Last week, this duck crossed the pond to attend the British International Studies Association (BISA) NGO Working Group workshop on Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Global Governance. The workshop convened scholars of NGOs as well as NGO practitioners to consider the practice and changing landscape of global governance as well as the role of NGOs therein. A highlight was an interactive session during which we discussed the recent BOND–the UK membership body for organizations working in international development–report Fast Forward: The Changing Role of UK-based INGOs. The rich discussion generated plenty of ideas to talk about, but today I focus on just one: How can academics support and strengthen data collection and research methodology in NGOs?
This question, posed by BOND, is not unlike the heated debates currently occurring in the discipline on the policy relevance and public value of political science. Yet, to date, we have mostly debated how to be more policy relevant for policy-makers (who often fund our research), rather than how to work with less powerful groups like NGOs. What the Working Group discussion made clear though was that NGOs need us! The challenge is to figure out how to transfer capacities and skills to enable and support the work of NGOs. Here’s the NGO practitioner wish list:
- NGOs do not have the qualitative or quantitative skills necessary for proper data analysis. Workshop attendees expressed that they felt that their data and evidence lacked credibility without these methodological skills.
- NGOs do not have access to gated academic journals that most of us publish in.
- NGOs are often pressed for time and need the report done yesterday; they perceive that the academic and NGO worlds work at different speeds.
- NGOs would like more forums where they can interact and connect with academics.
So, what are some possible solutions to bridge the gap between NGOs and academics and build NGO capacities? One promising model is the UK-based organization Enhancing Learning and Research for Humanitarian Assistance (ELRHA) whose objective is to support partnerships between researchers and practitioners to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian action. ELRHA’s Effective Partnerships workshops are interactive forums that foster relationships between academics and practitioners. Interestingly, the new definition of “impact” adopted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England incentivizes collaborating with practitioners in ways that our current system of tenure in the U.S. does not.
Another possibility is for professional organizations, such as APSA, MPSA, and ISA, to form partnerships with NGO umbrella organizations like BOND, InterAction, or Coordination Sud to match academics with NGOs who require specific expertise or methodological skill sets.
On a smaller scale, professors who teach classes on NGOs or NGO management can partner with local NGOs to design experiential, service-learning projects for their students. In my graduate-level NGO Management class, I partner with the Philadelphia-headquartered American Friends Service Committee; students complete semester-long projects proposed by the AFSC that range the gamut from program evaluations to strategic planning to research on best practices. Students hone their developing management and research skills, while the AFSC benefits from theory-informed practice, social science perspectives, and robust research. It is a win-win for all involved!
Finally, unless academic journal policies change drastically, NGO scholars should continue to disseminate their research via blog posts, open-access journals and practitioner-oriented publications to reach a broader audience that includes NGO practitioners.
What are some other ways that academics can share their research, skills and expertise with NGOs?
I really like the idea of providing research assistance to NGOs but have no idea where to start or even if I could be of help. Maybe there could be a clearing house of academics who would be willing to volunteer their time and NGOs could view that and then contact people to request help?
Thanks, Joey. Yes, I agree, this is where I think the professional associations would be most helpful. They already have our contact and expertise information. I think the ELHRA model is optimal, but it begs the pesky question of…who would set it up?
Thanks Joey. I think ELRHA’s objective is to be that kind of clearing house, would be great to have something like that on a larger scale.
Totally agree. I’d love to help create some version of DataKind (https://www.datakind.org) to connect academics and INGOs.
Thanks, Andrew. I wonder if NSF would fund something like that? Or a foundation like Ford?
Fantastic idea! I wonder if this is the kind of project that NSF or even a foundation like Ford might fund?
On fostering partnerships between academics and NGOs:
Kindly note that I am supportive of this mobilization, but with caveats (which you may have discussed as well), from my experience working with NGOs as an academic, as an academic researcher and as a trainee, and as an NGO board member and research committee member, as well as in my former capacity as an education policy advisor to a provincial government, I would like to suggest that some of the following should be considered by scholars in advancing these partnerships:
This NGO-academic partnership approach should be understood within the
context of the current post-secondary institutional landscape. The
incentivization of this conceptualization of scholarship by academic funders is
not a radical answer to policy-for-policymakers but its further elaboration. It
is part of the Anglo movement both toward replicating in the Arts the model
converting the physical sciences fully into a publicly-subsidized R&D
sector and toward a bifurcated academic labor market, with a handful of upper-management-styled power ‘researchers’ who (after a training period of conducting CBPR for civil society orgs, such as NGOs) specialize in large grant applications and administration.
