The choreographic space of constraint [Thesis].

Development NGOs on the dance floor of neoliberalism

"Doing a thesis according to me is like creating a choreography.[...]

Once the music is chosen one listens to it a lot, grasps its highlights, silences, and then all the little details that will give depth to the choreography.

Once the music is well understood, felt then we create..."

In the opening paragraphs of her acknowledgments, Justine Contorexposes her embodied and synesthetic way of looking at the creation of knowledge, specific to the doctoral exercise.

Reading dissertations is also about following the dance of the world in its great diversity: each dissertation gives you the rhythm and its path of reading.

Dancing on the stage one has chosen for oneself or on hot coals

How can a structure or an institution remain alive when everything is organized for its conformity and control?

The author answers: it can still dance.

When the type of dance is fixed, the music and choreography, it will always be possible to interpret it with its personal flavor.

But finally, if it has to dance on hot coals, another question arises: what sense would it make to do so, at the level of the structure and at the level of the professional working there.

Racins and history of cooperation

In Belgium, development NGOs have their roots in colonialism, they are also close to the social-Christian pillar of the Belgian society.

Once political decolonization was done (in 1960), development aid was entrusted to Foreign Affairs. The emergence of "cooperation" accompanied the international dynamics of political decolonization in the conceptual zone of influence of the United States.

The 1990s were a turning point for development NGOs. In 20 years, their number more than tripled globally.

On the one hand, because the generation that participated preferred this mode of engagement to that of traditional political parties and interest groups. On the other hand, because of their encouragement by neoliberal policies, with the aim of outsourcing certain state functions and professionalizing social movements.

In the late 1990s, projects, so "ambitious" that they were called "megalomaniacal," and whose relevance to local populations was questioned, led to the establishment of regulatory frameworks, and an evaluation service (the SES, Special Evaluation Service).

When the ballet is neoliberal

Parallel to this, the paradigm of "New_public_management" has imposed itself and tends to nibble away at the differences between private and public management. The latter is obliged to respond to economic modalities in tension with its founding attributions.

In this dynamic, NGOs have progressively been subjected to devices functioning as management audits, whose imperative success gives access to funding.

Thus, NGOs place themselves in the paradox of being non-governmental and claiming "ideological and action autonomy", in a context where they are framed (regulation) and financed (subsidies / grants) by the state.

In 2005, at the international level, the managerial turn took shape in the "Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness," which calls on "countries and the agencies they represent [to] increase efforts to harmonize, align and manage for results in aid, through actions that lend themselves to monitoring and the use of a set of indicators" (source: https://www.effectivecooperation.org/sites/default/files/documents/Paris%20Declaration%20-%20FRENCH.pdf).

Prescribed, abstract work and real work

This has resulted in different modalities of control. One of these, "screening" (verification) "aims to check whether and how NGOs achieve their results on the ground ".

The version implemented in 2015-2016 has received strong criticism from the field:

"Whatever you do, it's not so much about the quality of the work as it is about the quality of the management. Financial management, administrative management, partnership management, process management, risk management, management management...management here, management there. A farce we are being played."

The questionnaire is very detailed: it has 9 themes, 23 main questions and 62 sub-questions. In total, it involves answering in an often very short time questions formulated in 336 lines.

One third of the actors are excluded, either because they give up due to lack of administrative support or because they do not meet the conditions determined by the "screening." It is rather the small structures and French-speaking structures that are excluded, as opposed to the large structures and Dutch-speaking structures.

"This formalism (filling in boxes with yes/no and adding up the results) produces a quantified coding that is supposed to represent reality: but this process of abstraction results in a mental representation of reality, a fiction of it, which is denounced by NGOs on the one hand, but above all by the professionals within them. "

Disguised commodification

Even though attempts to commodify the NGO sector have so far failed in Belgium, unlike in the Netherlands and Canada for example, at the cost of accepting new control mechanisms that had previously been fought against, the Belgian NGO sector responds to a logic of commodification and competition that is increasingly prevalent.

Evaluations, rankings and hierarchies are transforming the professional practices of the structures and their workers who must respond to them in order to subsist. This process is transforming the entire sector, but not in the same way. It is a "generalized movement [that] gives rise to nodes of resistance".

The dance of development NGOs

How then have development NGOs come to dance the choreography of neoliberalism, both at the organizational level and at the level of the humans who make it up?

They have taken on four costumes:

That of the critical NGOs: these NGOs are most challenged. Small NGOs that have not passed the screening and have fragile funding. They can still regroup, but the funding thresholds to be met require regrouping with a large number of NGOs.
That of the Pragmatic NGOs: they are swimming in the middle. Critical and small in size, they have all succeeded in screening and are able to regroup to continue to exist. They dance the imposed neoliberal choreography.
That of the neo-managerial NGOs: these are most of the NGOs, the "critical mass. Many of them have gone beyond what is required in terms of neoliberal management. However, internal tensions are very strong among workers: "they put the organization and the well-being of those who compose it at risk.

That of the model NGOs: the stars of the neoliberal ballet, NGOs often of international family, valued in the media and consulted by public authorities. They all have internal management mechanisms.

This ontological choreography metamorphoses each of the actors to the rhythm of political and administrative reforms.

Image source: 8882624 from Pixabay.