Legal Regulations

Legal regulation of the NGO sector is still the prerogative of nation-states and will remain so into the foreseeable future. This needs to be kept in mind, particularly in light of the later discussion on the emergence of a transnational or global civil society. The nation-state prerogative entails decisions as to what is a charitable purpose, what kinds of activities citizens are allowed to support with tax-exempt contributions, and at what point NGOs breach their stated purpose. Such regulatory policies are drafted in national legislatures or executive branches and enforced by government agencies and the courts. Although there have been initiatives within the European Union to establish an EU-based transnational charitable legal status in the form of a European Association, none has succeeded so far. In 2006, the European Commission withdrew a proposal for the establishment of a European Association after some member states actively protested and others practiced passive nonengagement (Breen Reference Breen2008). Of the 27 member states of the EU, only Poland, Slovenia, and the Netherlands allow residents’ donations to another member state's NGOs to be tax deductible, 16 member states restrict deductibility of charitable donations to domestic NGOs, and eight states allow cross-border donations as tax deductible in very limited circumstances (57). Across the EU and beyond, nation-states still hold definitional power as to which NGO causes are deemed to be public interest causes and therefore should be supported by the polity through allowing tax deductions. Depending on the country in which they gain official status, NGOs face different sets of legal restrictions that regulate their role as actors engaging in institutional and public advocacy. Generally, NGOs receive charitable tax status through national tax laws or not-for-profit laws. The following brief overview of national laws and their impact on NGOs is intended to provide insight into what exactly is being regulated in the relationship among NGOs, citizens, and the state and how these legal regulations shape advocacy.

In the United States, charitable nonprofits are legal entities under the 1986 Internal Revenue Code § 501(c)(3) if they are founded and operated exclusively for “religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.”⁴ Yet charitable status has a price, part of which is restrictions on lobbying legislative bodies at all levels of government. Charities are allowed to educate their constituents, but there is a legal line not to be crossed: They are not to become advocates for these constituents’ causes in legislative settings. As Jeffrey Berry and David Arons forcefully argue in their study A Voice for Nonprofits, “What non-profits are not supposed to do is to represent their clients before legislators. Feed them, just don't lobby for better anti-hunger programs. Heal them, just don't try to lobby for changing the health care system. This is the essence of American law on nonprofits” (2003: 4). Moreover, the U.S. regulatory practice is complicated by legal ambiguity: The 501(c)(3) status does not completely forbid lobbying, but only any “substantial” amount of lobbying.⁵ The vast majority of U.S.-based nonprofits choose not to take any risk: 95% of NGOs that file I-990 forms claim that they do not lobby at all.⁶ A survey in 2000 of nonprofit leaders who had filed tax returns with the I-990 form found that more than two-thirds wrongly believed that their NGOs were not allowed to do any lobbying if they received government funding (Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003). The authors cite comments from interviews that accompanied the survey that reflect a striking level of ignorance or false conviction regarding the ability to lobby: “[We can't] be involved in lobbying as a nonprofit because we receive government grants” (60).⁷ This wrong judgment is the result of the ambiguity of the law itself – an ambiguity that has the effect of discouraging public advocacy.

In fact, NGOs can decide to apply for a special status in which they can use a certain percentage of overall expenditures for lobbying;⁸ yet where to draw the line between, for example, lobbying and educating legislatures is not at all clear. A number of studies have concluded that, because of such ambiguity, NGOs avoid not only lobbying, but any kind of legislative activity (Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003; Bass et al. Reference Bass, Arons, Guinane and Matthew2007). In fact, the threat of potential noncompliance and the gray zone in IRS treatment of lobbying prevent most NGO boards and directors from engaging in any overt advocacy activity. Regulation thus inhibits NGOs from transforming the public articulation of grievances into the more constructive language of public advocacy for policy change, even though NGOs acquire knowledge and insight in their fields of action from which public debate would certainly benefit. The IRS also forbids all partisan political activities by NGOs, including but not limited to all written and oral expressions of support or opposition to a candidate (OMB Watch 2007: 2). Although this ban on political activities is more than 50 years old, it has no clear definition that would establish workable guidelines for NGOs. Moreover, IRS enforcement of the ban takes place in almost complete secrecy, because the agency is prohibited from disclosing information about its investigations. NGOs thus operate with little guidance on permissible and nonpermissible activities; this level of uncertainty, as OMB Watch concludes, has “deterred them from engaging in genuine issue advocacy and promoting civic engagement among citizens” (1). A sample case cited by OMB Watch is about an NGO client who wanted to put out a press release announcing a presidential candidate's support for one of the nonprofit's policy recommendations. The nonprofit lawyer could not advise his client conclusively on whether this press release was permissible or not (5).

In addition to producing anxiety and reluctance among civic actors to engage in politics at all, such unclear legal regulation has problematic secondary effects. It contributes to depoliticizing a whole array of issues that NGOs deal with by signaling that engagement with these issues is not, or should not be, political. Citizens experience NGOs as acting on social problems while at the same time avoiding taking a political stand on them. Donating to a food bank thus gets cognitively removed from engaging in debate on the politics of poverty and welfare. The present legislation also disembodies political practices in civil society by prohibiting NGOs from citing names of politicians running for office and supporting specific policies. This makes it difficult for citizens to recognize connections between politicians’ positions and the social problems that NGOs try to address. Supporting salmon preservation is accepted, yet publicly advocating for better toxic waste legislation, by pointing to political candidates who would support such legislation, is not.

Although lobbying legislatures is limited, the IRS does not forbid institutional advocacy behind closed doors or engaging with government agencies or the courts to advance policy goals. Under federal law, “only advocacy before a legislature is considered suspect, lobbying the executive branch or filing a court suit is not considered lobbying” (Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003: 53). What is the difference between the two activities? Clearly this distinction draws on a controversial understanding that legislative processes are more vulnerable to special interests than the executive branch or the courts. Yet why should organizations that serve broad public interests be allowed less public voice in regard to legislatures than, for example, well-financed private business interests? The public dimension of advocacy is most closely reflected in the legislative process, and if NGOs are not allowed to try to shape legislators’ positions, then their role as public interest groups is in question.

Whereas Berry and Arons argue that the U.S. IRS code in fact deters nonprofits’ participation in public policy making, I would slightly rephrase this conclusion: The tax code does not deter NGOs from employing institutional advocacy strategies within the confines of executive agency consultations and private boardrooms, but it does prevent public interest groups from participating in the public part of public policy making. Thus, the IRS code communicates that public policy making is policy making for the public, not policy making with the public. Government agencies often invite NGOs to serve in planning or advising roles. When the Aspen Institute asked, in a random sample survey, about the frequency of different types of policy participation among NGOs, the results pointed squarely to government agencies offering NGOs a seat at the table (see Table 4.1).