This partnership approach should not be discussed purely in its marketing form. Negative repercussions for scholarship include not only academic labor market bifurcation and steering the Arts toward a private-service business model, but also the conversion of students and under-employed academics into a labor market that pays the employer. This may be portrayed as a favor to students and a boon to charitable culture. However, after
academic grant chiefs secure mass funding projects in their partnership with
civil society orgs, their remaining responsibility is to deploy students and
underemployed academics–usually women–as labor to these organizations. As
with any mass internship labor system, while the women and men trainees may be
paid a modest stipend by the grant, and the work may be personally fulfilling,
the trainees are also paying the university to act as an intermediary in this
labor contracting system, both through tuition and fees (generally debt &
interest), and their taxes.
The economics of such a pay-later-to-labor-now system is of dubious socio-economic benefit: The debt the trainees take on to participate in this charitable training and work will come over time to pile on and compete with the other creditors’ claims on their income. The university-based debt labor system feeds financial capital’s indiscipline, and so potentially contributes to economic crisis. Scholars have the capacity and responsibility to consider such costs, including weighing and deciding upon their contribution to them. In turn, these costs impact scholarship.
The networking benefits to the student- and underemployed academic labor subcontracted by the grant are not clear, considering the civil society orgs’ bolstered reliance upon unpaid labor. As well, and even where NGO partner employees are partially paid by the grant,
this system facilitates the increasing state reliance on NGO unpaid labor
–charity– as opposed to welfare state integrity. Through the mobilization of
low-paid disposable labor, this system frees up more state revenue to go toward
high-accumulation sectors, such as the military and upper management compensation
inflation broadly. Scholars have the capacity and responsibility to consider such costs, including weighing and deciding upon their contribution to them. In turn, these costs impact scholarship.
Moreover, these systems generally work by authorizing
the civil society orgs to steer or determine academics’ research agenda. While
this again can be painted attractively in the abstract, as incentivizing
academics to ‘listen to and amplify the voice of the community’ and so on, in
the current context negative repercussions include proliferating the public
misunderstanding of the benefits and function of scholarship as a discrete
social enterprise. Of decisive importance is that it’s very easy for
conservative and neoliberal governments to use this system—with civil society
orgs as more affective intermediaries–to capture scholars within their political
agenda and to use scholars as a human political buffer.
For example, where neoliberal governments require NGOs to demonstrate Walmart-like economic impacts in order to compete for funding, those NGOs in turn now appeal to scholars to provide this (not-so-community-driven) organizational “need.” Facilitated by the
understanding of scholarship as an socially-subordinate private good, this mediated-capture aspect of the academic-NGO partnership can displace conflict from between the
NGO and state to between the NGO and academics, thereby undermining another of
the advertised benefits of community-‘embedded’ research.
It may or may not be that academic-NGO partnerships are an ethical path, or a better or the best possible approach in the contemporary context. Certainly, it is always helpful, from a training and career perspective, to have the research agenda and methodological marketing down, front and center. However, in the contemporary institutional context, the
incentives can be overwhelming, to market the research arrangement and avoid responsible scholarly considerations of the drawbacks and hazards.
At the least, a reasonable, full mapping of both benefits and costs, from both the researcher and the trainees’ perspectives, might be assembled in a back-stage venue, such as a journal article or edited-volume methods chapter, and acknowledged (for example here) as well. In this way, individual scholars might, within the supporting community of scholars, more fully consider and compare the implications of the available research agendas, and/or develop and share techniques and strategies for navigating characteristic problems and issues with the research approach.
Sure, I am not advocating that this type of engagement with NGOs would replace scholarly/academic work (which would fall in the category of basic science) but it could be a good way to contribute to applied science/practice and build NGO capacity with the resources we have as academics (expertise).
Great post!
I have found in the human rights community that NGOs seem to find it helpful when researchers aggregate and intelligibly articulate data that supports their talking points (or refutes the arguments of their detractors), at least where that data exists. When I’ve been able to do this NGOs has been receptive to briefings, and it’s been helpful to them to have “experts” provide data as part of campaign events.
Behind the scenes, I have also found them very willing to hear when the science does NOT support advocacy arguments, which helps them develop better policy agendas as well as frame arguments.
I’ve also sometimes found NGOs receptive to having students do semester projects studying a particular problem they’re grappling with… but you need to involve the practitioners then in helping identify projects where the answer is something they can use, otherwise it’s a time sink with no value added to interface with the students.
Thanks Charli! Yes, I agree, for my class the AFSC suggests projects that they need completed and I pick those that are feasible and appropriate for the students’ skill level. Often these are “back-burner” projects that the organization would love to get done but doesn’t have the time/resources to complete. The projects tend to be more practical than academic, but it works for this class (NGO management), which is more practitioner/policy-oriented. I also think this type of set-up could work for methods classes; in my experience, NGOs need help designing surveys/focus groups/interviews and analyzing the results, which would be great projects for undergraduate or MA-level methods classes.