Book review: A. Choudry, D. Kapoor , NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects. London-New York: Zed Books, 2013
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main topic of this book is the growing professionalization, depoliticization, and demobilization of movements for social and environmental change termed "NGOization."Editors Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor adopt a critical approach toward non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by focusing on analysis referring to the dependence and/or complicity with state, market, and multilateral/international institutions.The volume includes articles adopting common assumptions about the role of NGOs in globalizing capitalist colonization territories, nature, peoples, and cultures in the early twenty-first century.This book fills the gap in the literature regarding the negative effects of NGOs.The volume includes articles by scientists, activists, and educators whose studies include themes such as economic planning, NGO evaluators, gender, ethnography, human services, food system governance, the future of democracy, social and environmental justice, capitalism, colonialism, and development assistance.Case study chapters include different geographical and political contexts such as the United States, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Philippine Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan.The book includes nine contributed chapters and a preface.Sangeeta Kamat, in the preface, discusses the synergy between neoliberalism and the rise of the NGO sector, which has an important role in the transformations of states and the economy.She shows that the basic problem of NGOs is they are the favored institutional form through which every social problem can be addressed.But this NGOization obstructs the processes of authentic democratization.Kamat underscores the perspective of the authors of the book, particularly the thesis the "NGOs belong neither to the state nor to civil society but are contested sit in the struggle between the interests of capital and people's aspirations for a just and humane world" (xi).In this context, NGOization is analyzed as an always unfinished and unstable project.Choudry and Kapoor, in the introductory chapter, seek to move beyond dominant "civil society" concepts of politics and action by critic analyses of NGOization to reconceptualize resistance against capitalism and colonialism.The editors show the limitations of building NGO typologies as well as of analyzing their relationship with governments and the private sector.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".