NGOs ON THE LINE
An essay about purpose, rigour, rhetoric and commodificationby Sue Soal of the Community Development Resource Association
Polarity
One of the complex identity questions that NGOs live with is the polarity between being non-governmental organisations – and all of what that means – and being professional organisations. While these aspects of our identity are not incompatible, they are distinct.
We are not membership organisations; we are generally not accountable to clearly defined constituencies; yet we pursue clear social purpose and align ourselves in terms of our values, political choices and preferred futures. Neither are we simple commercial service providers selling our goods to the best payer (despite great pressure to become so), yet we bring resources – both material and human – to situations that we have assessed, in whatever collaborative ways, as being in need of us.
Somewhere between the extremes of this polarity lies a proper accommodation of both aspects of our identity. This is not ever reached as a fixed place, but is a balance towards which we, ideally, strive in our daily being. Very often, however, sight of that middle is lost and we veer towards one or the other side. We become strident, activist campaigners, yet we have no mandate to speak on behalf of others. Alternatively, we become so engrossed with the technical niceties of our expertise that we lose sight of our social purpose.
The CDRA is both an NGO and a professional organisation. This year we have had many good reasons to think about this polarity in our identity and to aim at holding it in a new way. Using our own experience and reflection, we share some of our thoughts on this question and to the challenge that it raises for NGOs more broadly.
As NGO
We are constituted as a not-for-profit organisation; the entire staff, including consultants, is salaried, and accountable to a Board of voluntary Directors. These are individuals who are drawn largely from civil society and are selected on the basis of their standing and accomplishment in the world of social change. The Board is entrusted with the task of holding the organisation to its vision - to contribute towards social transformation, to work for “the good”. What motivates us all is the prospect of channelling our energies and resources to people and places that would not ordinarily benefit from them, in such a way that the possibilities for freedom, consciousness and so, social transformation, are maximised. The vehicle of organisational health and the method of organisational development consultancy has long been a cornerstone strategy of the CDRA.
We are conscious that we often fall short of the standards that we set for ourselves, indeed that we often fail to live up to the ideal that is entailed in choosing to be an NGO. Nevertheless, it is this striving to fulfil an NGO’s best potential that gives concrete meaning to our claim that what distinguishes us, and all NGOs, from other organisations is that we are “value driven”. While this inhibits us from performing certain functions (for example, social regulation, wealth creation), it frees us to do these others.
As a staff we are in a tremendously privileged position. Within this broad brief, we are free to devise our strategies and approaches and select who we work with. To that end, and because our work is in pursuit of a social vision, we work closely, mutually accountable, with individual practices subject to the scrutiny of the team as a whole. This is not simply good professional practice (although it is that too), but is also about holding the organisation as a whole on course, ensuring that its resources are put to best use, in terms of the purpose that we are paid for and for which we have raised funds. Further, all members of staff are employed on fixed salaries – we have neither incentive schemes nor commissions – and irrespective of our positions in the “line” of the organisation, we relate, in the final instance, in terms of our contribution towards achievement of the organisation’s vision.
The CDRA’s status as an NGO is essential to its very being. Because we are an NGO, we pursue all our programmes as strategic interventions into – and contributions to – the development sector. Organisation development consultancy is our core intervention methodology. That we work as consultants in and to the sector has always been a bit strange. Over the years, and as consultancy has increasingly risen to prominence in the sector, we have had to ensure that our NGO identity is preserved. In an environment where even grassroots fieldwork is – increasingly and absurdly – expected to “pay for itself”, we have had to ensure that our consultancy does not succumb to the pressure and temptation to become simply market-oriented.
Instead, we are constrained by the boundaries of our social purpose. In order to be socially relevant (and morally worthwhile), NGOs must address a clear need in the world. However, the core of NGO work tends, of necessity, to be funded from outside of its niche market, either by donors or by other sustainability schemes. This means that direct market-related feedback in the form of people taking their “business” elsewhere is often missing. In fact, NGOs often do have a captive audience, and poor practice, or inappropriately deployed energies, do not always result in a lack of takers for the goods on offer.