More than 75 percent of these NGOs said that government officials contact them with requests for information or support – and more than 40 percent said that this occurs at least twice a month (Bass et al. Reference Bass, Arons, Guinane and Matthew2007: 164). This finding suggests that, when invited by government agencies or committees, most NGOs are eager to pursue policy goals within the institutional confines of relatively closed settings; yet in public, legal regulatory frameworks incentivize constraint and avoidance.

Across Europe, NGOs are regulated by similar national laws, involving (1) adherence to constitutional principles and (2) the exclusion of what is considered to be political activities. Adherence to constitutional principles means accepting not only a normative order but also specific modes of political expression. In Germany, a 1984 ruling by the Federal Finance Court, for example, established that charity status had to be revoked if an NGO publicly sponsored nonviolent resistance in public spaces or refused to comply with police orders during a demonstration.⁹ In effect, endorsing civil disobedience could cause the NGO to lose its charitable status. For example, a sit-in held in the office of the Family Minister to protest restrictive abortion policies might endanger the charitable status of participating or mobilizing NGOs.

All EU member states have stipulations that threaten NGOs with losing charitable status if they engage in political activities. Yet what constitutes a political activity is defined quite differently from country to country and leaves much room for interpretation. The baseline criterion is that support for political parties is not allowed. Beyond that, Hungary, for example, prohibits involvement in all direct political activities (Moore et al. Reference Moore, Hadzi-Miceva and Bullain2008: 12) without specifying what is deemed political, whereas Latvia only restricts political activities “which are directed to the support of political organizations [i.e., parties].” German law stipulates that an occasional attempt to influence public opinion is acceptable under charity law, but involvement in “daily politics” is not.¹⁰ What constitutes “daily politics” as opposed to occasional political public advocacy is not clearly laid out in existing law. Thus, establishing demarcation lines for acceptable public advocacy is left to the courts of EU member states, and most NGOs try to avoid the dimly lit territory of political advocacy in the first place.

It should be noted, however, that restrictions of political activities for NGOs are much more severe in autocratic states or in managed democracies. In Ethiopia, the Civil Society Organization Law passed in January 2009 prohibits any domestic NGO that receives more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad from engaging in activities related to “the advancement of human and democratic rights…the promotion of the equality of nations, nationalities and peoples and that of gender and religion…the promotion of the rights of the disabled and children's rights.”¹¹ In Eritrea, the government issued a proclamation in May 2005 that prohibited all NGOs, domestic or foreign, engaging in relief or rehabilitation from receiving funds from the United Nations or its affiliates, from other international organizations, or through bilateral agreements. Moreover, NGOs are only allowed to operate inside the country if they have one million USD or its equivalent at their disposal, thus effectively closing down all smaller community-led public interest groups (Vernon Reference Vernon2009: 9). As a result, the number of NGOs operating in Eritrea fell from 37 in 2005 to 11 in 2007. In Russia, President Putin introduced revisions to the nonprofit law in 2006 that expanded the grounds on which registration of an NGO could be denied if its “goals and objectives…create a threat to the sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, national unity, unique character, cultural heritage and national interest of the Russian Federation” (Bourjaili Reference Bourjaili2006: 4). Moreover, Russian state agency officials obtained the right to attend all NGO meetings, even those strictly internal to the organization, and required complete funding disclosure. Additionally, as prime minister in 2008, Putin attempted to curb foreign involvement in the civic sector with a decree that effectively removed the charitable status of 89 foreign-based NGOs (Vernon Reference Vernon2009). These organizations also became subject to a 24 percent tax on all grants they made inside Russia, thus squeezing their operations from two sides. Yet although it is not surprising that autocratic systems would be particularly sensitive to the role of NGOs as critical civil society voices, it is much less obvious why democracies limit political advocacy of the nongovernmental sector and quite successfully rely on “anticipatory obedience” by NGOs eager not to jeopardize their charity status.

Few states have taken steps to clarify the public advocacy role of NGOs with the intention of expanding their rights to engage in politics. Yet discussions and resulting policies in Australia and the United Kingdom point to an increasing, albeit contested, public awareness that the present regulations are not adequate when considered in the context of NGOs’ roles of organizing civil societies and being the organizational voice for constituency matters. In 1991, the Australian government officially recognized the need to allow NGOs to operate as public interest representatives. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Community Affairs issued a report that addressed the role of NGOs explicitly in terms of their responsibility to practice advocacy: “An integral part of the consultative and lobbying role of these organizations is to disagree with government policy where this is necessary in order to represent the interests of their constituents.”¹² However, when the Howard government came to power in 1996, the official interpretation changed. Prime Minister Howard referred to the NGO sector as “single interest groups,” “special interest,” and “elites” (see Staples Reference Staples2007) and took stringent measures to reshape the NGO sector, including the following:

1. Defunding:During the Howard government, several vocal critics of the government's policy were defunded, many of which were representing the poorest and most disempowered Australians. By 2002, 20 percent of NGOs had lost all their funding, and a further 50 percent faced substantial losses. Some of these funds were redistributed to groups that provided services, but did not engage in advocacy (Staples Reference Staples2007: 9).

2. Forced amalgamation: Some organizations that had been critical of government policies were pushed by officials to merge with more mainstream NGOs. For example, radical feminist groups were forced, under threat of defunding, to merge with other, non-gender-specific groups. The Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women was defunded and advised to “mainstream” its advocacy through the Federation of Ethnic Councils. Yet this association had been created specifically because women felt that they were not being heard in the male-dominated councils (Staples Reference Staples2007; also Sawer Reference Sawer2002: 45).

3. Altered contract relationships: Changes from government provision of core funding to purchaser-provider contracts hit networks or peak groups that tended to serve a range of NGOs within a subsector, providing them with information and advocacy tools, as well as determining group positions on specific policy issues. In the purchaser-provider model, the core of the government–NGO relationship is a service that is being provided, in effect abolishing advocacy funding for NGOs (Staples Reference Staples2007).

4. Confidentiality clauses: These clauses, which were included in most contracts that NGOs had with the Australian Federal Government, required “that the organizations not speak to the media without first obtaining the approval of the appropriate department or minister” (Staples Reference Staples2007: 10). They also prohibited publicizing any agreements with government and required that media releases and the like be cleared by the agencies of the Commonwealth (Sawer Reference Sawer2002: 46).

It took the successor Ruud government, in 2006, to undo these overtly repressive policies and enter into a more cooperative relationship with the NGO sector.

