Local NGOs in national development: The case of East Timor

NGOs’ survival and development, and identifies some strategies which the NGOs
themselves identified as useful in helping them attain these. It also identifies some
areas, notably relating to community development and organisational management,
which they found challenging and where more capacity development may have been
valuable.
Finally the study reflects on the actual experiences of Timorese NGOs compared to
theory and experiences elsewhere relating to democracy, development and
peacebuilding. It finds that NGOs played a supportive role in the transition to
democracy, contributed to democratic consolidation by strengthening the state in a
number of ways, but had little leverage to hold the government to account. Their
efforts to make democracy more responsive to the development needs of the people
were thwarted to some degree by the centralist nature of decision making and the very
limited resources and capacities of the government itself. Government-NGO
collaboration occurred primarily in areas where pre-existing relationships provided a
basis of trust. NGOs were active in many areas of development, largely with
international NGO and donor funding, but official donor support was declining rapidly
towards the end of the study and the sustainability of even well established NGOs was
an open question. NGOs also made a contribution to managing local conflicts and
building a culture of human rights, but the violence which erupted in 2006, after the
study concluded, was beyond their scope. The findings, which emphasise the changing
relationship of the new state to its citizens, suggest that the civil society and
development practice, which has been strongly based on de Tocqueville’s approach to
civil society, is not particularly helpful in a post-conflict setting. Instead, an adapted
Gramscian approach, viewing civil and political society as interrelated sites in which a
struggle to embed non-violent means of apportioning power is being waged could be of
greater analytic and practical value.
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