The “Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e7813460-07bf-11df-915f-00144feabdc0.html had a piece a few days ago on the politics of aid relief organizations in Haiti.
bq. In an editorial published on its website yesterday, The Lancet said the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of needless competition for funds. “Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” The Lancet wrote. Aid workers in Haiti deny any suggestion of rivalry. “To say that there is something of a bad feeling amongst us is totally false, period,” said Louis Belanger, a spokesman for Oxfam. “This is a massive disaster and it takes time.”
This speaks to a broader debate about the motivations of aid NGOs, where (perhaps surprisingly) political scientists have played a prominent role. Much recent work has suggested that aid NGOs are as motivated by the need to maintain their own revenue flows as by broad humanitarian aims. For example, James Ron and Alex Cooley “argue that”:http://www.barnard.edu/polisci/faculty/cooley/ngoscram.pdf “principal-agent problems, competitive contract tenders, and the presence of multiple principals exacerbate INGO insecurity and create organizational imperatives that promote self-interested action, inter-INGO competition, and poor project implementation.” In a vignette reminiscent of the Lancet criticisms, Ron and Cooley write about how in Goma:
bq. The combination of vast sums of donor money, short-term contracts, and an overabundance of NGOs created an unstable and competitive environment for Refugee Help and others. NGOs constantly renegotiated old contracts whose due dates were fast approaching, while competitors kept lobbying the UNHCR for new contracts. “It’s perhaps embarrassing to admit,” one midlevel Refugee Help manager recalled, “but much of the discussion between headquarters and the field focused on contracts: securing them, maintaining them, and increasing them. The pressure was on: ‘Get more contracts!’” … Goma had become a “three-ring circus of financial self-interest, political abuse and incompetence” where aid had become “big, big money,” and any NGO “worth its salt . . . recognized that it had to be in Rwanda.” … Another Western reporter described Goma as an “aid agency supermarket” in which aid groups “blare[d] out their names and logos like soft drink manufacturers,” plastering everything from water pumps to T-shirts with advertisements.aid groups were desperate to be involved in the Goma relief effort so that they could bolster their fund-raising capacities back home.
While Ron and Cooley acknowledge that the NGOs were also motivated by normative concerns, their explanation highlights organizational survival as the key motivating factor. Susan Sell and Aseem Prakash “argue too”:http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/ogandy/C45405%20resources/Sell%20and%20Prakash%20using%20ideas.pdf NGOs are driven by material interest as well as normative principle.
However, there is a recent very interesting “paper”:http://www.duke.edu/~buthe/research/private_aid.html by Tim Büthe, Solomon Major and André de Mello e Souza that comes to quite different conclusions. It looks at where major US aid organizations decide to allocate aid and its arguments, if not entirely at odds with those of Ron and Cooley and Sell and Prakash, at least suggest that cynicism doesn’t explain everything by a long shot.
bq. In sum, we estimate a statistically and substantively significant effect for every one of the seven measures of objective recipient need, which provides strong support for the “altruistic” hypothesis that NGO allocation of private-source development aid is indeed very importantly driven by variation in the need of recipient countries. By contrast, we fail to find any statistically significant support for the “cynical” hypothesis, and in many of these models, the estimated standard error for MEDIA COVERAGE is so large that, more likely than not, the “real” effect of media coverage is indistinguishable from zero.
It’s important to note that there are limits to this set of findings. It only tells us about _decisions over where to allocate_ aid; not the processes through which this aid is allocated once workers get there. It is also possible that smaller fly-by-night charities and subcontractors are more vulnerable to the dynamics Ron and Cooley discuss than bigger and better respected organizations. Still, it’s the first serious effort at data collection in this field that I know of, and a pretty serious and interesting contribution to debate.