In the absence of this clear feedback we, like many other NGOs, engage in continuous processes of internal strategic review and regular solicitation of external assessments. Seeking balance and relevance in our client profile, our fee structure and our subsidy policies is a central part of our ongoing work. We ask ourselves always “Are the organisations we serve the best expression of our social purpose and are they best placed to achieve it?” It is precisely because the CDRA is an NGO that we are both able and obliged to work as we do, work with whom we work and contribute learning from this to the broader development community.
As professional organisation
In addition, and parallel to, our identity as “NGO”, the CDRA works also as an association of professional consultants. Viewed in this way, the organisation might best be compared to a traditional professional practice – say, of lawyers, architects or doctors – where individual practitioners who share a common discipline come together to enhance their impact, share costs and, in some cases, meet the needs of a specially defined niche. Meeting as partners, these professional associations are typically flat in structure and collegial in mood. Decisions tend to be made by all practitioners, or at least partners, in these associations. In these organisational set-ups, the guiding principles of the discipline, and the professionality of those who practise it, are held in high esteem.
Our consultant’s team works in this way. The team as a whole has always held, managed and developed the practice of the organisation. Further, the team has always been at the centre of the essential economic decisions about the organisation’s life. These include where to target our resources and energies and which programmes to pursue. While individuals undertake operational and managerial tasks, these are generally within the terms of a broader social and professional identity that is held by the team as a whole.
All consultants, together with our organisational manager, make up the team that thinks through the organisation’s work and decides where, and with whom it will work. This working principle is not so much about democracy, or inclusion (indeed, not all staff are included in all decision making). Rather, it is about professional members of staff making a contribution to the ongoing identity formation of the organisation and having a degree of autonomy in, and influence over, the work that they undertake.
The CDRA is also similar to a conventional professional association in the way it manages, develops and “holds” its profession as a distinct entity, separate from other disciplines, services and professions. Over the years, we have worked hard at articulating a generic discipline of development practice and also at distinguishing process consultancy as a clear sub-set of this discipline. In this regard, we view ourselves as “development professionals”.
However, it is in this regard that we also differ somewhat from other professions. Where the traditional professions have been in existence for centuries, and have formed their core principles over many years of experimentation, association, organisation and education, development practice is very new. Drawing on other disciplines like social work, psychology, anthropology and organisation development (themselves all relatively new disciplines), development practice has yet to establish itself as a profession in its own right.
Working as a professional organisation, the CDRA has developed an understanding of development practice while holding and practising it. Somewhat akin to building a railway as a journey progresses, so we have developed our understanding of development practice as we have deepened our practice itself. We have been in the fortunate position of being able to share this learning both in written form and directly through our consultancy and programmes over the years, and so our contribution has been both towards development of the organisation’s practice, as well as towards improved practice in the sector as a whole.
Increasingly we have seen that there is good reason to pursue development practice as a profession. For many years we have maintained that one of the greatest constraints to success in the development sector is a lack of “practice”. Simply put, there are many good ideas in the sector; less honed expertise in putting these ideas into practice. Moving towards professionality builds institutional, methodological and theoretical boundaries around development practice, lifting it out of obscurity or simple technique, giving voice to approaches that work and space to grow these further.
Professionality
The term “profession” evokes powerful responses. For us, it includes and goes beyond meeting rigorous standards of quality and reliability. We see professionality as the ability to formulate, in any given moment, unique responses to unique needs.
The argument for
Within the development sector, there is a widespread desire for approaches to development work that are more transparent, replicable, and visible. The flexibility and diversity of practice within the sector has given rise to a need for recognisable standards of practice, a concern that development practice is whatever one makes of it and, as such, is open to manipulation and abuse. Very often it is simply ineffectual, and a shared understanding of what that practice is would contribute substantially towards enhanced impact. Further, and where good work is being done, there is a striving for recognition that the work is indeed complex and substantial.
These motivations for increased professionality in the work of development practitioners are often given by different groupings within the development sector, for example, fieldworkers’ needing recognition, or managers’ needing uniformity and control. However, we can also look at these motivations as expressive of the entire development sector’s need. This is a need for recognition that the work undertaken in “development” is not, as is so often claimed, wasteful, or simply representing the interests of the powerful.
