ABSTRACT
In the popular mind, and even for many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), ‘foreign donors’ is an undifferentiated category. The donor organizations are funded from outside the system, usually by the public or by governments, and the money is transferred from the donors to NGOs as grants, with tangible expectations in the form of conditionalities, or intangible expectations in the form of value outcomes. Since many NGOs share same donors across the world, the system more or less shares the same development strategies for NGO support. The motives of both categories of donors, though different, also converge at times because every donor is situated in a particular political and cultural context. Before 1990, bilateral donors supported civil society in one or more of the following ways: NGOs were supported as implementers and facilitators in government programmes. Foreign foundations operating in India are all grant-making foundations whose goal is to bring about a systemic change rather than to engage in merely palliative action.