Criticism of restrictive NGO provisions also led to policy change in the United Kingdom, where the discrepancy between encouragement of democratic participation by community organizations and restrictions on their public voice had attracted considerable criticism. The traditional focus in the UK, as across Europe, had been to encourage “volunteering or grassroots community work rather than ‘upward’ activism through…forms of advocacy” (Dunn Reference Dunn2008: 53). The 2006 Charities Act's definition of public benefit did not include political activities, which it defined quite broadly as covering “any activity or purpose which furthers the interests of a political party or cause or which seeks to change the laws, policies, or decisions of UK or other governments” (Dunn Reference Dunn2008: 54). Just like other national regulations of the NGO sector, the Charities Act operated with a tacitly understood gray territory: Consultative functions of NGOs, for example, could be interpreted as nonpolitical activities, as opposed to activities aimed at changing legislation. As discussed earlier, vague language on what constitutes political action tends to result in NGOs treading very cautiously around political issues in public. Moreover, it disproportionately affects the activities of small NGOs, which have few resources to withstand possible legal tax challenges (Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003; Dunn Reference Dunn2008; Lang Reference Lang, Blanco and Cammaerts2009a). As a consequence, in the UK as elsewhere, only a limited number of large sector organizations tended to have regular consultative access to political institutions.

In 2007, a Government Advisory Group on Campaigning and the Voluntary Sector was formed in the UK with the intent to spur “legislative reform to change the definition of ‘political activity’” for the voluntary sector (Kennedy et al. Reference Kennedy, Lamb, Quint and Clark2007: 1). The advisory group's report recommended enhancement of a legal framework that “recognizes the unique role that the sector is playing in articulating peoples’ views and promoting political debate” (Government Advisory Group 2007: 2) and thus called for “clarification of the law and for an opening up of the legal rules to allow all political activities save support of political parties” (Dunn Reference Dunn2008: 57). Moreover, the report highlighted the relationship between engagement of the public and liberalized rules for political engagement of NGOs, because “advocacy of a range of opinions would itself be valuable and beneficial to the community, as the best means of promoting democracy” (Government Advisory Group 2007: 16). It concluded that the mission of the law should not be to protect the public from political activity by NGOs – by contrast, “the law should encourage the public to participate in democratic processes through such organizations” (16). Hence, the report suggested a radical departure from the prevailing government tradition to “protect the public” against political activities from the NGO sector. In recommending new guidelines to the existing law, the UK Charities Commission voted in favor of adopting the Government Advisory Board's recommendations in March 2008. It is noteworthy that nothing has changed in the overall legal framework for NGOs. Only the guidelines for interpreting what constitutes acceptable political activity in the United Kingdom have been clarified, thus allowing for a stronger, more confident voice of the NGO sector. To date, to my knowledge, no other European country has followed suit.

In sum, even though most countries’ charity laws condone some political activity, the gray areas and unclear margins, as well as the fear of potentially severe repercussions when transgressing these margins, make public political advocacy a potentially hazardous activity for NGOs. Nonprofit sector research points out that restrictions of political activity tend to promote a culture of tacit self-censorship and ultimately limit the capacity of NGOs to advocate for social change and engage publicly with public policy (Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003). As the changing debate in the United Kingdom signals, governments can encourage the nongovernmental sector to use its voice for public and political advocacy. Yet in most governance contexts it is taken for granted that NGOs tread the waters of public political advocacy very carefully and are ultimately at the mercy of the goodwill of government agencies. This stifles dissent and discourages NGO advocacy and politicization of civil society matters.¹³

Accountability Debates

A second factor that constrains NGOs’ public advocacy, as well as their engagement capacity, concerns the particular frames that have been employed in recent debates about representativeness and accountability.¹⁴ Whereas it is widely accepted that NGOs do not operate within a narrow traditional representational paradigm (they are not being voted in and out of office),¹⁵ they are often asked to answer to more loosely defined representational claims (“whom do you speak for?”) in their institutional and public principal–agent relationships. When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank prepared for their annual meeting in Prague in 2000, The Economist published a lengthy article on groups that they identified as fueling the “backlash against globalization,” arguing,

In such accounts and across all levels of governance from local to global arenas, NGOs have come under scrutiny for exerting what is perceived to be undue influence. If they are not elected, then how can they claim to represent civil society? Although recent research has emphasized both the normative and technical differences between representation and accountability schemes (Charnovitz Reference Charnovitz2005; Jordan and van Tuijl Reference Jordan and van Tuijl2006; Peruzzotti Reference Peruzzotti, Jordan and Van Tuijl2006; Vedder Reference Vedder2007), NGOs have been struggling with the perception that they lack both representativeness in a narrow sense and accountability to constituents in a wider sense. They have not been able to embrace and capitalize on the idea that their accountability derives its mechanisms not from institutional politics, but from interaction with civil society constituencies, which, in principle, “leave[s] great room for creative and innovative action, allowing…NGOs to challenge present identities or existing constituencies without being concerned about electoral accountability or due process” (PeruzzottiReference Peruzzotti, Jordan and Van Tuijl2006: 48).

In addition to the challenges they face regarding formal representational mechanisms, NGOs also tend to find themselves increasingly under scrutiny for not delivering results. A recent example is the public dispute over how the Red Cross and other NGOs distributed donations after the Haiti earthquake of 2010. Human rights advocates and the media criticized that, two years after the disaster, “more than a half million Haitians are still sleeping under tarps, often in camps without enough water or toilets” (Page Reference Page2012: 1). A PBS documentary titled Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? placed responsibility for still lingering inhuman living conditions squarely on the international NGOs on the ground. Filmmaker Michele Mitchell claimed that “when you give money to a do-good organization, you expect them to do good with it. We need to do better.” NGOs in this case are presented as a disappointment when it comes to “fixing” social ills. They are being made singlehandedly responsible for the lingering catastrophe, while considerably less attention is given to the political, economic, and social context in which they try to “do good.”¹⁶ Shortcomings in effectiveness are perceived as indicating a lack of legitimacy and as breaking the compact between an NGO and its individual sponsors.

Narrowly formal, highly individualized, and overstated moral accountability claims have succeeded in putting many NGOs on the defensive. In order to construct a more robust, civically embedded legitimacy for NGOs, we need to redefine accountability. One way to view accountability is as the “institutional vocabulary through which ideas of representation, legitimacy, and authorization are represented” (O’Kelly Reference O’Kelly, Dubnick and Frederickson2011: 256). Yet this vocabulary, as I have argued in Chapter 1, can be based on different dictionaries: It can reflect concerns of representation and authorization within an organization, between an NGO and its funders or donors, or between the organization and its wider stakeholder community as defined by the NGO. In a different perspective, so the argument of this book suggests, acts of NGO outreach and engagement with publics should be put at the center of the accountability debate.

Yet most public debate on accountability at this point is not concerned with NGO outreach to constituencies. Instead, it takes its cues from misused funds, violations of laws, or perceived shortcomings in effectiveness that threaten accountability to donors. The remedies that are offered tend to focus on internal management processes on the one hand, on outcome measures and so-called ‘stakeholder accountability’ on the other hand. These remedies, in effect, urge NGOs to organize even more bureaucratically and produce even more quantifiable data on internal affairs and external effects than in the past. Although my intention is not to deny altogether the validity of these specific measures of accountability, it seems important to consider the various frames that shape the debate and, in particular, to what degree they address accountabilities to the public.

