The Double-Edged Sword of NGOs

NGOs are a powerful tool of the international development complex they also pose many ethical and political problems. In Model United Nations, delegates might find themselves supporting specific NGOs as they work on the committee's topics. However, in choosing to work with NGOs, delegates should consider the following issues:

  • The majority of NGOs tend to be small and region or issue-specific. Therefore, most national NGOs struggle to scale up to address situations on an international level. While the United Nations has historically worked with some more reputable NGOs, this scalability and applicability of NGOs must be considered. 
  • The implementation of NGOs chips away at the sovereignty and autonomy of nations over once public resources. While many NGOs do provide resources to a while public, surrendering resources to NGOs runs the risk of essentially "privatizing" the resources.
  • NGOs are band-aid solutions that reduce the pressure of governments to make a real institutional change. Thus an overuse and dependence on NGOs can have long term detrimental effects on the powers and responsibilities of governments. For example, homeless shelters to help to address homelessness on the short term but may make the government complicit to the issue as it essentially becomes "not their responsibility."
  • NGOs can also function as corruption vehicles or ways for the ultra-rich to exert control over certain issues. Due to the low international accountability of NGOs, it is unclear how those that start NGOs or nonprofits directly benefit from the money their organizations receive. For example, the campaign Kony 2012 was exposed to have many internal ethical issues with most of their money funneled into the pockets of their executive instead of the issues they were aiming to support. In addition, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can be seen as doing good work, what if they had invested all of their money into niche issues or "solutions" that ultimately hurt the world?
NGOs are an important part of international development but delegates should remain vigilant and cognizant of the drawbacks of NGOs. How we think beyond the handful of NGOs as a committee and move towards more institutional changes that can better support refugees and religious minorities?

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