In order to better serve the needs of donor agencies, funding is directed toward non-membership CBOs or what the World Bank has designated as “operational NGOs”—groups that operate within poor constituencies but are not organizations of the poor. Operational NGOs are thus organizations “engaged primarily in design, facilitation, and implementation of development sub-projects,” and they have been explicitly designated as the preferred recipients of World Bank funding. As a consequence, the nature of NGO activity at the local level has shifted significantly. The implementation of projects calls for training in specific skills rather than a more general education that involves analysis of social and economic policies and processes. In other words, these developments have compelled CBOs to adopt a narrowly economic and apolitical approach to working with the poor. The logical consequence of funding flows is that CBOs that have no local support or participation have sprung up overnight. Stephen Commins, a World Bank social policy analyst, admits that the Bank now faces the problem of assessing whether a local organization really does have broad based support or whether it is a “bringo”—“bring your own NGO.” But the donor community continues to ignore its own warnings about both the growing disconnect between the people and NGOs and the resulting crisis of credibility.

The change in focus of NGO activity impacts the organizational character of NGOs as well. The shift toward a managerial and functional approach to development has led to a more professional orientation to the extent that professionally trained staffs constitute a significant component of the leadership in CBOs today. The change in leadership has an enduring impact on the political capabilities of NGOs because a technical staff tends to regard its work as apolitical and disconnected from larger social and economic processes, such as structural adjustment or international debt policies, even when they directly impact the poor. More often than not, technical personnel adopt a functionalist problem-solving approach to social issues of inequality and poverty that translates into paternalism toward the poor. In other words, the professionalization of community-based NGOs and their subsequent depoliticization represent two sides of the same coin and produce a common set of effects.

Neoliberal “Empowerment”

This new emphasis on project implementation at the local level results in a focus on individual capacities to minimize the social and political causes of poverty. The apolitical and managerial approach to community development draws upon the liberal notion of empowerment in which the poor are encouraged to find entrepreneurial solutions to their basic needs. This entrepreneurial notion of empowerment (not unlike the US motto of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”) is altogether different from the understanding of empowerment for social justice that characterized the work of CBOs in the post-World War II development period. In the current use of the term empowerment, the individual is posited as both the problem and the solution to poverty, diverting attention from the issue of the state’s redistribution or global trade policies. On the other hand, the “development with social justice” approach involves educating the poor in terms of both social and economic policies and their own political rights. This strategy is similar to the one used in the women’s rights and environmental justice movements, which aim at empowering individuals to change their societies.

The partnership between NGOs and new economic institutions has thus enhanced NGO activity by separating NGOs from their original mandate to organize the poor against state and elite interests. This is a clear case in which market demand determines supply. Operational NGOs emerge and flourish to meet the demand of international aid agencies, thereby restructuring political engagement at the local level in completely new ways. CBOs are increasingly engaged in empowering the poor to become active in their own development, which is much in the spirit of the World Bank’s own conception of empowerment. The World Bank’s Participation Sourcebook explains: “As the capacity of poor people is strengthened and their voices begin to be heard, they become ‘clients’ who are capable of demanding and paying for goods and services from government and private sector agencies. ... We reach the far end of the continuum when these clients ultimately become the owners and managers of their assets and activities.”

The popularity of micro-credit programs among NGO projects can be understood within this context where the state is no longer responsible for creating employment, and the poor are expected to strengthen their own capacities toward livelihood security. Micro-credit programs are well suited to the neoliberal economic context in which risks are shifted to the individual entrepreneur—usually poor women who are forced to compete among themselves in a restricted, uneven, and fluctuating market environment. The promise of livelihood security thus translates into optimal utilization of one’s own capacities and resources.

The neoliberal notion of empowerment leads unmistakably to the marketization of social identities and relations. Individualizing the process of empowerment where each individual has to build his or her capacities to access the marketplace reduces the concept of public welfare to one of private interest. The identity of the “citizen” is reduced to that of a “client,” such that the solution to social inequality requires individuals to build their capacities to access the marketplace. Public welfare is reduced to an aggregate of individual gains, and the social democratic notion that public welfare is something that must prevail over and above private gain ceases to exist. Questions of public goods and services or of distributional issues are ignored in this version of empowerment and participation. The democratization that NGOs represent is thus more symbolic than substantive. For the most part, they are engaged in producing a particular kind of democracy that coincides with and can function within a neoliberal economic context.

Studies conducted independently by scholars in different countries have confirmed the phenomena of both NGO professionalization and depoliticization at the grassroots level and agree that there has been a remarkably rapid shift both in the organizational character of NGOs and in the nature of their work. For instance, Miraftab traces the evolution of Mexican NGOs from organizations geared toward “deep social change through raising consciousness, making demands, and opposing the government,” to organizations aiming at the “incremental improvement of the poor’s living conditions through community self-reliance.” In my research in Western India, I found a similar transition from consciousness-raising and political-organizing work to an emphasis on skills-training for economic livelihood projects. In each case, community-based NGOs moved away from empowerment programs that involved political organization of the poor and education about unfair state policies or unequal distribution of resources. Instead, NGOs have adopted a “skills training” approach to mitigate poverty and inequality by providing social and economic inputs based on a technical assessment of the capacities and needs of the community.