Assignment

Assignment

Executive summary

The concept of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) has been widely used as an analytical category in development research. NGOs have often been seen as organisations acting in clear opposition to their surroundings. Researchers until recently frequently assumed that NGO members act more or less in accordance with a broad consensus, and that they were united around a common set of objectives. NGOs were assumed and assessed according to their output, while their internal and external social networks were largely ignored. In this paper I am going to interview a British person Mr. Owen who is working in an NGO in India.

This interview revealed this fact that an attitude to NGOs as bounded and defined entities may prevent a thorough understanding of the nature of Unnayan NGO activism at the micro level.

I found that Unnayan had hardly ever been a neat and cohesive unit, except perhaps in the very early stages of the organisation's history. Instead of consisting of a homogenous group of actors, there were individuals with numerous agendas, alliances and loyalties to the non-NGO world, who sometimes behaved in conflict with the organisational goals that were meant to unite them. Unnayan appeared increasingly as an unbounded entity where members constantly transcended fragile organisational boundaries and acted out their agendas elsewhere.

Interview

Knowing about alliances and networks may contribute to our understanding of how NGOs function. Mr. Owen in his interview told us that, in Unnayan, an organisational world appeared where alliances were numerous, subgroups were constantly formed and reformed, and people's loyalties cut across organisational boundaries. These boundaries were fragile and unpredictable. Unnayan was woven into patterns of political and organisational experience in the city, a part of a totality that included 'the poor' (another questionable analytic entity) as well as various political groups and city authorities. The individual actors maintained numerous links and alliances as well as loyalties and antipathies with other actors, inside and outside Unnayan (Hardoy 2001 Hodson).

The activists' visions, hopes, aspirations, disappointments, expectations, ideological commitments and priorities revealed a different world, far from the sometimes neat overview presented in a number of NGO studies and evaluations, which in various ways attempt to categorise different types of NGOs and to assess organisational performance.

Owen told us about the Organization type of Unnayan. Unnayan was neither large and bureaucratic - it counted around 35 members at the most - nor so small as to lack a well-established institutional structure. The founders were far from opportunistic, but driven by a sincere conviction that given the right organisational and financial resources, it was in fact possible to create processes of development which would benefit the poor. Although organisational activities declined in the mid-1990s, Unnayan had initiated a number of successful projects in the past. When I first came to know the organisation in 1995/96, it still enjoyed a reputation as one of Kolkata's most sincere NGOs. From its founding in 1977 and until 1997, Unnayan received solid and almost unconditional financial support from the Dutch aid organisation NOVIB, ...