Doing things differently?

Membership-based organisations of the poor (MBOPs) are not a new phenomenon. However, the interest in the potential contribution they can make to the task of advancing the cause of poor people has recently been renewed, and is growing. The timing of this resurgent interest is worth noting. For the past 15 to 20 years, large amounts of money, resources and energy have been invested in supporting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) throughout the world. However, the anticipated ‘associational revolution’ (Salamon 1994) linked to NGOs has not occurred and the desired impact at a relevant scale has not materialised. We have therefore entered a period in which development practitioners, activists and scholars have had to revise strategies, and think hard on how, and in which direction to proceed. Part of this revision has led to a renewed interest in organisational forms that were mostly overlooked during the period when NGOs were held to be the ne plus ultra of civil society approaches to poverty eradication and development (Kanbur 2001). With a more realistic understanding of the limits of NGO led interventions, the search is now on for new or complementary alternatives. The focus on MBOPs cannot be divorced from this search. ¹