Agency, structure, and power
The problem of NGO power is closely intertwined with the elusive
relationship between agency and structure. Agential power is analytically straightforward. In our framework, as articulated in the
Introduction and this Conclusion so far, the practice of NGOing is
performed by agents, exercising agential power, even though such
agency is only possible within existing structures of meaningful action
and social fields. However, here we emphasize the structure of NGO
positioning with networks, and the more elusive nature of structural
power.
We have seen how social theories across many disciplines fail to
maintain a balance and creative tension between structure and agency.
Instead, they tend to privilege either structure or agency. In terms of
IR theory, we seek conceptual alternatives to the false dichotomy of
either affirming the agency of international organizations as autonomous from states (a common constructivist claim), or denying their
agency as the tools of states (a common realist claim). Our account of
NGO practice is intended to convey a balance between agency and
structure as mutually constitutive. An increase in one does not necessarily decrease the other. Without a structure of social relationships,
there is no agency in social reality. And without actors exercising
agency, there are no structured relationships among them. All agency
is socially situated and is discernible by the observer only by looking
from the point of view of a particular actor in a particular time and social location. Structural power is as real as agential power, but is
harder to characterize and narrate in a causal explanation.
Further research on agency power and structural power in NGO networks shows great promise. NGOs increasingly emerge as the presumptively legitimate, taken-for-granted organizational form for organizing
any political opposition or reform movement. NGO anchoring practices
are so deeply embedded in the institutional structure of world politics that
everyone assumes the answer to any new problem will include NGOs.
NGOs do not impose themselves using agential power. Instead, there is
a “structural power” that installs NGOs in the lead of any new political
movement, rather than any of the historically alternative actors or organizational forms. In this way structural power is hidden in plain sight.
Because NGOs link societal and political partners, agential and
structural dynamics enfold the partners as well. The dynamics of
structure and agency play out through a “cycle of NGO social construction” depicted in Figure 11.1. Each corner of the triangle is simultaneously agent and structure. NGOs are structure vis-à-vis the networks
they constitute, and agents constituted by their partners. The three
arrows indicate the direction of constitutive or structural power; the
power to constitute agents within social fields of taken-for-granted
organizational forms and conditions: