The accountability dilemmas of INGOs in China

Abstract

In the past few years, INGOs have been subject to growing scrutiny from scholars and practitioners across the world. Critics have highlighted a policy backlash against INGOs within Southern countries, a growing mismatch between INGO capabilities and contemporary global problems they claim to address, and diminishing support from grassroots communities that underpin INGOs’ work. In spite of these mounting interests in INGO legitimacy and accountability, there are few academic studies focusing on the accountability dilemmas that INGOs have to face while operating in unfavorable political systems in the South. This dissertation aims to fill in this gap by investigating the multiple accountability dilemmas confronted by INGOs operating in contemporary China. First, this research situates INGOs within the shifting landscapes of their intentional, national and local contexts, and demonstrates that INGO accountability is a complicated “social phenomenon” that is constructed by the wider context under which INGOs operate. Second, by adopting a street-level bureaucracy approach, this research examines the accountability processes at INGOs’ grassroots level, with special attention to the accountability dilemmas between upward and downward pulls on INGOs. Third, this research identifies a series of strategies street-level workers of INGOs use to mitigate the accountability tensions imposed on them, including prioritizing horizontal accountability among themselves, exercising informal accountability towards local stakeholders, and using individual discretion when applying formal accountability. Fourth, this research identifies two scenarios of interactions between formal and informal accountability at the street-level of INGOs, and finds out that only when formal and informal accountability are aligned with the organizational mission can they work together to create “a culture of downward accountability” within INGOs. This dissertation illuminates the informal accountability mechanisms that facilitate collaboration, joint production and downward accountability between street-level workers and their local stakeholders at the grassroots level of INGOs. Furthermore, this dissertation constructs an original theoretical framework to conceptualize and analyze INGO accountability dynamics. The framework could also be used to facilitate future comparative study to explore the potential interactions between the macro political contexts and the micro accountability mechanisms of INGOs. Finally, this dissertation calls for more attention on the street-level workers of INGOs and their significant role in cultivating and sustaining downward accountability within INGOs.