The first frame is donor accountability. In the 1990s, accountability was primarily raised in the context of “ties that bind” (Hulme and Edwards Reference Hulme and Edwards1997), articulating discomfort with the dependencies created by an increasing number of NGOs relying on funding from states and private donors. The arguments presented in this debate were not simply that NGOs were silenced by money. Instead, researchers followed the more intricate traces of how donors produced and shaped NGO work and their advocacy. One of the earliest empirical analyses on how donors influence advocacy through funding allocations was Shelley Feldman's account of the “un(stated) contradictions” between NGOs and efforts to build civil society after independence in Bangladesh (Feldman Reference Feldman1997). Feldman traced the role of NGOs in the privatization and liberalization of a formerly nationalized economy in the broader context of the neoliberal agenda of development assistance. As NGOs came to speak for the people and as the NGO sector became legitimized “as a controlled, organized arena of public debate with institutional and financial support from the donor community” (Feldman Reference Feldman1997: 59), other less controllable voices were being marginalized. The “ties that bind” led NGOs to shift their accountability from constituents to funding agencies. As a consequence, agendas were tweaked and frames altered so that they presented a better fit for donors and might secure future funding more easily. Even if an NGO lost trust within a local community, this did not necessarily mean losing donor support, because evaluations tended not to look at long-term effects. Accountability to donors thus resulted in frame adaptation and ultimately became a technocratic assessment of “numbers of beneficiaries and resources allocated and disbursed” (64).

In the past decade, a number of studies have taken up the question of NGO and donor relationships, with the vast majority corroborating Feldman's conclusion by finding strong frame adaptation to donor interests. In the global South, NGOs align their mission to comply with their mostly foreign and northern donors’ emphasis on service provision at the expense of advocacy (Hudock Reference Hudock1999; Edwards Reference Edwards2004). Structural dependency problems are often exacerbated wherever direct communication channels are weak. The more that constituents of NGOs and funding sources are removed from each other, the more difficult it becomes for NGOs on the ground to satisfy demands from both sides (ChandhokeReference Chandhoke2003).

In the global North, some NGO leaders fear that confrontational political activity will impact their donor or government funding (Salamon Reference Salamon1995; Hudson Reference Hudson2002: 412; Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003: 74; Bass et al. Reference Bass, Arons, Guinane and Matthew2007), that donor dependency produces mission drift (Henderson Reference Henderson2003; Aksartova Reference Aksartova, Hammack and Heydemann2009), and that donors prefer service provision over advocacy (Smith and Gronbjerg Reference Smith, Gronbjerg, Powell and Steinberg2006).¹⁷ Donors, by way of how they frame program calls, already preselect certain agendas, in the process framing social conflicts in ways that tend to establish specific norms while marginalizing others (i.e., Hudock Reference Hudock1999: 33ff.). Grant recipients, in turn, will adapt their frames to funders and, as we have established earlier, there are clear disincentives for NGOs to discuss mismatches of program mission with constituent needs or other failures with their donors. Until recently, for example, Western donors who sponsored programs dealing with violence against women in Russia and Africa did not accept contextualization in terms of class and poverty, but instead only sponsored projects with a clear focus on domestic violence against women (Hemment Reference Hemment2004). Gordon and Berkovitch (Reference Berkovitch and Gordon2008), in their study of Israeli human rights NGOs, show that international donors not only produce program frames but also incentivize certain strategies over others. Major foreign donors to human rights causes in Israel, they point out, strongly favor litigation over more systematically critical and activist approaches to human rights violations. In sum, donor ties, albeit to varying degrees, influence NGO mission, strategies, and advocacy capacity.

To limit exposure to and the influence of donor interests, some NGOs have policies of not soliciting any funds from potential adversaries in business or government. Greenpeace for example, an NGO that exposes state and business failures in environmental protection, considers independence from state sponsorship a crucial element of its organization. Amnesty International depends on a similar image as not being susceptible to state influence for its ability to critique human rights violations across the globe. And Médecins Sans Frontières avoids donor influence by making it their mission to provide medical care independent of who is a perpetrator and who is a victim in humanitarian crisis situations; it argues that its mission could be jeopardized if it could, however indirectly, be associated with one side of a conflict (Frantz and Martens Reference Frantz and Martens2006: 28).

Yet most NGOs are dependent on grants from institutional donors such as governments or foundations and will therefore to some degree adapt frames, strategies, and tools to those favored by these institutions. In recent years, donor prerogatives have come under scrutiny, and “donor accountability” is now discussed not as accountability to, but as accountability ofdonors (Bendell and Cox Reference Bendell, Cox, Jordan and Tuijl2006). Yet far more critical inspection is reserved for NGOs, specifically their deployment of funds for programs, services, and advocacy.

A second stream of the accountability debate focuses on inner-organizational accountability, in particular relating to hierarchy and delegation within an NGO and to accountability to external boards. This debate has affected the activities of larger NGOs more than smaller ones, with criticisms regarding financial transparency, unclear hierarchies, and unaccountable decision-making processes resulting in considerable inner-organizational inspection by many NGOs. Frequently, change agendas are drafted and monitored by means of self-regulatory codes and standards (Ebrahim Reference Ebrahim2009: 889ff.). Yet whereas extensive inner-organizational accountability measures primarily sap labor and energy resources and thus might affect an organization's willingness to engage in public advocacy and outreach indirectly, accountability to boards has been identified as a more immediate and critical issue for NGO advocacy. A discussion among nonprofit leaders in the United States, recorded by the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Listening Post Project, highlights some of the constraints that board accountability might impose on advocacy and outreach:

Two features of boards intertwine to stifle NGO public political advocacy. One, NGOs need to have boards composed of knowledgeable, but also well-networked personalities; increasingly, rich donors and members of business communities are being asked to serve on boards and thus bring profit-making as well as more socially conservative logics to the table. Two, boards are more narrowly focused on mission accomplishment and tend to disincentivize broader social agendas, thus leaving NGO executives prone to neglecting public advocacy and to streamlining accountability measures to fit their internal operations.

