NGOs and uneven development: geographies of development intervention

Abstract

Much research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in international development has been case-study-based, with questions about the broader geographies of NGO intervention rarely asked. This paper explores the factors that drive such NGO geographies and considers how they relate to the uneven geographies of poverty and livelihood produced under contemporary processes of capitalist expansion and contraction. Explanations of NGO presence and absence must of necessity be historicized and contextualized, and particular attention should be paid to the influences of the politics and political economy of aid and development, the geographies of religious, political and other social institutions, the transnational networks in which these institutions are often embedded, and the social networks and life histories of NGO professionals and allies. The resulting geographies of intervention pattern the uneven ways in which NGOs become involved in reworking places and livelihoods, though this reworking is also structured by the dynamics of political economy. The paper closes by drawing out implications for geographical research on NGOs, as well as for efforts to theorize the relationships between intentional development interventions and immanent processes of political economic change, and their effects on inequality and unevenness.