293volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 293-298

Understanding the Role of Non-government Organizations(NGOs) as Cultural BrokersA Review of Approaches

The role of intermediary or broker is not one that has always tended to receive a good press. Brokers may all too often come to be seen as untrustworthy middlemen (or women) who create unnecessary costly distance between individuals and the desired transactions they are seeking to complete. Yet brokers may also serve as connectors, integrating and bringing together diverse social economic and political actors in order to achieve goals that neither would be able to achieve individually, or filling information gaps in ways that may offer a more complete representation of a cultural objective or strategy. This contribution provides a brief rationale for thinking about the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as potentially productive brokers in the context of improving non-tangible cultural heritage at the level for policy and practice, and sets out some key ideas and concepts. The Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted by UNESCO in 2003, and by 2013 had been ratified by 151 states. The concept of intangible cultural heritage refers to knowledge, oral representations, traditions and skills that communities recognise among their cultural heritage. Non-government organizations (NGOs) have in recent decades come to be viewed as important actors across a range of fields, from international development and human rights to arts and recreation. NGO roles as cultural brokers have become increasingly of interest in the worlds of policy.

Understanding NGOs

The term “NGO” is a relatively new one, despite the fact that various forms of voluntary, non-profit or charitable organization have long existed across most societies. The acronym NGO dates back to the establishment of the United Nations (UN) system in 1945, when it denoted observer status in UN processes that was given to selected international non-state actors. This was a precise usage, but “NGO” has since become a somewhat vague term used in both broad and narrow senses. It can refer to diverse groups, from small community-based organizations to larger increasingly professionalized types of agency. This includes international NGOs, national developing country organisations, and local level grassroots membership or self-help organisations. NGO is often used interchangeably with “voluntary”, “non-profit”, “civil society”, and

david lewis article

294 david lewis | understanding the role of non-government organizations

“community-based” organization, each of which has distinctive cultural and ideological roots. At its narrowest, NGO can be used to mean the sub-group of third sector organizations working in development and primarily funded by the international aid system.1

Definitions of NGOs can therefore pose something of a challenge, since there are different ones that variously focus on NGOs’ legal characteristics (the nature of an organization’s formal registration status within a particular context), economic characteristics (its source of resources) or functional characteristics (the types of activities that it undertakes). For the past decade or so Salamon and Anheier’s2 “structural/operational” comparative international definition of the non-profit organization has given some basic help in this task by emphasising an organisation’s observable features, suggesting five crucial characteristics: it needs to be formal, that is, institutionalized with regular meetings; private in being institutionally separate from government (though it may get resources from government); non-profit distributing, with any financial surplus generated not accruing to owners or directors; self-governing and managing its own affairs; and finally voluntary, and even if volunteers are not used as such, a degree of voluntarism in the management of the organization, such in the form of a voluntary board.

Although NGOs themselves are not new, their activities were largely invisible in international development discourses until the middle of the 1980s. At this point they were “discovered” and courted by two interest different groups. First were those who, disillusioned with the lack of results obtained from mainstream development organisations and projects around the developing world, began to herald NGOs as independent thinkers capable of developing alternative radical development approaches. NGOs were linked into emerging rights, citizenship and “civil society” ideas. Second were the ascendant neoliberals, who began celebrating NGOs as private, non-state actors that could play useful roles within the privatisation agendas that were now being rolled out around the world.

NGOs as brokers, entrepreneurs and intermediaries

Alongside the emphasis on NGOs as organizations that could implement policies and activities in new and improved ways, there was implicit in the attraction of both these groups the idea also of NGOs as “intermediaries” or “brokers”. The idea of brokerage has traditionally carried both positive and negative connotations in development and policy circles.

The Manchester School of anthropology contributed to the work of development sociologist Norman Long3 which focused attention not only on the structural characteristics of development processes and institutions nut also on “the responses and lived experiences of the variously located and

1 D. Lewis, Non-Governmental Organizations, Management and Development. London, 2014.2 L. Salamon & H. Anheier, “In search of the non-profit sector: in search of definitions”, Voluntas 13:2,

1992, p. 125-152.3 N. Long, Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London, 2001, p. 14-15.

295volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 293-298

affected social actors” involved in development interventions. Long has for many years drawn attention within development studies to the importance of taking an “actor-oriented perspective” to the study of development activities. Drawing on the interactionist tradition of British anthropology, he developed an influential set of ideas about the importance of brokers and networks based on an anthropological understanding of social relationships “as the outcome of face-to-face interaction between particular individuals who are engaged in a series of transactions that evolve over time.”4 This was later elaborated into the idea of the productive power of knowledge “interfaces”, seen as critical points of intersection between different social fields, domains or lifeworlds where social discontinuities based on differences in values, social interests and power are found.5

In the context of the sub-field of development NGOs, it has long been claimed that such organizations bring a flexibility and agility to processes that when dominated by government institutions often remain bureaucratic and monolithic. NGOs were seen as functioning as flexible actors that could build relationships with communities in ways that were often beyond the capacities of mainstream government structures and institutions, either because these were mired in clientelism and patronage, or because organizational structures were highly rigid. Thomas Carroll’s6 influential work on NGOs in Latin America highlighted their intermediary or “bridging” roles in development. This multi-country study of NGO work alongside government and farmers presented a positive view of intermediaries rather than exploitative “middlemen” as organizations offering “outside independent and sympathetic assistance and with a support structure that provides both vertical power linkages and horizontal networks of civil engagement.” (p. 181)

NGOs have also come to be viewed as a sub-set of the wider “third sector”, a term used to refer to those organizations or groups that are neither formally part of government nor business. Within the overall framework of policy, NGOs may deliver services, sometimes in partnership with government or business, or they may contribute to the formation of policies themselves, either directly by participating in agenda setting and framing, or indirectly by working at community level to build demand from local citizens for change or for better implementation. This has produced a view of NGOs as “policy entrepreneurs” in which organizations play important roles within policy processes, since policy is not a merely technical process but a socially mediated one that is instead constituted by processes of “dialectical argumentation and persuasion”.7 NGO roles are part of the relationships that they are able to build and maintain with citizens and other stakeholders, and “the normative values and social visions that they seek to actualize.” Within Adil Najam’s model of policy entrepreneurship, NGOs are seen as playing four main interlinked roles – as

4 N. Long, An Introduction to the Sociology of Development. London, 1977, p. 177.5 Idem, p. 177.6 T.F. Carroll, Intermediary NGOs: The Supporting Link in Grassroots Development. Hartford, 1992.7 A. Najam, “Citizen organizations as policy entrepreneurs”, in: D. Lewis (ed.), International Perspectives

on Voluntary Action: Reshaping the Third Sector. London, 1999, p. 147.

296 david lewis | understanding the role of non-government organizations

monitors, advocates, innovators and service providers, while policy processes are staged into agenda setting, policy development and policy implementation – any which or all may be open to the four NGO roles described.

Finally, the perspective on brokerage and translation in development outlined by Mosse and Lewis8 builds further on these perspectives. It focuses on the multiplicity of interactions produced by decentralising and denationalising imperatives of neoliberalism, and in which a range of meanings and identities are under constant negotiation. Here the idea of translation is added to the concept of brokerage, drawing on Bruno Latour’s work, in order to reveal more of the process of construction of policy worlds and development practices. In this perspective brokerage is seen as concerned as much with representations and identities as with material resources: “Brokers deal in people and information not only for profit in the narrow sense of immediate reward, but also more broadly in the maintenance of coherent representations of social realities and in the shaping of their own identities.” (p. 16)

NGOs are actors positioned at the interface of the making of development worlds, and Latour’s concept of translation within actor network theory helps us to understand how the heterogeneous range of people, ideas, and objects involved in development encounters interact to produce coherent ordered representations of social reality.

Case example and discussion

The case of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s (AKTC) work in Stone Town in Zanzibar illustrates the productive potential of NGO type organizations operating as skilled intermediaries within local and national community development processes. Stone Town possesses a unique and complex mix of African, Arab, Indian and European cultural influences that are embodied in both tangible and intangible forms of heritage and contemporary social and economic relationships. It is a World Heritage site containing a wealth of significant buildings and public spaces.

As part of the organisation’s activities around the restoration of Stone Town, innovative work was carried out first on the restoration of the town’s historic Old Dispensary building and later on the sixty-year old Forodhani Park. The aim was to both improve local infrastructure and to enable people, particularly those with less secure livelihoods, to feel proud of their culture and community by “preserving a unique heritage and use of open space.”9

Within what is now an extremely densely populated heritage site, the local waterfront park area provided a much needed public space for six decades. Originally known as Jubilee Gardens, the park contains a diverse range of trees and plants, and attracts both locals and tourists in large numbers. It serves as a much-needed public space, as a meeting place, a leisure facility and a place where a range of civil discourse and interaction takes place. The

8 D. Lewis and D. Mosse (eds.), Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield CT, 2006.

9 Agka Khan Trust for Culture, The Revitalization of Forodhani Park. Project Brief. Geneva, 2008.

297volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 293-298

park is also economically significant for local livelihoods. There are local businesses, including street-food vendors and informal sector traders who sell tourist paraphernalia. By the 1990s, however, Forodhani Park (as it later became known) had fallen into a state of disrepair. There had been little proper maintenance carried out by local authorities, and the area’s capacity and role as a public, civic space was being gradually eroded and displaced by private interests.