This focus on internal accountability finds its academic equivalent in public choice theories that conceptualize NGOs as firms. The “firm” analogy asserts that NGOs operate just like corporations and therefore can be subjected to the same accountability mechanisms as business operations, that is, primarily accountability to an NGO's board and consumers or clients. The firm analogy developed in opposition to accounts that see the NGO sector characterized by norms and thus clearly distinguish it from the state and business sectors, which are authority and profit centered, respectively (Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink Reference Khagram, Riker and Sikkink2002). NGO members and supporters, according to norm-centered approaches, “are primarily motivated to shape the world according to their principled beliefs. Of course, many government and business activities are also involved in managing meanings, but for NGOs and movements it is their raison d’être, rather than an ancillary motivation for action” (Khagram et al. Reference Khagram, Riker and Sikkink2002: 11). These principled beliefs and the resulting strategies distinguish NGOs from business, and the specific motivations of NGOs influence their choice of strategies and tools. Yet proponents of the firm analogy, such as Sell, Prakash, and Gugerty, disagree. They find that “both business and NGO networks” have “principled as well as instrumental beliefs,” and thus it is impossible to distinguish them on the basis of motivations (Sell and Prakash Reference Sell and Prakash2004: 151). Moreover, they find that business and NGOs do employ “similar types of strategies” (see also Prakash and Gugerty Reference Prakash and Gugerty2009). By their account, NGO strategies are exclusively determined by the external environment and not by a set of norms that guide their actions (Sell and Prakash Reference Sell and Prakash2004: 150). Proponents of the firm approach to NGOs see individuals who support these organizations as making similar choices as when they buy a product.

Many of the findings that Gugerty and Prakash present echo the NGOization theme of Chapter 3, specifically the tendency in the sector to professionalize, bureaucratize, and institutionalize. However, what from a public sphere and democracy perspective might seem problematic is simply the result of rational choices in the “firm” account of NGOs. Thus, NGOs might be well served to institute equally hierarchical management and business administration procedures as the business firm next door.¹⁸ Moreover, advocacy in the firm analogy mutates into a functional strategy to increase returns for “customers” and indirectly the “employees” of the firm. If we follow the firm analogy, then the public is reduced to an aggregate of individualized consumers or clients of NGOs, which they fund as stakeholders and shareholders. The NGO firm's key purposes are to deliver returns and satisfy consumers. Ultimately, citizen consumers exert market power by “shopping” for the products of the nongovernmental sector. Accountability to the NGO firm thus becomes an internal management problem; in its marketized form, it becomes a mere reflection of “consumer” interest in its products. The fact that NGOs are not distributing surplus wealth among owners or stakeholders is acknowledged, but not considered to be a salient enough distinction from firms.

The central problem with the firm analogy is that, although it might capture the professionalized direction in which the NGO sector is being pulled, expressed for example in stricter board accountability, it reifies this pull without addressing its potential effects on democratic voice. Public choice theory and the firm analogy thus “naturalize” the inward-oriented dimensions of NGOization and the reliance on citizen consumers rather than mobilized constituents. In the firm logic, institutional advocacy and upward accountability to boards, trustees, and governments are valid in that they facilitate survival of the operation, and so is the occasional PR campaign. The sector's functions as an assembly of organized venues for citizen engagement and as an incubator of publics have little place in the firm logic of instrumental accountabilities.

Finally, a third debate that puts its mark on the accountability issue includes right-wing attacks on what is perceived to be a left-leaning and radical NGO sector. As NGOs have increased their influence in policy agenda setting from the local to the global level, and as relationships with governments and business have grown (Keck and Sikkink Reference Keck and Sikkink1998; Take Reference Take1999; Warkentin Reference Warkentin2001; Berry and Arons Reference Berry and Arons2003; Risse Reference Risse2004), concern with NGO politics has risen to prominence. NGOs are credited with having set major global public policy agendas over the past decade, tackling issues such as unsustainable debt, environmental degradation, human rights law, violence against women, landmine removal, and corporate social responsibility (Jordan and van Tuijl Reference Jordan and van Tuijl2006: 4). The success of these NGO interventions has begun to raise questions from political conservatives who see NGOs as progressive liberal forces with too much influence and too little legitimacy (e.g., Anderson Reference Anderson2003; Entine Reference Entine2003; Rabkin Reference Rabkin2003).

Critics associated with neoconservative think tanks have launched websites to monitor NGO bias and entice donors to demand stricter accountability and transparency, framed in the language of “neutrality” and “nonpartisanship.” NGOwatch.org, launched jointly in 2003 by the Federalist Society together with the American Enterprise Institute, the Rushford Report in Washington, DC, and the NGO Monitor in Jerusalem all target progressive advocacy NGOs and in particular their participation in global governance arenas. These projects have a similar mission: to expose what they believe to be biased investments in progressive causes by NGOs that share “a knee jerk demonization of corporations and free market” (Entine Reference Entine2003: 2) or other “biases” such as pro-Palestinian political positions. As seen through the eyes of this conservative subpublic, the nongovernmental sector is responsible for ideologically motivated and unsubstantiated attacks on the pillars of global capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. Entine, for example, cites the Rainforest Action Network's campaign against Citigroup starting in 2000, which exposed the bank's investments in operations responsible for rainforest destruction, climate change, and the disruption of the livelihood of indigenous peoples: “Clearly, this one issue will not bring a multi-faceted company such as Citigroup to its knees. But it is more than just a mere annoyance; it is reputation management hell” (3) fueled, in his opinion, by “NGO hysteria” (1). Sponsors of NGO watchdogs are mostly right-wing think tanks; NGO Monitor, by contrast, operates as a university-based project in Israel that is co-founded by the Wechsler family foundation.

Assessing the long-term impact of these relatively new conservative watchdogs on NGO advocacy is difficult. What is already apparent is that organizations such as NGO Monitor primarily use legal stipulations attached to charity status to force donors or funders to withdraw from sponsoring certain NGOs. In February 2012, for example, NGO Monitor succeeded in getting a German NGO that compensates survivors of Nazi labor camps to withdraw funding for an Israeli NGO because of its support of the Palestinian right to return (Axelrod Reference Axelrod2012). The director of the German NGO argued that it could not support an organization with a political agenda. Even large targeted NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, find themselves engulfed in a PR war over claims of anti-Israeli positions and actions, and they spend precious staff and financial resources defending themselves (Peratis Reference Peratis2006). Conservative watchdog organizations thus might contribute to a climate of subtle fear, ultimately counting on the self-restraint of targeted NGOs that are motivated to protect their organization.

By some measure, NGOs themselves have become culprits in allowing the accountability debate to shift from seeking legitimacy through broad public engagement to singularly defending their organizational survival (Feldman Reference Feldman1997: 64). By allowing the debate to shrink to inner-organizational and technocratic management strategies, donor engagement, and the occasional public audit, NGOs might be forfeiting chances to substantiate their legitimacy claims with public engagement. This response is even more notable considering that the sector's public reputation overall has been and still is excellent. Despite increased scrutiny from donors, academic critics, and conservative watchdogs, citizens tend to trust NGO integrity, authority, and expertise compared with other institutions. Public opinion surveys indicate that in the United States, Asia, across Europe, as well as in Canada, NGOs are considered more trustworthy than either business, government, or the media (see Table 4.2).