Certainly, a great deal of development money is misspent, through exorbitant consultancy and administration costs, through inept distribution channels, through NGOs making claims that they cannot deliver on, through governments claiming aid so that they can spend on arms, and so on. Certainly development money is often used as a panacea for the world’s ills – channelled as disaster aid without end, or now, after the events of 11 September 2001, given as support for anti-terrorism activities. Still other money is used, ostensibly to promote democracy and human rights as a universal “good”, but actually to lay the groundwork for the expansion of global capital and as a response to anti-globalisation forces in the North, not, in the first instance, as a contribution to quality of life in the South. All of this is true.
Each instrumentalist purpose that development money is intended to serve makes more mockery of the intention of practitioners to work for the good, to strive for balance, to enable improved quality of life – for its own sake – and for the sake of humanity as a whole. Instrumentalism breeds cynicism. And in the development sector, we work in one of the most cynical environments on earth. In this context, it is hard to imagine taking practice seriously. Yet those of us who pursue human and holistic development, amongst all of the other purposes of development, must take it seriously. It is all we have to set us apart from grand-scale structural engineering that has scant regard for human dignity and the good of the planet, irrespective of its rhetoric.
It is for this reason that professionality in development practice is such a tremendously important thing to pursue. We seek acknowledgement that an important need is being met through development practice, that a valued task has been undertaken, and that the manner in which this is accomplished is worthy of respect. We will only get that acknowledgement if we give it to ourselves first.
The argument against
In order to accomplish this acknowledgement – both inner and outer – we need to overcome an inherent aversion to professionality, one that is particularly distinct in our sector. This aversion has several sources. One is linked to the progressive, egalitarian roots of many who choose to work in development. For these, the term “profession” conjures up images of class differentiation, and the power (and potential for its abuse) that working out of a professional framework gives. For these practitioners, professions are cold and aloof, contrary to the solidarity impulse that got them to the field in the first place.
For others, an aversion to professionality lies somewhat closer to home. While development practice happens in the field, it tends to be supervised from the office, often by people who do not have, or have forgotten, their own field practice. For these practitioners, a lack of transparent and visible standards of professional practice protects them from managerial control.
There is still another possible root of this aversion – one that is connected not so much to the notion of equality, but to freedom. For these practitioners, the appeal of development work lies in its freedom to innovate, to create, to work intuitively and responsively. Attempts to professionalise this practice could well end up destroying it altogether – particularly if such professionalisation became, as it so often does, the imposition of rigid frameworks and rules. For these practitioners, it is safer to avoid professionalisation altogether than to risk closing their space to work, unregulated and inconsistent as it may be.
Moving on
Our view of this contested and debated topic is that those of us working as development practitioners – in whatever capacities – can, and should, work towards increased professionality in our practice. If this means that we must tackle some of the legitimate concerns and anxieties around the endeavour, then so be it, but these concerns should not prevent us from “reclaiming” professionality for our practice.
In this regard, we need to say clearly, however, that professionality is not, in the first instance about “performance standards” or quality control – less still about line-managing the behaviour of staff in the field. It is also not about establishing a guild that denotes some practitioners as outsiders, and others as insiders. As practices become institutionalised, these concerns do arise and make claims of the profession, and they need to be dealt with. For us, however, professionality is in the first instance, about what we do in the field, how we think about it (whether we think about it in a systematic or impersonal way, at all) and whether and how we learn from that.
To work with professionalism is not simply to deliver a service that is reliable in its predictability and consistency of standards. The development sector is teeming with people who can provide respectable, even reputable, services: trainers who have their workshop “packages” that get sold all over the world; consultants who ply their methods and ready solutions; NGOs that make their reputation developing something original – then peddle it endlessly, with little regard for need or context. The development sector is home to many who long for easy solutions and who deliver services that bolster the mistaken belief that human development will be made easier if we just find (or buy) the right technique.
Professionality goes beyond this, generating in its adherents the abilities to face each situation they confront, anew, to recognise these and to formulate from a confident inner capacity, responses and interventions that best suit that situation at that time. A person can be trained to deliver a competent solution; their professionality can only be developed, over time and with practice. A good service can be replicated and delivered en masse (like telephone call centres, the world over, are achieving); a profession can be delivered only to the extent that there are practitioners with the right combination of education, practice and judgement to deliver according to the standards of that profession.
We believe that this view of professionality takes account of the valid reservations that development practitioners may have about the endeavour. It names the particular intervention that we presume to bring to others in our chosen field; it eschews easy and “command” management approaches, demanding instead an approach that is collegial and mutual and it supports and enhances precisely the freedom that development practice requires.
Contrary to a belief that professionality implies capitulation, it may well be our most important defence against cynicism and despair. We believe that “professionality”, not “service” is the more accurate description of development practice’s best potential. It may also be just what we need to keep hope through these dark times where it appears that the best efforts of many make little difference at all.
The CDRA’s response
A Centre for Development Practice
In the past year, several new takes on our professionality and our identity as an NGO have emerged. Together, these have been worked into a new vision for ourselves, no longer “OD consultancy in the development sector”. The future that beckons is that of “Centre for Development Practice”.
We aim to build a world-class centre, a resource to those who wish to build themselves and their organisations towards excellence in development practice. In this incarnation, we see ourselves opening up and offering our learning and our resources widely. This shift is a contribution towards building and extending our own professionality, and also towards building professionality in the development sector as a whole.
In many ways, the new focus is a logical next step for us, and reflects a significant point that we have reached in our work – that we are sufficiently confident of the understanding we have built of development practice to take this next step of contributing towards its institutionalisation. Our motivation for increased professionality in development practice also reflects our strategic reading – as NGO – of what is needed in our sector, what is needed in the world, and our commitment to pursuing that.
Our external evaluation
Embracing a view of ourselves as a Centre has also been informed by the outcomes of our external evaluation, completed in 2001. This evaluation offered valued confirmation of much of what we pride ourselves on. That our services are generally highly regarded. That we have developed a conscious body of knowledge and a practice that is unique and can be articulated and shared with others. This is an unusual achievement for an NGO and confirmed that as a professional organisation, we have achieved considerably. Several recommendations were made towards improving our internal functioning and honing our field practice, and these have been worked with throughout the year.
The evaluation also revealed our shadow, of course, aspects of our organisation that we were not seeing. In particular, and despite our conscious view of ourselves as having a dual identity, the evaluation showed how our professional accomplishment has been at the expense of our NGO identity. That this aspect of who we are has come to be underplayed and therefore not developed to its full potential. This posed some fundamental challenges and has prompted a rethink for us about how we relate to the world.
First is the element of our strategic initiative and identity. It was argued that as an NGO, working in a sector that prides itself on being “value-driven”, a more explicit articulation of how we see ourselves in relation to the current global conundrum was needed. Without this, silence may well come to be taken as consent to the prevailing status quo, despite our view that we must be judged primarily on our actions, on our practice.
The second, related, area that has challenged us is that of collaboration, of working together in relationships with others who share a common social vision. This diminishing of relationships has been particularly marked in South Africa and a source of great concern for us, given our South African roots, our commitment to serving development in South Africa and our concern that any global contribution should have as its source, a strong and tangible local connection.
We see that while our tendency towards reflection and introspection has served us well in building our professionality, it has resulted in a relative isolation, particularly in our “horizontal” relationships. While retaining the organisation’s inner core of internal engagement, we need to balance this with increased engagement externally. At its most extreme, our challenging and slightly distanced stance linked to our successes in the field, our achievement of an international profile, and our being well funded has made us likely candidates for accusations of being arrogant, aloof and self-serving.
The future
Faced with this tough picture of ourselves, we have asked “How, then, do we reconcile, turn around, seek balance in what is out of kilter while still valuing and continuing to build that which so evidently works?”
Pursuing our vision of the CDRA as a Centre creates the literal, metaphorical and virtual space for us to regain balance by building and strengthening our NGO identity without compromising our professionality. Paradoxically, it is through pursuing the boundaries of our professionality that the space to work more, and more consciously, as an NGO has emerged. Three hallmark qualities take us into the future: professionality, initiative and collaboration.
In this new period for the CDRA, the quality of professionality is significant in that we aim to continue to provide consultancy services and facilitated programmes that meet this standard. A central tenet of our work throughout the years has been precisely its striving to provide unique responses to unique needs, and to support our field team in doing just this.
Professionality is also significant because we aim to develop all services within the CDRA’s core such that they meet this view of professionality, combining with our existing consultancy services to provide a range of services and resources offered by a central “core”.
