Group Deliberations

While working together on the presentation after many deliberations we have come to arrive at the fact that inherently a lot of NGOs are there which want to make a difference in the communities where they operate. But, there is one thing that often comes attached to the whole argument and that is that critics attack NGOs all the time calling them means of change that work from the outside rather engaging from within the communities. This is not wholly true as there are NGOs in many places that are run by the people from the very communities they operate within.

Evidence has come to show that NGOs have very often helped make the transition that was taking place politically in many places like post Pinochet Peru, help reach out to the lower masses of society and foster the democratic movement in Indonesia. Although we will be drawing on from these experiences, our larger focus is on ROTA and how it aims to encompass the ideals of an NGO that is democratic from within and looks towards making an impact. This is in line with the fact that very often we fail to recognize that the problems with NGOs mostly occur from the fact that they fail to actively deconstruct the societies they work within.

What Development is...

The essentially contested notion of development has come to be many things to many people, so much so that it has become almost impossible to find a singular/unitary definition to the concept in itself. What begun in the 1940’s with theory of modernization soon was out of line with the understanding of development as with the years became somewhat unacceptable owing to the lack of explanations that it gave.

What is most often questioned is how do we understand development, this is because of the fact that there are many ways to interpret it like GDP, HDI and other such indices as many have pointed out development is not a concept which can be quantified and thus remains abstract in certain terms. Yet more so what we have seen in the past few decades is also a shift in the development agendas that have dominated the decade; like 1970’s saw a focus on sustainable development, 1980’s on the environment and now we see the focus on climate change mitigating the effects.

Not only does this illustrate the evolutionary nature of the process of development but rather goes on to show that over time evolution in the realm of development changes the way we look at development itself and how we approach it. This is what has been behind what we see as something normal today like the NGO’s filling up the cleavages that exist between the government and the society as a result of the change in how the state functions today.

Hopper, P. ‘Understanding Development’ Polity (2012)