Knutsen and Brower (Reference Knutsen and Brower2010: 600) argue that NGOs might capitalize on this trust by refocusing the debate on expressive accountabilities as opposed to mere instrumental accountabilities. Expressive accountabilities are broadly defined as “accountabilities to the community, to mission, and to patrons.” They signal an NGO's reliance on broad community outreach to clarify its mission and learn how to implement adequate change agendas while serving their clients. Yet I suggest that expressive accountabilities should include another important dimension of NGO activity, involving not just a one-way focus group approach to gauge constituents’ needs that the NGO will then tend to organizationally but also the pledge to strengthen citizen voice along the way through efforts to generate publics. NGO accountability needs to be based on broadly engaging and activating constituents, it is in essence public accountability [see also Jens Steffek (Reference Steffek2010)].

Public accountability, in this view, entails commitment to the activation of civil society discourse with the goal of generating self-sustaining publics. It implies that NGOs not only represent but also constitute publics by aggregating, amplifying, and strengthening voices that other-wise might not be heard. Public accountability is generated by four modes in which NGOs relate to publics: (1) providing transparency in terms of the organizations’ operation, finances, and information on their mission and goals; (2) initiating and sustaining debate that is open, widely accessible, and interactive; (3) promoting active and continuous engagement of constituents and interested citizens in the organization; and (4) enabling constituents to organize public voice and thus serving as catalysts for stronger publics. Generating public accountability in these four modes of transparency, debate, engagement, and activation would radically alter the status of NGOs in governance contexts. If they would be representatives at all, then they would be “interim representatives” (Nyamugasira Reference Nyamugasira1998), speaking for communities while engaging in a process of organizing publicness. This would mean reversing the tendency that Bass et al. (Reference Bass, Arons, Guinane and Matthew2007: 116) detected among NGOs to go “from mobilizing citizens to representing citizens.”

The Volunteer Citizen

If NGOs want to foster stronger public accountability, they need involved citizens who are prepared to engage with an organization in more than a cursory manner. However, a third set of conditions that disincentivize public NGO advocacy and accountability point to the particular citizenship practices associated with NGOized civil society and late modern governance. In the global North, citizenship practices of the early 21st century are captured in images of the consumer and the volunteer citizen. Whereas governments tend to leave the promotion of consumer citizens to the markets – with exceptions, such as former President Bush encouraging Americans to go shopping post-9/11 – there are clear indicators of states’ investment in empowering volunteerism. In 2008, 61.8 million Americans – 26.4 percent of the adult population – contributed a total of 8 billion volunteering hours worth 162 billion USD to the United States.¹⁹ From the local to state and national levels, calls go out to citizens to volunteer, and websites such as http://www.serve.gov link potential volunteers to volunteering opportunities across the country. In a time of fiscal hardship, California Governor Schwarzenegger, in 2008, launched a new cabinet position for “Service and Volunteering,” the first of its kind in the United States, to encourage Californians to become involved in their communities and the state.²⁰ There is hardly a city in the United States that does not have a government-sponsored or endorsed volunteer platform in which volunteering is presented as the prime means to connect to one's polity.

Across Europe, volunteer rates are considerably lower, which enticed the European Union to declare 2011 the “European Year of Volunteering” and to state quite unabashedly in its press release that “volunteering has a great, but so far under-exploited, potential for the social and economic development of Europe.”²¹ Governments and foundations across the continent have made a tremendous effort in recent years to instill volunteer spirit in a citizenry that is being slowly weaned off the welfare state. Voluntary agencies have been created in many municipalities that are focused on publicizing the idea of volunteering, as well as matching volunteers with NGOs and other organizations. In Germany, there were about 400 such voluntary agencies in 2012.²² Yet governments are not the only entities intent on bolstering volunteerism. NGOs likewise depend on volunteers signing on for office tasks, campaigns or other activities.

As economies struggle and funding sources diminish, volunteers have become an invaluable part of most NGO operations. Between September 2008 and March 2009 alone, more than one-third of U.S.-based nonprofit organizations reported an increase in the number of their volunteers, and almost half anticipated an increase in their use of volunteers in the near future.²³

How does the culture of volunteering affect public advocacy and political voice? The available research on this issue is not conclusive. For some observers, volunteerism indicates initiation into a less individualistic and more social way of understanding society; it is seen as the gateway to social activism (Cronin and Perold Reference Cronin and Perold2006). In a recent study for CIVICUS, the World Association for Civic Engagement, Cronin and Perold argue that volunteerism and social or political activism feed on each other, and they criticize approaches that have branded volunteering as a mere “bandaid” for social injustices or even as a depoliticizing force in neoliberal societies. Similar studies see volunteerism as “political in a range of ways, including in the power relations it emphasizes or creates, the judgments it implies about the social or welfare system in a community, the action or lack of action by governments on a given issue, the life choices of community members, or simply in the emphasis it places on the role of individuals within the functioning of society” (Petriwskyj and Warburton Reference Petriwskyj and Warburton2007: 83).

In contrast, although researchers who are more focused on public voice and communicative involvement might see merit in volunteer activities, at the same time they note that judgments that are implicit in volunteering lack discursive power. Individual acts of volunteering will not yield change if volunteers’ concerns are not translated into acts of “giving voice” and if voice is not transformed into collective public advocacy. Jeffrey Alexander, in his seminal study on civil society, argues,

The criterion that is being employed here is whether volunteer activity emphasizes, or at least includes, the construction of public social or political messages and the dissemination of these messages into wider publics. I call the act of projecting communicative judgments “doing public advocacy.” Not that the Girl Scouts or PTA volunteers are by some iron law restricted to holding cookie sales and school fundraisers. They could engage in, albeit limited, public political advocacy to try and alter policies in their district or state. It is the abstinence from “projecting public judgment” while claiming to do good as an individual that makes the culture of volunteering not conducive to public advocacy.

Trying to understand this “strange process of political evaporation” in many volunteer-based contexts, sociologist Nina Eliasoph has provided an intricate account of the lack of public-spirited talk in American civic group contexts (Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph1998: 7). First, there is a commonly shared sentiment that helping hands-on with a project that yields tangible results is more rewarding than getting involved in long-term public policy advocacy. Second, people often volunteer in arenas that are somewhat close to home and therefore are less interested in seeing the bigger picture underlying those problems. Third, and this brings us back to the question of the role of NGOs in advocacy, citizens have internalized the idea that legitimacy for speaking in public is tied to “speaking for yourself.” Political talk about broader issues therefore tends to take place in “backstage” contexts, whereas public talk in “frontstage” environments shrinks to the narration of personal experience. Media feed into the evaporation of frontstage politics by granting legitimacy of voice more often to those directly affected than to those who speak on broader public concerns or who want to speak for those who are affected (see the later discussion).

For the United States, there is additional evidence that people refrain from discussing politics in order to avoid conflict and preserve social harmony (i.e., Mutz Reference Mutz2006: 107ff.). Thus, public talk shrinks to instances of personal stories, and the civic alphabet of publicly speaking for others gets decimated. NGOs could attempt to nurture a connection between volunteering and public voice, but, as Eliasoph shows, public voice must be trained and the contestation it might involve must be accepted as part of the social fabric of societies. Some recent interventions have therefore suggested “learning from the ‘not-so-nice’ volunteers” (Cravens Reference Cravens2004: 1) how to combine proximity and hands-on experience with repertoires of public contestation and voice.

