currents – I argued that they recast the AAP in ways that are generative for INGOs. In particular, they suggest the importance of accountability for influence to organizations that are themselves accountable to, and comprised of, people who are significantly affected by the issues that INGOs address. This chapter has only scratched the surface of what humanitarian, development, and advocacy INGOs might learn from social justice organizations such as SURJ, Thousand Currents, and Solidaire. While there are significant differences between and among them, both types of entities face the question of how elites should address social issues that primarily affect others. Future work might look in much more detail at both types of organizations to understand what the former might learn from the latter, and what the insights and experiences of both can tell us about the AAP.