Religious actors are important players in international development. As part of global civil society, they influence political decision-making in both national and supranational arenas. This paper proposes an analytical framework to explore the ‘moral authority’ of religious INGOs as a source of discursive power, defined as the ability to influence politics and the policy process by shaping ideas and norms. Focusing on religious actors’ discursive power, the paper adds a discourse analytical perspective to the study of religious INGOs in global governance. In a second step, we apply our model in two cases studies on religious actors in development politics, situated at the macro and micro levels respectively. At the macro level, we scrutinize the political strategies of religious INGOs at the World Food Summit 2009 in Rome. Here, normative arguments about justice and equality in the wake of the global food crisis coincide with material interests of these INGOs as development actors in food aid. At the micro level, we explore the role of Buddhist development NGOs as religious actors in post-conflict Cambodia. We argue that these Buddhist NGOs serve as important facilitators in rural development for localizing global discourses of sustainable development to the grassroots level.
