I'm writing an essay right now about the role of NGOs in social transformation. Overall I am going to argue that they can help effect it, in ways that are smaller than they sometimes claim but are nevertheless meaningful. One of the points I'd like to bring up as a critique of the role of NGOs is that of the racism that is inherent in much of development. This critique is decades old. A book I read last year, Escobar's Encountering Development, argues forcefully that development discourse constructs white societies as the norm against which black and brown societies are found wanting. This is painting with a pretty broad brush, and it doesn't give black and brown societies enough credit for subverting and repurposing the white/liberal/Enlightenment-normative perspective that underpins a lot of development thinking. But he's not all the way or even mostly wrong, it's a super important point. Anyway his book is almost 30 years old and so I was looking around for some more recent reflections. One I found is by a Liberian-American (seems she went to high school in DC, actually) academic currently at Oxford, writing about race as an unspoken but pervasive presence in development. Fantastic! Could not agree more that race and racism are conspicuously absent from the field and that, as she puts it late in the paper, development agencies need more "radical rabble-rousers" to shake things up.
The problem is that the paper suuuuucks. It's sloppy, poorly written, ignores relevant literature, and makes lazy, dubious claims. Instead of nodding along and making notes to draw on later, as I'd hoped to do, I found myself compulsively picking it apart. For example, referring to how white people are still pretty much in charge in development:
Pailey claims that “one need only take a cursory look at the traditional institutions of global development (for example, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, United Nations Development Programme), their NGO proxies and international development or development studies departments even in the most non-mainstream institutions, such as SOAS, Sussex or Open University, to see this reality confirmed” (Pailey 2019: 7). But a cursory glance reveals that six out of UNDP’s top nine leaders are non-white, as are over half of UN agency heads overall. The same goes for the WTO, which lists 41 councilors and members of key committees, of whom 24 are non-white. Of the world’s four “most powerful” NGOs, according to Foreign Policy magazine (Anonymous 2008): six of eight directors of BRAC, which was founded and is headquartered in Bangladesh, are non-white; 13 of World Vision’s 25 directors are non-white; only three of Oxfam’s 12 directors are non-white but its CEO is from Sri Lanka. Admittedly, the Gates Foundation exemplifies Pailey’s point a bit better. That is not even to say that she's wrong in her overall point, just that the evidence she casually tosses in to support it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Later in that paper, she calls for development organizations to “[elevate] radical rabble-rousers who challenge and dismantle the status quo,” not just “[recruit] people of color … to fill tokenistic diversity and equality quotas” (14). But who is to say when such recruitment is tokenistic; by what standard is a hire judged to be radical enough? I suppose that, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, she knows it when she sees it.That's all got citations and stuff because I cut and pasted it from my own essay. Anyway I'm not going to end up using most or maybe any of it. Her paper is just so...amateurish. I don't come away feeling like I've learned anything. She sets out to argue that critical development studies and critical race theory could learn from each other, which is an interesting premise. But her analysis is below the level I would expect from myself -- a master's student with a shaky, if improving, grasp of the literature -- on a course paper. She just lays out a half-baked description of each, points to some places where each admits to blind spots that could be filled by the other, and leaves it at that. I would be embarrassed to submit something that poorly argued and poorly written for class, much less publication.
In conclusion, it is exasperating to find someone who is making a point, from a prominent place, that I think is important but swinging a pickaxe at her own foundation while she tries to put the walls up.