I do not want to cast all volunteer activity as nonpolitical; in fact, some NGOs have developed much expertise in the deployment of volunteers for public advocacy. Student actions against sweatshop labor on campuses, petition campaigns to protest the Iraq War, and the Copenhagen protest during the COP15 meetings would not have happened without volunteer corps giving their time to public advocacy. However, the evolution of a civic culture in which personalized civic engagement meets professionalized NGOs often results in the orchestration of public involvement through highly managed activities by NGOs that offer concerned citizens easy roles to play in acting out their causes. A visible trend to professionalize public advocacy has put collective public voice and action into the hands of a few well-trained activists while appealing to broader constituencies for quick and easy means of support, such as a signature, a donation, or a fleeting appearance in a flash mob. The image of the Greenpeace protesters on the Brent Spar, or the Robin Hood tree climbers, or the PETA activists rescuing animals from test labs convey actions of highly professionalized activists. Greenpeace, for example, gives intensive training to professional activists before they enter a contested public situation. PETA, while encouraging volunteers to produce self-organized public events, only gently nudges its audience into a more contested repertoire. Its Action Center states in the rubric for grassroots activism a number of activities such as “set up an information table” and “ask your library to order animal-friendly books.” The activity with the most public contestation potential is introduced in a peculiar manner. It reads, “Plan a demonstration. Organizing a demonstration is a great way to help animals, and it's not as scary or difficult as it may sound. In fact, demonstrations can involve as little as passing out leaflets and holding posters.”²⁴ I am not quoting this to elicit smiles. This quote, I submit, may reflect the distance that many early 21st-century volunteers in the global North feel from active voice and contestation in public spaces. The volunteer citizen, in this light, needs assurance by an outspoken public advocacy NGO that taking a stance publicly is not so dangerous after all and can in fact be considered acceptable behavior. Yet seen from a different perspective, the individual volunteer in need of these kinds of assurances might be a successful fit for neoliberal states.

In sum, for the most part, NGOs in the global North operate within volunteer cultures that disincentivize public advocacy. A 2008 survey of a representative sample of U.S.-based nonprofits in four policy areas by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies found that, although nearly three-quarters of nonprofits engage in some form of public advocacy during the year, less than 2 percent of these organizations’ budget is devoted to these activities and most “rely on the least demanding forms of engagement (e.g., signing a correspondence to a government official endorsing or opposing a particular piece of legislation or budget proposal)” (Salamon and Lessans Gellner 2008: 2). Advocacy is concentrated “in a narrow band of organizational players – chiefly the executive director. Most organizations report that clients or patrons are ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ involved in their lobbying or advocacy” (2), thus leaving volunteers to perform almost exclusively service-oriented tasks. Even public-advocacy-oriented NGOs like PETA have established a three-tiered system of activation in which volunteers play only a limited role. On the first tier operate a small number of professionalized and well-trained activists who stage and publicize its messages; a second tier of volunteers is encouraged to practice occasional outreach that is tailored to be consonant with their lifestyles; and a third tier of “checkbook advocates” is enlisted to provide the funding for public advocacy. Thus the volunteer orientation of late modern citizenship is not conducive to generating engaged publics. NGOs have learned to turn a vice into a virtue: By focusing on institutional advocacy, NGOs might not have extensive need for an activated base of citizens and thus might avoid citizen engagement altogether.

Traditional News Media

A fourth factor that has significant influence on NGOs’ public advocacy is access to and representation in established news media. Although the relationship between NGOs and the news media is changing considerably as new communication technologies facilitate direct communication and targeted outreach to constituents, donors, and interested publics (see Chapters 6 and 7), coverage by print media and TV has long been considered indispensable for successful public advocacy. Even as their dependency on established media is waning, NGOs still acknowledge the capacity of just one positive or negative news story in a major newspaper or international news outlet to make or break a campaign (Cottle and Nolan Reference Cottle and Nolan2009). Thus, at the same time as NGOs explore new civic spaces on Facebook, Second Life, or other Internet-based working platforms, a prime indicator for successful mobilization remains coverage in established news outlets.

The study of NGO representation in traditional media, however, is still in its infancy; empirical analyses are few and far between (i.e., Hale Reference Hale2007; Cottle and Nolan Reference Cottle and Nolan2009).²⁵ Yet some observations are supported by several studies and seem to be gaining increasing salience. One, NGOs have long had a difficult time getting into established media, and if they do, they had to make large investments in order to get even minimal coverage. Two, with many traditional news outlets having downsized the number of reporters who can cover an issue or an area with in-depth knowledge, NGOs have increasingly become their own news source, which media outlets take as welcome (and cheap) replacements that compensate for their own downsized independent reporting. Three, the predilection of media for personalized stories affects the ways NGOs tailor their public image and their advocacy; they sideline broader political messages in favor of direct and personalized accounts of how someone is personally affected by an issue. Let us consider each of these observations separately.

Conclusion

We have identified four sets of conditions that present challenges to public advocacy for NGOs. The first challenge is the legal regulatory environment in which what is considered public, but nonpolitical, as opposed to public and political, is a massive gray zone that tends to subtly silence NGO voice. Charity regulations in most countries, even though they might not directly repress NGO political advocacy, are prone to disincentivize it through unclear definitions and enforcement regulations. A movement to clarify and thereby relax stipulations around political activity for NGOs is only in its infancy. The Labor government under Gordon Brown in the UK and recently the Canadian government have undertaken efforts to provide NGOs with more reliable knowledge about their rights to public political advocacy while also signaling that promoting public political advocacy is not negatively sanctioned in institutional governance contexts.

A second challenge to public NGO advocacy concerns recent attempts to limit NGO accountability either to internal issues of management and transparency or to external donor relations. If NGO legitimacy is reduced to a matter of transparent management and finances, the substantive publicness of NGOs evaporates. Within this narrow accountability discourse, incentives for NGOs to gain legitimacy through active engagement in the public sphere and through publicness become muted. Along the same lines, we found that perceiving NGOs as firms that draw legitimacy from merely functional sources has a similar effect: The analogy shifts NGO identity away from their roots in civil society and from their capacity to foster and aggregate citizen voices. It would be only rational if the nongovernmental sector would feel compelled by these limited forms of accountability to focus even more on internal aspects of their operations at the expense of public engagement. Instead, we have put forward four modes of public accountability that tie an NGO not just to its internal operation or to donors and immediate constituents but also to larger publics. These four modes are transparency, debate, engagement, and activation. In this perspective, NGO legitimacy rests on generating publics. The sector's voice might be less constrained if it could envision a central source of accountability to be partaking in aggregating and organizing citizen input.

A third constraint that challenges NGOs’ advocacy in the public sphere and the fostering of public accountability is the dominance of depoliticized civic engagement practices. The increasing pull to professionalize, to work with a core of reliable staff, and occasionally to engage volunteers to organize an outreach activity is not conducive to NGOs’ ability to incubate and work with subpublics. It produces inward orientation and disconnect with constituencies.

The final constraint to NGO advocacy is the lack of a footprint in the established media. Only large and resourceful NGOs seem able to attract substantial media attention, and many small NGOs have given up on even trying to make it into established news outlets. Even though there are signs that the downsizing of traditional media might provide opportunities for NGOs to become their own news source, this applies primarily to topics whose relevance the news outlets have already established. In other words, active news sourcing by NGOs does not necessarily imply changes in agenda setting.

This is not to argue that constraints on NGO public advocacy are all fueled externally. NGO staff themselves might not even see the need to work in and with their publics. They might see the publics that NGOs confront as polarizing or ideologically opposing the mission of the organization. An NGO working on teenage health issues might prefer not to engage publics in socially conservative milieus. As an interviewee in the previously introduced Harwood study explained, “Many of the people who work in the social sector don't like the public” (Harwood 2009: 5). Or NGO staff might see these publics as uninformed and needy, leading NGOs to enter “therapeutic relations” of dominance with their constituencies (McFalls Reference McFalls2007: 9). Mostly, however, NGO leaders in the global North might share the sense of an increasingly elusive public, captured in the statement: “How do you engage people when you can't make physical contact?…People work two jobs, they don't go to their neighborhood schools, they pull into their garage after work.” Another interviewee added, “I can't prove that (engagement) is a good return on investment,” which was seconded by a third NGO leader who argued, “We lack examples about how this might play out. We encourage our chapters to get involved with the community, but we can't tell them what the benefits will be” (Harwood 2009: 18). The conclusion often drawn by NGOs when confronting the issues raised in this chapter is that it might be easier to stay focused on implementing a specific program or working in institutional governance arenas rather than to invest the time, effort, and resources in “trying to find a public that may never materialize” (Harwood 2009: 17).

Some NGOs try to approach their lack of publicness in a purely functional manner. The solution at hand is to outsource public outreach by employing “grassroots lobbying firms” that help generate support via engineering public participation for specific causes (Walker Reference Walker2009). The public here becomes something that needs to be “managed” rather than cultivated, “targeted” rather than actively engaged and incorporated. Other NGOs are content with enticing from their constituents the occasional “checkbook advocacy” (Skocpol Reference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999a), responding to the observation that citizens are overall less committed to a specific cause and therefore in principle not continuously involved (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Powell and Steinberg2006).

Outsourcing or simply monetizing the occasional interaction with constituencies, however, might not be sufficient to strengthen the public advocacy dimension of NGO work. If indeed the nongovernmental sector is to become a central hub for democratic voice in civil society, other pathways need to be considered. Some NGOs embrace new technologies that provide the means to engage publics with relatively few resources and might increase the level of interactivity between an organization and its constituents. Using new media might be the easiest way to engage with broader publics and synergize advocacy. NGOs might also consider joining advocacy coalitions in which their own contribution carries weight within a much larger assembly of voices. This again might alleviate resource scarcity for some organizations; for others it might help diffuse direct responsibility for more politically outspoken or controversial messages. However, these attempts to incubate publics need to take place within a political environment that is, if not outright supportive, at least not opposed to civil society operating as a public sphere. What role NGOs can play in civil society “depends crucially on the larger political setting” (Foley and Edwards Reference Foley and Edwards1996: 48). I established earlier that governments, to some degree, rely on the NGO sector to represent citizens. In turn, NGOs could ask more of government and governance institutions to increase the limited public sphere footprint of NGOs.

In the short term, debates about modifying the ban on political activity for charities seem to be inevitable. Crafting regulations that would increase the opportunity for small and resource-poor NGOs to practice more public advocacy would need to be part of these debates. Moreover, NGOs could ask their governments to be less strict about funding public advocacy when contracting with them to provide service. Even though advocacy tends to have more support in politics and business than activism and contestation, governments and foundations as well as many private donors do not like to fund it (Blueprint 2002). Governments place strict scrutiny on what kinds and how much advocacy can be pursued, and for foundations and private donors, the focus on results-based programs tends to sideline advocacy efforts. If governments combined contracts or grants with a stronger emphasis on public outreach and engagement, it would incentivize NGOs to see their organizations more as public advocates.

What would be the motivation for governments to incentivize NGO advocacy? For one, state actors increasingly realize that, with NGOs forming a circle of assumed publics around their institutions, the legitimacy problems of policy making do not necessarily disappear, but may, in fact, increase. If governments claim NGOs to be their publics and these NGOs in turn rarely engage with their constituencies, the democratic line of public accountability is broken. Second, because of the weakness of established political parties, there is a need to alter how coalitions are being fostered and how public opinion is being formed. New alliances between parties and NGOs might be possible if legal restrictions were changed and parties realized that they need civic partners to renew their ties with civil society. Such alliances have been suggested for the global South as a means to undo the consequential positioning of civil society actors against, or independent of, the state. The question instead is how civil society actors can enhance state practices by more closely aligning with political parties (Carothers Reference Carothers2002a: 19).

Another reason why governments might need to be part of the solution to enhance NGOs’ formation of publics is that civil society actors need resources that provide some balance to privatized sponsorship. Civil societies that rely for the most part on private donors tend to reproduce existing inequalities. In Western countries, a vast amount of private donations goes to middle-class causes. Those in poverty and on the margins of society have neither a strong voice, nor a strong lobby, nor the resources to craft either. Producing more equal voice in civil society requires government involvement. Even though “the revolution will not be funded” (Incite 2007), as one activist project famously quipped, generating public voice and citizen agency cannot be done without the support of governments. Thus, government funding and public advocacy can, under certain conditions, be complementary features of civil society.

In sum, governments and international governance institutions are in a prime position either to incentivize NGOs to practice public advocacy or to dampen such efforts. The next two chapters present case studies on how government–NGO relations might help or hinder public advocacy.

Table 4.1. Frequency of Different Types of Policy Participation of U.S. NGOs^a

^a Percentage of respondents; N = 1,738.

Source: Table adapted with modifications from Bass et al. Reference Bass, Arons, Guinane and Matthew2007: 164.

Table 4.2. Trust in NGOs and Other Institutions, 2012

Note: This survey is conducted yearly with 1,950 “opinion leaders” in 11 countries. Opinion leaders are defined as high‐income persons with significant interest in media, economic, and policy affairs. Results are based on 25‐minute phone interviews.

^a Europe = UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland.

^b Asia = Japan, China, South Korea, India.

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer® 2012.