SUMMARYUnder the new aid approach, nongovernmental development organizations (NGOs) are expected to move from "delivery" (service delivery projects) to "leverage" (lobbying and advocacy). In line with this international tendency, the Belgian government has signed a pact with the NGO sector in which a move away from delivery and toward leverage is being proposed. Given that Belgian NGOs are heavily dependent on government funding and strongly oriented toward the "delivery" model, this pact implies that a number of NGOs will have to undergo organizational changes. This article shows that there is a major cleavage in the NGO landscape in Belgium. Some organizations clearly favor the leverage, whereas others prefer the delivery roles. Those that are more dependent on government funding tend to incline toward the leverage orientation. The attitudinal orientation toward the leverage model however does not imply that organizations are effectively willing and able to change. A number of identity and legitimacy concerns are perceived by NGOs to be important sources of organizational inertia.
Many national water policies propagate community-based participatory approaches to overcome weaknesses in supply-driven rural water provision, operation, and maintenance. Citizen involvement is thought to stimulate bottom-up accountability and broaden the information base, which may enrich design and implementation processes and foster improved water accessibility and sustainability. Practices on the ground, however, are embedded in socio-political realities which mediate possible beneficial effects of participatory approaches. This paper builds on full social network data collected in a Ugandan village to study the social and political reality of two distinct levels of participation, i.e. local information sharing among citizens and a more active appeal to fellow citizens to improve water services. We use Logistic Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure to explore what type of actor and network traits influence information sharing and whether the same factors are in play in the demand for action to remedy water-related problems. Whereas social aspects (social support relations) and homophily (using the same water source, the same gender) play an important role in information sharing, it is the educational level, in particular, of the villager who is called upon that is important when villagers demand action. Our findings also demonstrate that those most in need of safe water do not mobilize their information sharing ties to demand for action. This indicates that building local water policies and practice exclusively on locally existing demand for action may fail to capture the needs of the most deprived citizens.
While community-based monitoring is becoming increasingly commonplace, evidence as to its functioning remains inconsistent. Based on Ugandan village network and survey data, this article studies community-based monitoring from a social-capital and perceived-efficacy perspective. From a social-capital perspective, the prospects for community-based monitoring look promising as there is a high social-capital stock and an efficient information-sharing network galvanizing information for a few key individuals. The dominant efficacy profiles are also encouraging as there is an abundance of ‘followers’ (with high belief in collective capabilities) and some ‘leaders’ for collective action (with high belief in individual and collective capabilities). And yet, few community-based monitoring activities are undertaken. Our article shows that only the intersection of both theoretical lenses explains the underperformance in community-based monitoring, as those actors who are central in the information-sharing network do not have a ‘leadership’ efficacy profile while those who are ‘leaders’ are not central in the village information network.
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