Conclusion: risks of following the partners
To discover the politics of NGOs, and throw off the blinders of IR
theory that hide the politics, we have emphasized the need to study
NGO practices, in particular the two anchoring practices, using the
methodological imperative to “follow the partners” beyond the point
when the actors share and articulate common norms. This may reveal latent agendas, expose conflicts and asymmetric power relations among
members of the network, or bring to light hidden or normatively
deviant partners. These power relations coexist with cooperation in
NGO networks. But if you expose the power relations, you may lose
the cooperation.
The fundamental research challenge for NGOs is not epistemological, as some strands of constructivism argue. The core research challenges are ontological—avoiding misleading ontologies that hide the
politics or portray NGOs as clearly bounded, hard shelled bureaucracies, as well as methodological—mining data and/or getting into the
field with enough time and determination and other resources to
observe all the faces of NGO practice. Only in this way can we gain an
in-depth understanding of NGOs and their networks. A comprehensive
research agenda would ideally include:
1 designing detailed and disciplined case studies matched with large-n
comparisons;
2 conducting extended, multi-sited, and longitudinal field research;
3 educating and working with local scholars who appreciate and can
explain local actors, culture, and history;
4 incorporating multifactor explanations across a broad range of
relevant material, ideational, and institutional causes; and
5 directing attention to the details of all actors—whether state or
non-state—to their salient and latent agendas, and to the networks
in which they operate.
In this way, the partnering and bridging of NGOing, in which
NGOs simultaneously resist and embody instrumentalization by their
partners, can become the object of research, and their actual politics
and power can be understood in more detail. Norms remain important
as they proscribe and prescribe NGO action, but the accompanying
practices require far more scrutiny. Normative claims and causal
chains need to be distinguished.
The serious scholar, who recognizes the subtle, almost mesmerizing,
power of NGOs and norms to obscure the real politics from the eyes of
even seasoned observers, has a professional duty to consciously set
aside the normative lens in order simply to see the broad politics.
Then, at a certain point, the normative lens should be brought back in,
for a range of reasons including assessing the impact of one’s published
account on the ongoing politics.
At the same time, there is a countervailing risk of imagining additional “hidden partners” or “latent agendas” in the network that are not really there. Therefore, it remains important both to stay grounded
in solid empirical research, and also to acknowledge its practical and
ethical limits.
The conventional model of IR research has been dominated by the
misleading theoretical trichotomy of liberalism, realism, and constructivism, with the assumption that any particular body of evidence
must support only one perspective at the expense of the others.
Turning toward the politics of NGOs has demanded that we
attempt to transcend this false trichotomy. Instead, we seek to recognize
three kinds of things happening simultaneously in the practices of
NGOing: institutional cooperation, asymmetric power and conflict, and
the transformation of actors’ identities and material structures.
For liberals concerned about institutional cooperation, we have proposed a broader conception of institutions by illuminating the transnational networks built by bridging NGOs. For realists concerned
about power, we have revealed relationships of power and conflict in
those transnational networks that are overlooked in conventional
approaches. For constructivists concerned about international political
change, our emphasis on NGO practice enhances the power of theory
to perceive and explain the origins and reshaping of actors, both normatively and materially. By rejecting the theoretical homogenization of
actors and issue areas, we have created a broader conception of politics, particularly in networks, so that the three theoretical traditions
can complement each other to better explain the reality of NGOs, and
the variety and dynamism of world politics.