INGOs must confront their past – and help shape a different future

In recent years there has been increasing interest among INGOs around the decolonisation of “aid” and development.

These efforts have focused predominantly on exploring how INGOs can reform their operations, governance, and relationships with communities, but less so on the recognition that poverty, inequality, and hunger are not just unfortunate events but direct consequences of political choices and the international systems, institutions, and practices that high-income countries have created.

Many institutions that govern and influence the international financial system and rules, such as Bretton Woods institutions the World Bank and IMF, were established in the 1940s when most of Africa and a third of the world’s population were under colonial rule. These institutions have become a central focus of global financial architecture reform, which was kicked off by Mia Mottley and her Bridgetown Initiative.

Similarly, INGOs, many of which were also born during colonial times or soon after, need to revisit their role within the wider economic and political system. Is it the role of INGOs to continuously fix the holes of a broken, unequal and unsustainable economic system to keep it stable and make the lives of millions of people who are left behind, generation after generation, more manageable? Or is it about admitting that our aspirations for dignity, equity, human rights, solidarity, sustainable development, well-being, prosperity, climate justice and accessible public goods for all are not achievable unless we address the system – and eventually ourselves within it? Is it about offering and advocating for alternatives to this system, which keeps reproducing ‘externalities’ and is essentially running on wealth and resource extraction, exploitation, and the preservation of unequal power relations?

The trap of depoliticised “aid”

One of the biggest issues facing INGOs is depoliticisation. Providing food assistance to hungry people is a lifeline that cannot be denied, for example. But we can’t keep doing it apolitically for decades without questioning why people keep going hungry. That calls for an interrogation of the liberalised trade system, investment strategies, highly concentrated and untransparent commodities trading market, the promotion of exports, and cheap labour-led growth. It means interrogating land grabs by big agribusiness, unsustainable levels of meat production, intellectual property rights on seeds, agricultural industrialisation, mono-crop farming, and a broader system that limits food sovereignty and creates absurd situations in which some countries are highly food insecure yet huge food and agriculture exporters (Ethiopia, for example).

Similarly, while running various programmes to provide education and training to individuals to help them get on their feet, we should look at a country’s education ecosystem and domestic resource mobilisation. We should look at international creditors’ debt conditionalities, enforced austerity measures, illicit financial flows and tax havens that many rich countries facilitate. These all allow wealthy companies and individuals to shift profits and impoverish national budgets for critical public goods such as education.

What is common in these examples is a combination of clear power imbalances, systems set up and led or dominated by high-income countries, extractive practices and dependence on external actors and/or their money.

A brief history of economic development

Approaches to economic development have changed over time, from modernisation (in the post-World War 2 period of the 1940s and even before), developmentalism (1950-1970s), structural adjustment programmes (1980s), the ‘NGO-isation’ of development (1990s), micro-interventions, behaviouralism and the Millennium Development Goals (2000s) to today’s Sustainable Development Goals. At each stage, INGOs have been instrumental actors and partners, and have largely been playing along with the mainstream approach to development. Even when INGOs have been acting as a critical voice challenging the system, their connections with donor governments and their growth mindset (for some INGOs, annual spending can go over $200 million) means it has not always been possible to sustain and reflect a decolonial mindset in the actual work delivered in low- and middle-income countries.

One simplified way of understanding decolonisation is through Eurocentrism. This can be characterised as a set of values grounded in the view that the secret behind astonishing development in the ‘Global North’ is due to scientific and technical progress, rationality and productivity, not because of the global system has been set around the interests of high-income countries, underpinned by an extractive colonial past where wealth, profits and resources were accumulated, including through the trade of slaves and goods. Eurocentrism sees ‘development’ as an evolution, rather than seeing development and underdevelopment as intrinsically linked.

A Eurocentric approach means that INGOs are stepping in where a state is absent, willingly or not, and substituting the state in delivering critical public goods. The professionalisation of delivering these essential goods and services to people who have been marginalised has created a thriving international development industry which has deepened dependency on Western knowledge, capacity and funding and furthered a Eurocentric understanding of development.

A decolonial approach to economic development

A decolonial approach to economics means we see development and underdevelopment as outcomes of a shared system and history. This requires us to understand the deeper structural roots of the challenges we face. It requires us to build a deeper understanding of the structural roots of poverty and inequality, and how wealth creation, prosperity and power in high-income countries are linked to poverty in lower-income ones. If we want to break this cycle, INGOs need to proactively build their awareness of Eurocentrism in the international development sector, critically review their approaches to development and engage in a dialogue about the future role of INGOs.

As INGOs, we need to ask ourselves lots of questions. For example:

• What and whose knowledge do we use?
• How aligned are we with social movements in low- and middle-income countries? Do we listen to these movements?
• How self-aware are we of our privilege and power in defining how things are run and done in other economies we are often only vaguely familiar with?
• Are we a conscience of the status quo or a voice of the many?

I hope Bond’s new research on decolonising economic development will stimulate further conversations about the future role of INGOs and the broader international development sector in promoting sustainable economic development. We hope this research will inspire rich discussions and reflections, and more importantly, inspire and guide change both within UK INGOs and beyond as well as in the broader international development community of think tanks, academia, policymakers, donors and finance institutions. The time for a clear-eyed debate and change of course is long overdue within the UK INGOs and international development sector as a whole.