How do IGO Bureaucracies see NGO Partners? Past and Present Trends

This Paper seeks to assess IGO bureaucracies’ perceptions of their NGO partners. Such perceptions are important because they shape the broader “pro-NGO” global norms as well as the formal rules guiding NGO working relationships with IGOs. I seek to address three interrelated questions: 1) Do IGO bureaucrats perceive the NGO officials that they partner with as being “similar” or “different” from them? 2) If they perceive them as different, then what are the specific differences that such IGO officials tend to emphasize? 3) What factors shape such perceptions? The Paper begins by framing such perceptions in the broader trends of the past 100 years. I focus primarily on perceptions of officials from the League of Nations and UN Secretariat using primary sources (archival documents and memoirs) as well as secondary ones. This first section allows me to identify broad temporal patterns regarding IGO bureaucracies’ perceptions of IGOs and to offer an initial set of answers to my three questions. Specifically, I argue that at different times, IGO officials have either considered NGO representatives to be their “equals,” with similar internal cultures and goals, or as “lesser partners,” with different internal cultures and goals. I hypothesize that the relative degree of a) expertise, b) financial resources, and c) prestige of the most prominent NGOs with which IGOs collaborate explain the variation in perceptions. I then proceed to assess the plausibility of my arguments by focusing on developments over the past decade in the anti-corruption realm. I use a series of interviews with officials from seventeen IGOs (such as the UN, OECD, and World Bank) that deal with corruption issues to determine whether their perceptions of NGOs are indeed driven by the relative degree of expertise, financial resources and prestige of the most prominent NGOs in this realm (such as Transparency International and U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre). I find that, even though NGOs are formally treated as equals (in terms of participation and decision-making) in the vast majority of the nineteen IGO-NGO anti-corruption collaborative forums, perceptions with regard to “sameness” vary considerably across respondents from the seventeen IGOs. This case study supports the argument that the relative expertise, financial resources and prestige of the most prominent NGOs (measured independently of such interviews) drive such perceptions. I conclude by connecting my findings regarding recent developments in the anti-corruption realm to the broader trends discussed in the first part of the paper. I also lay out a possible research agenda that would allow for a more in-depth understanding of IGO perceptions of NGOs across issue-area and time.