Finally, with regard to professionality, the Centre will be aimed at development practice itself coming to be understood as a profession. Included in this understanding is recognition of the need for practitioners to read and grasp new situations, anew; to develop responses to these according to the unique circumstances of each; and to deliver these in innovative and appropriate ways, rather than to simply deliver packaged services. It is towards this broad and generalised view of development practice as profession – in the best sense of the word – that we commit ourselves and our resources in the future.
While the term “professionality” best sums up how we see our practice into the future, the ways in which this will be achieved are through initiative and collaboration. By initiative, we refer to our resolve to relate to the world with more overt strategic intent. Here, we will translate our existing commitments to liberty, consciousness and cultivation of inner power into direct action at the level of public voice and organisational alignment.
Our choice to pursue the organisational form of a Centre is the clearest statement of our commitment to work with initiative. It suggests a significant identity shift – from responsive consultancy to promoter of development practice. This resolve to work with more visible “initiative” is not a simple display of overt political allegiance. We have chosen to pursue the challenge to show more initiative by giving more direct and proactive support to the professionalisation of development practice. This practice, we believe, is in its very nature challenging of the status quo, progressive in its vision of alternatives, aligned with a humane worldview.
Finally, we aim to work in a way that is increasingly and purposefully collegial – collaborative. In this regard, we have undertaken to work consciously towards the establishment of horizontal relationships.
Practically, this commitment will see us extending existing involvement in collegial networks and forums, particularly with a view to supporting the emergence of professionality in the sector. More broadly, and in keeping with our view of ourselves as a Centre, we will seek opportunities to relate and work collegially as an NGO – specifically in Cape Town, where we are based. At the level of collegial work in the field, we seek to expand our associates programme, and run other programmes that will continuously bring ourselves and others into dialogue with development practitioners who share our concerns and fundamental approach.
A great deal of what has been written thus far maps a vision that will only emerge some years into the future. While we have this vision clearly in our organisational mind’s eye, and we pursue it as we slowly move and change, so we have annual plans and activities which remain in place and which continue to be pursued. New strategies will be overlaid onto existing ones and, over time, the CDRA will transform into a centre for development practice.
Some startling consequences
Very practically, the shift that the CDRA envisages brings us closer to the world of funded NGO activities, further from the world of consultancy as a sustainability strategy. This goes firmly against the grain of current development sector rhetoric. To focus on supporting the emergence – and professionalisation – of development practice is a resource-intensive task. Yet we believe it is truly worthwhile given what the world is asking of us, of us in the CDRA, and of us in the development sector as a whole.
More generally, our exploration - both in this section and in the Annual Report as a whole - raises pressing challenges for NGOs – of which one is central:
We live in a world where increasingly, rightly, the credibility of NGOs is being questioned. We arrogate to ourselves the right to pass judgement, to mobilise, to question the powers that be, and to devise clever alternatives. Yet we do not have a base, we do not have a mandate. Most of us do not have experience of running organisations much bigger than a few dozen people. Yet we presume to tell others what is wrong in the running of their corporations, their countries – what is wrong in how the world itself is run – all the while paying ourselves salaries drawn from a tiny percentage of the very surplus that we rail against.
On what basis do we make our criticisms, lay our claims, demand our right to be heard? It can only be on the basis of distinctive and honed expertise. This must be built meticulously, be conceptually lucid and show clear evidence of workable practice. We must offer a clear articulation of self and confident presentation of the unique contribution that we can make. And this does go beyond doling out the world’s placebo of development aid. If we cannot do this – articulate and demonstrate our professionality – then perhaps we really are just the clowns, heralding globalisation’s massive and inexorable progress towards, ironically, an increasingly divided world. The task is nothing less than that of cultivating authenticity.
The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) was established in 1987 as a non-profit, non-governmental organisation (NGO) to build the capacity of organisations and individuals engaged in development and social transformation. We are based in Cape Town, South Africa and work mostly in Southern and East Africa.
Email: vernon@cdra.org.za
Webpage: http://www.cdra.org.zaP.O. Box 221, Woodstock, 7915, South Africa
Telephone: -27 -21 462 3902
Fax: -27 -21 462 3918