Taking a view that “not only can public spaces be self-sustaining, but they can be catalysts for economic and social development and overall positive change” AKTC decided to build on the earlier work in Zanzibar to embark on the comprehensive rehabilitatation of Forodhani Park as part of Stone Town’s heritage. From 2001 the project focused on a wide range of activities including the restoration of the park’s walkways and landscaping, the park’s associated infrastructure (including sewage, lighting and drains), providing support for local small enterprises including street vendors, and re-extending public space in the park to improve its utilization as civic amenity and its visibility as cultural heritage. In this way the intervention created new jobs and stimulated the local economy (particularly in the informal sector), improved the state of local civic amenities, and also contributed to the overall strengthening of the profile of Zanzibar as a tourist destination. The subsequent challenge has been to build a sustainable future for the park among the various public, private and civic stakeholders who use it.

AKTC had worked in Zanzibar since 1989, undertaking several successful projects including the restoration of the Old Dispensary (now known as the Stone Town Cultural Centre), the Customs House, and Kelele Square. Over time partnerships were built with local actors such as the Government of Zanzibar and international actors such the Ford Foundation. Part of this work involved designing and implementing training sessions for almost a hundred people to improve conservation practice and the traditional construction methods used by craftsmen, builders and Government workers. By then restoring a number of local buildings that were on the point of collapse, it became possible to demonstrate a set of preservation techniques that could be used to preserve the site, and to generate rehabilitated housing stock where more than fifty poor local households could also be re-housed. Other non-governmental actors have supported these efforts within an integrated approach, including the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (converting sea front buildings into the Zanzibar Serena Inn) and the Foundation (strengthening local health and education services).

Consultation and observation carried out by AKTC was also useful in identifying local needs for better forms of social housing, more available work for people engaged in traditional crafts, and jobs for small traders. The result of conslutations and information gathering was that “it became clear to all parties that an important part of the patrimony of Stone Town was in need of revitalization.” In addition to providing financial resources, an important part of the work was that of intermediation based on trust between a complex set of local stakeholders including local community members, the government, local authorities, small traders, local civil society groups.

298 david lewis | understanding the role of non-government organizations

It is of course important to note that such work would be unlikely to be successful when undertaken by outside NGOs with little familiarity with an area. This work was underpinned by a long historical relationship between the organization and the area, and by a deep understanding of the cultural context. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and its institutional predecessors have had a presence in Tanzania and Zanzibar for more than a century. The relationship began formally in 1905 with the establishment of the first Aga Khan Girls School in Zanzibar. Later, in recognition of AKDN’s record of commitment to supporting the country, the government signed an Agreement of Co-operation in 1991. With the agreement renewed in 2001, AKDN had achieved a position from which to make significant contributions to Tanzania’s planned policy and development agendas across the economic, social and cultural spheres. For example, the agency’s other work has included rural development interventions in Lindi and Mtwara regions, provision of healthcare and nursing education inputs in Dar es Salaam, and the rehabilitation of infrastructure and public space in Stone Town.

Conclusion

This brief article has sketched out a conceptual framework for understanding and utilizing the NGO role as intermediary organizations with the potential to make productive contribution to the challenges in improving efforts to safeguard Intangible Cultural Heritage. Beginning with an overview of the complex definitional and operational worlds of the non-governmental sector, the discussion then moved to the anthropological field of brokerage and policy in which NGOs increasingly play important roles. Finally, the paper moved from brokerage as an analytical framework to explore normative concerns an draws briefly on an example of an intervention that combines both tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage. Using actor-network theory, these constituent parts can be seen to be made up of a diverse set of actants through which representation of social and cultural life are constructed and maintained. While it is important to note the diversity of NGO capacities and knowledge and the need to avoid essentialized views of such organizations, it is argued that NGOs and NGO-type organizations can be viewed as potentially agile intermediaries, capable of brokering ideas and representations that can contribute usefully to the strengthening of ICH.