Non-Governmental Development Organizations and the Poverty Reduction Agenda
The Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) have, over the past two decades, entered center stage in their active participation in the social, political, and economic issues affecting both the developing and developed world. This book offers a highly stimulating and concise summary of the NGDO sector by examining their history and metamorphosis; their influence on the social, political, and economic landscapes of the Northern and Southern governments and societies. The author analyzes competing theoretical and conceptual debates not only regarding their contribution to the global social and political dynamism but also on the sectors changing external influence as they try to mitigate poverty in marginalized communities. This book presents NGDOs as multidimensional actors propelled by the desire to make a lasting change but constrained by market-oriented approaches to development and other factors both internal and external to their environment. While a lot of attention has been given to understanding international NGDOs like World Vision International, Oxfam, Care International, and Plan International, this book offers a critical analysis of grassroots organizationsthose NGDOs founded and established by locals and operating at the deepest end of the development context.
This work will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including Development Studies, International Organizations, and Globalization.
Jonathan J. Makuwira obtained his PhD at the University of New England (UNE) in October 2003. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in International Development at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University. Prior to coming to RMIT he taught Peace Studies at UNE, and Comparative Indigenous Studies at Central Queensland University. He worked for the Ministry of Education in Malawi as a primary, secondary and teacher educator. He joined the Malawi Institute of Education in 1990 as a research officer, before joining the Council for NGOs in Malawi (CONGOMA) in 1998 as a Research Officer.
Routledge Global Institutions Series
Edited by Thomas G. Weiss
The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
and Rorden Wilkinson
University of Manchester, UK
About the series
The Global Institutions Series has two streams. Those with blue covers offer comprehensive, accessible, and informative guides to the history, structure, and activities of key international organizations, and introductions to topics of key importance in contemporary global governance. Recognized experts use a similar structure to address the general purpose and rationale for specific organizations along with historical developments, membership, structure, decision-making procedures, key functions, and an annotated bibliography and guide to electronic sources. Those with red covers consist of research monographs and edited collections that advance knowledge about one aspect of global governance; they reflect a wide variety of intellectual orientations, theoretical persuasions, and methodological approaches. Together the two streams provide a coherent and complementary portrait of the problems, prospects, and possibilities confronting global institutions today.
Related titles in the series include:
Trade, Poverty, Development (2013)
edited by Rorden Wilkinson and James Scott
The United Nations Development Programme and System (2011)
by Stephen Browne
Non-Governmental Organizations in World Politics (2011)
by Peter Willetts
Global Governance, Poverty, and Inequality (2010)
edited by Jennifer Clapp and Rorden Wilkinson
Non-Governmental Development Organizations and the Poverty Reduction Agenda
The moral crusaders
Jonathan J. Makuwira
First published 2014
by Routledge
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2014 Jonathan J. Makuwira
The right of Jonathan J. Makuwira to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Makuwira, Jonathan.
Nongovernmental development organizations and the poverty reduction agenda : the moral crusaders / Jonathan Makuwira.
pages cm. (Routledge global institutions series)
Summary: This book offers a highly stimulating and concise summary of the NGDO sector by examining their history and metamorphosis; their influence on the social, political and economic landscapes of the Northern and Southern governments and societies Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Non-governmental organizations. 2. Poverty. 3. Economic development. I. Title.
H97.M338 2014
362.55772dc23
2013022535
ISBN: 978-0-415-70443-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-70444-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-85770-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
The current volume is the eightieth title in a dynamic series on global institutions. These books provide readers with definitive guides to the most visible aspects of what many of us know as global governance. Remarkable as it may seem, there exist relatively few books that offer in-depth treatments of prominent global bodies, processes, and associated issues, much less an entire series of concise and complementary volumes. Those that do exist are either out of date, inaccessible to the non-specialist reader, or seek to develop a specialized understanding of particular aspects of an institution or process rather than offer an overall account of its functioning and situate it within the increasingly dense global institutional network. Likewise, existing books have often been written in highly technical language or have been crafted in-house and are notoriously self-serving and narrow.
The advent of electronic media has undoubtedly helped research and teaching by making data and primary documents of international organizations more widely available, but it has complicated matters as well. The growing reliance on the Internet and other electronic methods of finding information about key international organizations and processes has served, ironically, to limit the educational and analytical materials to which most readers have ready accessnamely, books. Public relations documents, raw data, and loosely refereed websites do not make for intelligent analysis. Official publications compete with a vast amount of electronically available information, much of which is suspect because of its ideological or self-promoting slant. Paradoxically, a growing range of purportedly independent websites offering analyses of the activities of particular organizations has emerged, but one inadvertent consequence has been to frustrate access to basic, authoritative, readable, critical, and well-researched texts. The market for such has actually been reduced by the ready availability of varying quality electronic materials.
