Introduction

This book is about understanding what shapes management ideas and practices in development non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Though it focuses on NGOs in South Africa, the issues and processes identified and described here have much wider relevance for our understanding and practice of managing NGOs within a much broader sub-Saharan African context. It is primarily about NGOs operating within the aid system and mobilizing a large part of their resources in the market for aid. Entering this market and playing the “aid game” also means they are conditioned and constrained by the prevailing “rules of the game.” Reflecting broader trends within the discourse on international development and society at large, these rules of the game, as I will argue below, reflect a particular way of thinking about and practicing management of/for development. In this regard, the book is also about the politics of aid and the asymmetric power relations that govern this arena. It gives an account of how the discourse emanating from the global governance structure of international aid affects management ideas and practices in development NGOs. Power is thus the first central theme of the book. At the same time, the book presents and discusses ways in which this dominant discourse may, to a certain degree, be resisted by the people running these organizations. Hence, the second central theme of the book is resistance in that it discusses how the hegemonic discourse is appropriated and may be resisted. The third central theme of the book is hybridity. Through an investigation of the interaction—power and resistance—that takes place at the interface between the global and the local, the emergence of hybrid management systems in development NGOs is examined. As such, this book shows how these organizations are not mere passive recipients of management knowledge, ideas and practices emanating from the global governance structure of international aid, but that they actively engage with these ideas and practices and translate and rework them through a local cultural lens. Taking the example of South African NGOs, this book aims to disentangle the complex and often contradictory forces that are at play and show how the global and the local interact to shape management ideas and practices in development NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa.