The backdrop to this chapter is the West’s response to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1979 and the debates over where, how, and with what partners NGOs should intervene in the region. The chapter argues that states and international organisations played a central role in setting the parameters of the NGO moment. This was visible in how, where and what NGOs could access the region. Oxfam’s decision to collaborate with the Vietnam-backed government in Phnom Penh, for example, left it open to influence from the regime’s priorities. But Cambodia’s most lasting impact on the NGO sector came in the legitimacy it accorded to those organisations. As this chapter shows, their actions in South-East Asia were crucial in convincing donors of the sector’s expertise and efficiency – as well as its ethical authority. This quiet transfiguration had huge implications for NGOs. From the early 1980s onwards, it became impossible to imagine emergency relief in the Third World without a significant NGO contribution.

This chapter traces the global NGO sector’s late twentieth-century turn to human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. It examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the spread of rights-based activism in that decade and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. This case study provides us with an important insight into the complex set of influences that shaped the concept of global compassion. NGOs adopted human rights language – and particularly the non-political politicking on which it was built – as a method for critiquing the existing world order. But the rise of rights-based humanitarianism was also conditioned from the Third World. Activists from El Salvador, for example, played a key role in influencing the intellectual and ideological frameworks through which NGOs understood the conflict. This was a striking reframing of ‘people-to-people’ action. Yet despite that disruption, the chapter concludes, the turn to human rights was ultimately built less on solidarity with the revolutionaries’ aims (though such sentiments were present, particularly among aid workers in the region) and more on an essentialising view of humanity that could appeal to a wide array of donors.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

This chapter traces the origins of the NGO moment to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the Nigeria-Biafra War. It describes humanitarianism as a key component of the West’s response to decolonisation, linking imperial notions of charity, relief and development to the practices adopted by NGOs. The principle of ‘access’ is at the heart of this chapter. ‘Access’ was central to the public narrative of intervention in Biafra: through the NGO-inspired model of ‘people-to-people’ action that drew so much popular support for the region, and in the televised images of the aid airlift that brought supplies into the region. It was important in a practical sense, too: in the continuities of personnel (missionaries and former colonial officials) from empire that were vital in the operation of non-governmental aid. And, this chapter argues, it also offered a reminder of the importance of Third World governments in shaping the territory of emergency relief. In Biafra, the relationship that NGOs cultivated with the local regime lay at the heart of their claims to legitimacy in the West, while also granting considerable agency to local authorities in setting the agenda of non-governmental aid.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

This chapter, on the rise of ‘populist humanitarianism’, describes the moment when the NGO sector’s appeal expanded irrevocably. The basic narrative will be familiar to many readers: the brutal famine, exaggerated by conflict, that ravaged the Horn of Africa in the mid-1980s; the vital role played by Western media outlets in driving the response; and the movement, led by celebrity humanitarians like Bob Geldof, that raised donations and popular engagement with the crisis to unprecedented levels. In many ways, that ‘movement’ ran counter to the principles on which the NGO sector had been constructed: it was anti-establishment, anti-bureaucratic, youth-focused and had a broad class base. Nonetheless, this chapter argues, it was the sector’s dexterity and its ability to mobilise its own bureaucracy to capture the rewards of the popular response, that was crucial in sealing its future success. By emphasising the twin calling cards of expertise and access to those in need in Ethiopia, the campaigns of the mid-1980s widened the support base for NGOs, reinforced their hierarchical, interventionist and depoliticising tendencies, and gave those organisations the resources that established them at the forefront of a new wave of popular engagement with the Third World.

This chapter outlines the NGO sector’s transformation from a vector for traditional ideas of charity, welfare and disaster relief, to the more expansive ‘NGO movement’, equally concerned with matters of human rights, economic equality and global justice, that it became. The emergence of a new generation of aid workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s is at the heart of this narrative. What challenges, the chapter asks, did these individuals pose to how NGOs thought about aid? And how did the sector adapt to these changes? To answer those questions, the chapter explores how left-wing critiques of aid, the influence of intellectuals like Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich and Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch, and a new emphasis on poverty and inequality in transnational religious circles, converged in a common discourse that placed ‘justice’ (broadly defined). The emphasis on reform in those discussions was key. Ultimately, this story is one of compromise, of how ideas of advocacy and reform were absorbed and rearticulated by the NGO sector.

This chapter examines the lessons of the NGO moment for how we write the history of globalisation. It suggests that we need to think more deeply about the boundaries of the ‘global’, and of where and how ‘global’ narratives are constructed. By looking beyond states and international organisations to NGOs, churches and civil society groups – and, indeed, to the Third World and the experiences of small and middling powers in the West – we can render visible the world system on which ideals such as humanitarianism, human rights, justice and development rested. That process, like the story of post-war globalisation, has three layers. First, the NGO moment helps to illuminate the places (physical, intellectual, and ideological) where globalising ideals were made. Second, it allows us to explore the patterns that underpinned those relationships: the connections between individuals, groups and institutions through which global compassion was constituted. Finally, by tracing how and where NGOs operated, this chapter argues, we gain a much fuller appreciation of how power was distributed in purportedly ‘global’ movements. Taken together, these elements allow us to paint a more nuanced picture of how outwardly ‘global’ ideas were understood, assimilated, rebuffe, and reframed in a variety of social and political contexts.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.