ABSTRACT
Historically, non-government development assistance organizations (NGOs) based in Northern donor nations delivered assistance, primarily at the local scale, to disadvantaged communities in Southern nations. Their primary mandate was to contribute to improved quality of life for people
in those communities. However, rather than continuing to concentrate on the ‘development project’, in order to provide services like water supplies and sanitation systems, or to encourage income-generation activities and alternative livelihood strategies, increasingly NGOs have devoted their energies to advocacy campaigns. In doing so, drawing on new opportunities afforded by growth in their numbers and size and in the resources available to them, and facilitated by advances in communications technologies, NGOs have increasingly globalized, working through transnational networks to maximize their impact on global policy processes.