Local NGOs in national development: The case of East Timor

social mobilisation to service delivery (Edwards and Hulme 1996). At the same time,
Fisher suggests that there is a strong tendency for such organisations to ‘drift from
participatory to oligarchic political structures’ (Fisher 1997:456). Thus the question
arises of whether NGOs can be transformative, or whether they actually reproduce
existing social patterns and structures.
The idea of NGOs existing within a fluid web of internal and external relationships,
relating to funding, knowledge, people and ideas, seems to be a useful one to think
about in this study, as is Fisher’s observation that, recognising that to ‘govern is to
structure the field of possible actions of others’, NGOs may ‘emerge from, contribute
to, or challenge the moral regulation inherent in governing’ (Fisher 1997: 458). In a
new nation like East Timor, the governing institutions during the transition process, as
well as the new government itself, will structure the possibilities for others’ actions in a
significant way. Thus my approach to the study of the local NGOs in East Timor draws
particularly on Fowler’s and Fisher’s insights.
Most recently, Lewis and Opoku-Mensah (2006) urge those researching NGOs to focus
their analysis not only on organisational characteristics of NGOs but on the
environments in which they operate, and the institutional systems and policy contexts
in which they are embedded. This thesis attempts to do this. While concerned with the
broad developments relating to local NGOs in East Timor, this study focuses on the
experiences of six selected East Timorese local non-government organisations which
existed before September 1999, and which regrouped and began to respond to the very
changed conditions confronting them after the almost complete destruction of the
country. However, these are set within a wider NGO, civil society and governance
context. Five of these NGOs were operating in East Timor before the 1999 emergency;
the sixth comprised East Timorese students living in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, and
was relocated into Dili, East Timor, in late 1999.
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