Borders among Activists

International NGOs in the United States, Britain, and France

Sarah S. Stroup

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801464720
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Borders among Activists, Sarah S. Stroup challenges the notion that political activism has gone beyond borders and created a global or transnational civil society. Instead, at the most globally active, purportedly cosmopolitan groups in the world—international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs)—organizational practices are deeply tied to national environments, creating great diversity in the way these groups organize themselves, engage in advocacy, and deliver services.

Stroup offers detailed profiles of these "varieties of activism" in the United States, Britain, and France. These three countries are the most popular bases for INGOs, but each provides a very different environment for charitable organizations due to differences in legal regulations, political opportunities, resources, and patterns of social networks. Stroup's comparisons of leading American, British, and French INGOs—Care, Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and FIDH—reveal strong national patterns in INGO practices, including advocacy, fund-raising, and professionalization. These differences are quite pronounced among INGOs in the humanitarian relief sector, and are observable, though less marked, among human rights INGOs.

Stroup finds that national origin helps account for variation in the "transnational advocacy networks" that have received so much attention in international relations. For practitioners, national origin offers an alternative explanation for the frequently lamented failures of INGOs in the field: INGOs are not inherently dysfunctional, but instead remain disconnected because of their strong roots in very different national environments.

1

Varieties of Activism in Three Countries

Upon arriving in Paris in early 2007, I was greeted by a vivid illustration of French civil society in action. Blocks away from my apartment, lining the canal Saint-Martin, two neat columns of bright red tents had been set up by an organization calling itself “the Children of Don Quixote.” The organization had created this “sleep-in” in to demonstrate solidarity with France’s homeless population. Given the relatively small number of homeless in France relative to the United States, I was struck by the vibrancy of this public protest and by the fact that it was an INGO, Médecins du Monde, that had initiated the idea of giving tents to the French homeless.1 These protests in early 2007 had practical consequences—homelessness became a substantive issue in the 2007 presidential election—but also embodied a particular variety of activism.

In this chapter, I explore the different “varieties of activism” in France, the United States, and Britain so that in later chapters we can examine how each national environment shapes the specific practices of the world’s leading humanitarian and human rights INGOs. The domestic environments of INGOs are highly institutionalized settings where INGOs encounter resource flows, regulations, and values that are firmly established and have remained resilient in the face of globalization. I pay particular attention to these national environments since the early 1990s, as this is the period during which greater global integration should have transformed the operations of internationally active organizations, but this chapter also draws upon historical detail to show the deep roots of national institutions. National environments are of course neither static nor isolated. Still, while it is important to understand how national environments evolve over time, it is also important to recognize that, in cross-national perspective, these environments remain quite different.

There are several layers of the national environment that together create an institutionalized field. First, there are broad national political institutions and cultures that define the appropriate roles of state and society. Second, each country has a narrower charitable sector that has its own particular regulations and customs. Last, there is the even finer category of internationally oriented charities. These organizations are governed by charity law but are also shaped by other factors, including national foreign policy institutions, particular social networks of internationally interested citizens, and even a country’s colonial history. Together, these layers create for INGOs an institutionalized field in which organizations “participate in the same meaning systems, are defined by similar symbolic processes, and are subject to common regulatory processes” (Scott 1994, 71).

The United States, Britain, and France are home to many of the world’s richest, largest, and most internationally active INGOs. And while all three are Western industrialized democracies with vibrant civil societies, INGOs in each country encounter vastly different settings. To understand the “varieties of activism” in the three countries, I utilize several existing literatures that have been largely neglected by NGO analysts. Valuable information comes from cross-national studies of nonprofit organizations, such as the Johns Hopkins University Comparative Nonprofit Sector project led by Lester Salamon. This ambitious undertaking has all the normal frustrations of gathering comparable data but offers rich and explicitly comparative country studies of the resource base and regulatory environment for the nonprofit sector. Another useful source for information on charities comes from the comparative civil society literature, which may have many touchstones but none more important than the work of Robert Putnam. If the Johns Hopkins project offers information on charities as organizations, the civil society literature provides insight into the underlying social values through comparative explorations of political culture, trust, and social capital.

In each country, there is a distinct subfield of international charities, but this is firmly embedded in a larger charitable sector. This is an important point for understanding the relationship between an INGO and its environment. Institutionalists of many stripes have long recognized that an organization’s early entry into a new field may carry with it certain “first mover” advantages that allow the organization a very wide array of choices, while latecomers enter into a fairly rigid environment.2 Thus, one might argue that the earliest INGOs like Amnesty International or CARE were innovators in the new fields of transnational human rights activism and international development and may have themselves defined what these fields would look like. While this may be true at the global level, it is not true at the national level. Amnesty International and CARE entered well-established charitable fields in their home countries when they were created; they may have been transnational first movers, but they were most definitely not the first American or British charities.

The present chapter fleshes out the fascinating differences among the national charitable sectors in the United States, Britain, and France. Following sociological institutionalism, I argue that both regulative material pressures and constitutive normative pressures are important for understanding an organization’s environment. Thus, I examine four dimensions of the charitable sector in each country: the regulatory environment, the political opportunity structure, material resources, and the way in which social networks locate international charities within society. I then explain how these four dimensions are both product and producer of different logics of appropriateness for charities. In sum, “doing good” for others has fundamentally different meanings in the United States, Britain, and France—meanings that internationally oriented charities carry with them when they move around the globe.

