ABSTRACT
NGOs are seen to have a central role in development practice, but the question that remains unanswered, and probably never can be answered, is: what role (or roles) should this be? This is not a new question; ever since NGOs as institutional forms came to have a role in social development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments have seen them as service providers, while the NGOs' supporters have seen them as advocates for social change. For example, William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement, and the host of other social service organizations he was associated with, were devoted to both social service and social change. Two hundred years later, little has changed, with the same old debates continuing as to what roles NGOs should have, and how they can be effective. This book proposes to move the debate forward by looking at the factors that make NGOs' work effective, and the issues that NGOs face in meeting these requirements. In this book I will look at local NGOs in southern India as a case study, as they are well established, have a strong social change focus mainly through women's empowerment programmes, and are undergoing rapid structural change as a result of India's rapidly growing economy and the related change in their funding sources.
