. As Smillie (1995: 151) suggests, there is a ‘powerful public myth that development should be cheap’, which has led in some quarters to a tendency to take low NGO administrative overheads as one of the main criteria for judging success. A third reason is the fact that development NGOs may be established by people consciously searching for ‘alternatives’ to mainstream thinking, and that the subjects of management and administration, with their strong associations with the business and the public sectors, are ‘tainted ground’ for these kinds of organization