NGOs

A non-governmental organisation is a private body pursuing a public purpose without being part of a state and without distributing profit. The term entered official language through Article 71 of the United Nations Charter, signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945, which authorised the Economic and Social Council to consult such organisations. The category now covers everything from a village hospice to Amnesty International, from a parish food bank to bodies with budgets larger than the governments they lobby.

Conservatives hold two positions here that look contradictory and are not. Voluntary association is the substance of a free society, the thing that stands between the individual and the state, and conservatives have defended it since Burke. An NGO that raises its own money from willing donors to run a shelter is that tradition in action. An NGO funded by governments and foundations to lobby governments is something else: a body with the moral authority of charity, the finances of a contractor, and no electorate.

Key Takeaways

• Article 71 of the United Nations Charter of 1945 gave the term its official currency.
• Tocqueville’s account of American associational life in 1835 supplies the conservative case for the sector.
• Conservatives distinguish sharply between donor-funded voluntary bodies and state-financed advocacy organisations.
• The accountability objection is structural: an NGO answers to its board and its funders, not to the people affected by its work.
• The aid-effectiveness literature has documented weak returns on decades of NGO-delivered development spending.

History And Context

The form is older than the name. The British anti-slavery movement organised as the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in May 1787 and secured the Slave Trade Act in 1807. The Red Cross grew from Henry Dunant’s account of the battlefield at Solferino in June 1859 and was founded at Geneva in 1863. Nineteenth-century Britain and America ran their poor relief, hospitals, schools, and libraries substantially through friendly societies, churches, and endowed charities.

Alexis de Tocqueville, travelling in America in 1831 and 1832, treated this associational habit as the mechanism that let a democracy remain free: Americans formed a society for everything, and in doing so learned self-government and limited what they asked of the state.¹

The post-1945 growth changed the character of the sector. The number of organisations holding consultative status at the United Nations rose from a few dozen in the late 1940s to several thousand by the 2000s. Government agencies began routing aid budgets through NGOs, so that bodies formally independent of the state derived most of their income from it. Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff argued in 2004 that the resulting global civil society claimed to speak for the world’s peoples while being accountable to nobody in particular.² William Easterly’s study of development spending set out how little the transfers had achieved.³ Dambisa Moyo made a sharper argument from the receiving end, contending that aid inflows had entrenched bad governments in Africa and displaced the domestic accountability that taxation creates.⁴

The Conservative Position

Conservatives support the voluntary sector on principle. Burke’s little platoon, Nisbet’s intermediate association, and Tocqueville’s civic habit describe the same thing: bodies smaller than the state and larger than the household, where obligations are concrete and neighbours are known.⁵ Charity that is local, funded by people who chose to give, and administered by people who bear the consequences of failure is the conservative model of social provision.

The objections apply to a different animal. The first is fiscal dependence. An organisation drawing the bulk of its revenue from government grants is a delivery contractor, and when it lobbies the department that funds it, the public is paying for a campaign it has not endorsed. The independence that gives the sector its moral standing has been sold.

The second is accountability. A minister can be removed at an election. An NGO director cannot. When an international body sets standards, drafts model legislation, or shapes a treaty text, it exercises public power without any mechanism by which the governed can withdraw consent. John Fonte set this out as a democratic sovereignty problem rather than a policy disagreement: transnational advocacy transfers decisions from electorates to networks of officials and activists.⁶

The third is subsidiarity. Large organisations displace small ones. Foreign NGOs running clinics and schools relieve a government of the duty to build them and relieve citizens of the reason to demand them. The conservative preference is for the smallest competent body, which is usually the one whose members live with the result.

Differing Positions

Defenders answer that the accountability complaint misdescribes what NGOs are. They exercise no coercive power; they persuade, publish, and deliver services, and they answer to donors who withdraw funds and to journalists who investigate them. Holding a body to electoral standards it never claimed to meet is a category error.

There is a functional defence as well. Where governments are corrupt or absent, NGOs deliver vaccination, food, and legal aid that nobody else provides; Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross work in places where waiting for state capacity means waiting through the deaths. Human rights monitoring by outside bodies is precisely what governments cannot be trusted to do for themselves.

A separate criticism comes from the left. The sector, on this account, is a privatisation of the welfare state: work that citizens are owed as a right is turned into charity dispensed at a donor’s discretion, and professionalised NGOs have displaced the trade unions and mass movements that once won concessions by organising the people affected rather than speaking for them.

References

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (Saunders and Otley, 1835).
2. Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff, “Global Civil Society: A Sceptical View”, in Global Civil Society 2004/5 (Sage, 2004).
3. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden (Penguin Press, 2006).
4. Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
5. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953).
6. John Fonte, Sovereignty or Submission (Encounter Books, 2011).