Development NGOs is the most highly visible sector, and includes both international and local organizations, as well as those working in humanitarian emergency sector. Many are associated with international aid and voluntary donation, but there are also NGOs that choose not to take funds from donors and try to generate funding in other ways, such as selling handicrafts or charging for services.
At the national congress of the African National Congress held in December 1997 in South Africa, President Nelson Mandela attacked the non governmental organizations (NGOs) for their critical stance on government and for carrying out the political agendas of foreign interests. A few years later, the SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations, Koffi Annan, famously described NGOs as the conscience of humanity. Mandela rebuked the NGOs, whereas Annan hailed them. Mainstream research on NGOs would tend to use Annan’s claim as a well-placed argument supporting the notion of NGOs as voices of global civil society and democratic change. Mandela’s criticism, on the other hand, will tend to be either overlooked and forgotten as soon as possible or interpreted as a political mistake by an otherwise great man. In fact, such a biased interpretation of two valid statements is unhelpful, and misses the role of NGOs in today’s life. This system is maintained through the way in which system members express themselves as actors within the system and in relation to the wider world. Such rhetorical consensus can be understood as norms that also help to establish and maintain boundaries around the NGO channel, but, and this is crucial, a “consensus” to which a variety of and in reality competing value agendas and even manipulative attitudes have been attached. Some Non government organizations pose as NGOs to attract funds and legitimacy, some for-profit firms dress up as NGOs to earn money, some mission organizations act within the development aid channel while using the latter as a shield for achieving their main aims, and some political parties and movements establish what have been called neutral humanitarian organizations to compete for funds.
Although the character of the resource transfer has created the structural form of this system, one might say it is this rhetoric and the way it has been handled which have created the feeling of “systemness”—that has made it into, and reproduces it as, a social system. The rhetoric that has influenced the whole NGO scene can be analyzed as functional for the maintenance of the system as it has functioned in the past (this does not mean, however, that this language is necessary for its continued existence.
