Page 202 - Volume 1_Go home mzungu Go Home_merged with links

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20 century 'zuŋ u 'not for profit' empires
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"Veni, Vidi, Vici ",Steti - ego adduxit amicis meis

Certainly, limiting our analysis to articles in English accounts in part for this unevenness,
but we noted that only two articles in the 300-article sample were written by scholars at
Indian universities. This is despite India being the most commonly studied country in this

literature, and one that uses English as the primary language in higher education.

This unequal representation of authors provides some evidence for the North-South
knowledge gap that political scientists and other social scientists have discussed. We

also found that about one-third of articles had at least one nonacademic author; more
than half of such authors were employees of NGOs, suggesting both possible subject

matter expertise as well as potential bias in reporting organizational effects or
outcomes.

***
Despite changes over time, nearly all of the articles we analyzed addressed one of six
broad research questions:

What is the nature of NGOs?

What factors lead to the emergence, development or evolution of NGOs or the
NGO sector?

How do NGOs carry out their work?
What effect, if any, do NGOs have on specific development outcomes?
How do NGOs interact with other actors in their environments?

In what ways do NGOs contribute to the production or reproduction of cultural
categories or power dynamics?

***
In our article, we wanted to show how a systematic review of existing work could answer
what is arguably the most debated of these questions, question 4--what effect do NGOs
have on development outcomes? We did so using a sample of articles on health and

governance, which represent the service provision and civil society functions of NGOs,
respectively.

We found that, on the whole, articles reported favorable effects of NGOs in these

sectors--67% for health and 52% for governance. But the evidence presented for these
claims gave us pause.

The health articles usually reported benefits to a health outcome or behavior, and 60% of

those articles gave a clearly measurable indicator on which to measure NGOs' success.