NGO Afterlives

Abstract Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today have an unclear, sometimes ambiguous status. How are we to make sense of all this? As panaceas for a range of problems, in both humanitarian and development fields, the NGO idea died—but it did not do so completely, and neither has it entirely faded away. Ideas and approaches that NGOs once helped to originate live on—such as participation, empowerment, and microcredit—but in new or changed forms. Paradoxically, while the term NGO itself may be increasingly shunned by many groups and organizations, it has gained a firmer place in the everyday vocabulary among publics in both the Global South and the Global North. In this special issue, we explore these paradoxes through a conceptual framework that we term the “NGO afterlife.” Despite these various kinds of “deaths,” both the NGO form and the NGO idea continue to influence social life at local, national, and international levels, and in a variety of ways. The afterlives perspective offers a distinctive view of transformation in which entanglements of past and present continue to influence how NGOs are seen within the local and international landscapes of activism, policy, and development, and shape internal organizational strategies and subjectivities of those involved.