Who gives, who receives, and who wins?: Transforming capital into political change through nongovernmental organizations

Abstract

How does international support for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) lead to political change in the developing world? Massive amounts of domestic government spending and international aid are now distributed through NGOs instead of state bureaucracies. Recent scholarship suggests that this decentralization of developmental aid to NGOs has unintended political effects on recipient communities, but the mechanisms driving political effects are unclear. In this article, the authors test whether NGO type affects the results of NGO aid, comparing the political impact of politicized and nonpoliticized NGOs. They do not find any difference between politicized and nonpoliticized NGOs. The results imply that to create political change, ideological predispositions held by individual NGOs are less important than is their ability to raise the level of social capital and civil society. Simply providing the infrastructure necessary to develop social capital and civil society can have a measurable political impact. © 2008 Sage Publications.