United States: INGOs Doing the Job Right

The United States is a natural place to start to understand nonprofit organizations and charitable work. The fascination with the American charitable sector, which is alternately called the “voluntary,” “nonprofit,” “third,” or “independent” sector, is expressed not only in popular discourse but in scholarship, as there are arguably more studies of nonprofit organizations in the United States than in any other country worldwide. The American nonprofit sector is also the world’s largest: the combined income of nonprofits accounts for about 8% of the American economy, larger than the gross national product of all but ten nations worldwide (Salamon 1999b; Hammack 2002). The state-society relationship in the United States has informed the popular conception of civil society as an autonomously organized sphere that both solves social problems and checks the power of the state. The popular myth of American civil society as independent and antistate is actually somewhat disconnected from real practice. Despite a deep-seated suspicion of government in the United States, the “autonomous” charitable sector relies heavily on government support (Watt 1991; Hammack 2002). In addition, the idea that nonprofits operate as a third sector separate from the market and the state is also inaccurate: the government has increasingly relied on nonprofits for service delivery, and nonprofits compete with and incorporate management tools from the commercial world (Light 2000; Ott 2001).

Internationally oriented charities are only a fraction of the vast American charitable sector, though they make up a large proportion of the global INGO community. International charities account for only 1.5% of the total expenses of all American charities, but this was the fastest growing subsector between 1992 and 2005 with an increase in revenues of over 240%.3 A 2006 study from the Urban Institute uses Internal Revenue Service data to construct a detailed profile of the American INGO sector. Authors Elizabeth Reid and Janelle Kerlin (2006) report that nearly 5,600 nonprofits work in international affairs, three-quarters of which are INGOs that actively work abroad in development and assistance.4 Of these, 1,200 work in international relief, while another 300 organizations work on human rights and democracy. The behavior and identity of these INGOs are to a large extent determined by the fact that the United States offers a friendly regulatory environment, a fragmented government willing to work with charities, a wealth of material resources, and social networks that reach into the corporate world.

Regulatory Environment

In the United States, private charitable enterprises have received protection from the state since Daniel Webster famously argued Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) before the Supreme Court. Over the past century, the relative ease of establishing a nonprofit organization and the accompanying legal protections have encouraged substantial growth in the nonprofit sector (Hammack 2002; Hall and Burke 2002). In the United States, “charity” is a legal definition encompassing groups with tax status as 501(c)3 organizations, a much narrower category than nonprofit organizations in general. American charities are required to file detailed annual reports with federal authorities (per the 1969 Tax Reform Act) and to provide three years of annual returns to individuals upon request (per the 1996 Taxpayer Bill of Rights). Still, charity oversight is weak in the United States. The subdivision of the Internal Revenue Service in charge of charity oversight has not been well funded by Congress.5

American charities benefit from two tax advantages that have been in place since the late nineteenth century. Like most charities around the world, they are exempt from income tax, but they also benefit from a generous tax exemption for donors on contributions.6 While the United States and the Britain both have tax regimes that encourage individual charitable giving, the United States is unique in several respects. First, American tax exemptions on charitable giving have existed for a century, whereas in Britain tax relief is relatively recent. Also, American donors can receive tax relief on noncash donations (including automobiles, computers, and cell phones) as well as on cash contributions. Finally, most charitable contributions in the United States are planned donations at the end of the year rather than spontaneous ones, which may help explain why the average size of donations in the United States is much larger than in Britain (Charities Aid Foundation 1994).

There is one important restriction on American charities, in the realm of political activity. According to federal law, “no substantial part” of a charity’s activities can involve “carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation,” though charities may engage in limited lobbying activities (Joint Committee on Taxation 2005).7 In addition, charities cannot use federal funds for lobbying and political activities. The restrictions surrounding political activities by charities have been tightened since the mid-1990s, and although some of the most restrictive legislation has failed to pass, the battle “has put a chill on at least some nonprofit engagement in policy deliberations and has left nonprofits that choose to engage in policy advocacy with considerably expanded paperwork burdens” (Grønbjerg and Salamon 2002, 465).

There have been several responses to these restrictions. Organizations like Independent Sector and the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest were expressly created to support political activity by charities. They argue that the tight restrictions prevent these organizations from fulfilling their missions as public benefit organizations (Salamon 1999b, 20). Other charities have asserted their independence by refusing to seek or accept government funds. The most common response, however, has been to avoid political action. The exact effects of these restrictions are difficult to discern, as there are few comparative studies that offer insight into the levels of advocacy work across all nonprofits or among charities (though see Child and Grønbjerg 2007). In a study of national and local nonprofits, Chaves et al. (2004, 297) find that “it is common for nonprofit executives and board members to believe that accepting government funding legally restricts their political activity more than it actually does,” even though some organizations receive government funding and still engage in political activity. Cumulative statistics on lobbying by 501(c)3 organizations reveal that no more than 2% of all American charities reported any spending on lobbying in the 1990s (Boris and Krehely 2002, 303–4). Lobbying is not the only form of advocacy, but it is difficult to find sector-wide statistics on other advocacy activities. A few sectors—environment, civil rights, social action—show high levels of political activism, but some of the m...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Where Have All the Borders Gone?
• 1 Varieties of Activism in Three Countries
• 2 Humanitarian INGOs
• 3 Human Rights INGOs
• 4 Reconciling Global and Local
• Appendix A Case Selection
• Appendix B Interviews Conducted
• References