How can non governmental organisation (NGO) performance be improved in contexts of conflict? How can analysis, donor support and NGO activities help achieve better humanitarian and peace building outcomes? This chapter, from the book Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict, offers a corrective to overblown accounts of the impact of NGOs in situations of chronic political instability. Individuals and organisations can and do create peace building spaces, leading to positive outcomes. This chapter identifies the key challenges, along with how they may be tackled in order to move towards improved practice.
The most important challenges facing NGOs are political rather than technical. NGOs need to choose where and how they position themselves in relation to conflicts and the response system in which they are embedded. NGOs can choose to keep quiet, separate themselves from the conflict and response in order to remain independent, or engage with the conflict context and response system. Whilst the first position is neither credible, nor tenable, the second and third positions are more promising. NGOs can maintain their humanitarian space by insulating themselves. However, political engagement combined with a pluralist approach may create room for manoeuvre and wider systemic change.
The same types of NGO interventions may have very different effects in different settings. Whether an intervention has explicit peace building objectives or not, it influences the conflict context.
- NGOs have a higher tolerance of risk, are more flexible, and are better able to conflict-proof their activities, compared with governmental and intergovernmental organisations.
- The extent to which NGO programmes do harm has been exaggerated. Far more significant than humanitarian aid was the role of development assistance in contributing to the origins of the conflict.
- NGOs have a range of positive political, economic and social effects on peace building processes. Multi-mandate NGOs with an operational presence can play an important stabilising role, protecting local leadership, stimulating social energy and stemming human capital flight.
Attempts to improve practice depend on political feasibility. However, continuing with business as usual in not a viable option. NGOs must:
- engage politically in a smarter and more robust way in order to ‘humanitarianise’ politics
- be conscious of the effects of their actions
- gather substantial knowledge about the conflict in question and its political and socio-economic context
- adopt a pluralist approach and keep their options open by widening, not narrowing choices
- think seriously about how to organise and manage for complexity.
