Browsing by Subject "Nongovernmental organizations"

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    Codified compassion: politics and principles in humanitarian governance
    (2012-08) Kennedy, Denis V.F.
    This dissertation analyzes recent attempts to devise rules and regulations to govern humanitarian action. Specifically, it asks: What drives humanitarian organizations to collectively regulate their principles, practices, and policies? Self-regulation, or self-organized attempts at collective action within direct state intervention, is a recent global phenomenon, affecting both the for- and non-profit worlds. In humanitarianism alone, there are now dozens of codes of conduct and other mechanisms that implicate all manner of humanitarian practice, from principles to aid provision. This research focuses on four key self-regulatory projects: the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief; the Sphere Project; HAP International; and the Code of Conduct on Images and Messages.Contrary to the widespread view that firms regulate for branding and competitive reasons, this study finds that principled reasons better account for the origins of these initiatives. Specifically, it shows that self-regulation has emerged out of a crisis of legitimacy in the humanitarian sector, whereby aid veterans concluded that good intentions were no longer enough as a basis for action. As Rwanda demonstrated, good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes. Through self-regulation, aid workers have sought to shift humanitarianism's ideational foundations from charity and good deeds to professionalism, technical standards, and human rights. Contestations over self-regulation, in turn, derive from different understandings of humanitarianism - of its meanings and know-how.
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    Integration, Erasure, and Underdevelopment: The Everyday Politics and Geographies of Gitano NGOization
    (2008-06) Chu, Margalit
    This critical fieldwork study interrogates the sociocultural and political economic production of underdevelopment through an analysis of the difference-based development politics occurring “on the ground” in and around Gitano non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Specifically, I propose that dominant development discourses and practices have promoted the desire for sociocultural integration and a nationalist politics of sociocultural erasure among targeted ethnic minority communities. Rather than encouraging serious political and cultural dialogue between ethnic (non- Gitano and Gitano) communities, state development agencies have employed strategies of contracting out social services to Gitano NGOs, thereby facilitating the dispersal of political accountability. This stopgap tactic has generated an increased dependence of targeted communities on flighty state handouts and dwindling sociocultural livelihood strategies for them to confront marginalization. Gitano NGOs have adopted the role of go-betweens wherein, on the one hand, normalized Gitano elites enact dominant development praxis and, on the other hand, they advocate apparently progressive Gitano nationalist and feminist politics. Community residents, for their part, have generally employed a defensive politics of active non-participation. That is, they seek the socioeconomic incentives of state development policies via NGOization while implicating themselves as little as possible in processes of sociocultural integration. The prevailing scholarship presents a top-down view of development praxis wherein state and global political economic processes act upon more or less passive, culture-trapped locals. In contrast, I contend that the everyday tensions between state agents, NGO members, and local residents reveal politically, economically, and socioculturally interested actions and contention on all sides that have nonetheless had the cumulative deleterious effect both of creating some Gitano (desire for) integration and generalized marginalization via development, or “underdevelopment.” My analysis is drawn from over two years of fieldwork at two Gitano NGOs located in a social housing community of the southern Spanish city of Granada. This project contributes to debates on the difference-based production of development, feminist geographies of NGOization, and critical feminist praxis.