October 14, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Nonprofit organizations that advocate on behalf of the poor in the developing world often hurt those they seek to help, writes Sebastian Mallaby in Foreign Policy magazine (September-October).
The “feisty, Internet-enabled groups” strive to hold the World Bank and other international lending institutions accountable for development projects that may exploit the poor or the environment, he writes.
But the environmental and social assessments and “perfectionist safeguards” nonprofit groups insist upon drive up costs, and their campaigning sometimes leads the World Bank to pull out of projects altogether, writes Mr. Mallaby.
He points to an antipoverty project in western China supported by the bank that would have transplanted 58,000 farmers from an arid hillside to an irrigated region.
Nonprofit organizations, he says, seized on inaccurate information that the project would deluge a traditionally Tibetan area with Chinese people. Armed with this argument, the organizations found allies in Hollywood and the U.S. Congress who eventually scuttled the bank project.
The Chinese government decided to go ahead with the relocation — but without the protections the World Bank would have imposed, Mr. Mallaby writes.
“However noble many of the activists’ motives, and however flawed the big institutions’ record, this constant campaigning threatens to disable not just the World Bank but regional development banks and governmental aid groups such as the U.S. Agency for International Development,” he says.
“If this takes place, the world may lose the potential for good that big organizations offer: to rise above the single-issue advocacy that small groups tend to pursue and to square off against humanity’s grandest problems in all their hideous complexity.”
The article is available to the magazine’s subscribers at http://www.foreignpolicy.com.
