The idea of a "New Policy Agenda" implies that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have comparative advantages as deliverers of services and promoters of democracy. As the Agenda reshapes the relationship between NGOs and donors, is it enabling NGOs to become effective mediators on behalf of the marginalised? Have new forms of NGO engagement with policy-makers secured promised benefits for the poor?

A report from the University of Bath’s Centre for Development Studies expands our understanding of the role of NGOs in policy processes through an ethnographic study of land redistribution in Bangladesh. Qualifying the naive assumptions often associated with the promotion of NGOs, the author shows that while there is strong evidence that more land was redistributed to the poor as a result of NGO involvement, mechanisms for doing so were neither inclusive nor egalitarian.

In 1987 Bangladesh’s Land Ministry launched the Land Reforms Action Programme, an initiative to distribute khas – unoccupied state-owned land – to landless families. A novel element of the land reform was the establishment within the Ministry of a Land Reform Cell (LRC) predominantly made up of staff from NGOs working on issues of agrarian reform. Feeding into LRC’s work was a coalition of some sixty NGOs which has helped spawn the NGO sectoral co-ordination groups found throughout Bangladesh today.

The author describes how:

• The LRC constituted one of the first opportunities for NGOs to wield central power and out-manoeuvre entrenched local elites.
• While some NGOs were enthusiastic about the new opportunity there was a deep sense of anxiety that they might be co-opted by an authoritarian regime using land redistribution to legitimise its rule.
• Opposition parties, peasant groups and excluded NGOs denounced the mainly NGO-based LRC members as government stooges.
• The Government’s Land Reforms Action Programme was precariously dependent on personal relations between individuals in the Ministry and in NGOs.
• Hampered by the lack of updated and reliable maps, falsified land deeds and a low level of technical support, the Land Reforms Action Programme redistributed only 40 per cent of the available identified khas land.
• The new government which took power in 1991 replaced the khas distribution programme and favoured a completely new set of NGOs, most with elite connections.

The Land Reforms Action Programme may have generally been a disappointment, but things were different in an area where an NGO supported by Oxfam put itself at the forefront of the landless farmers’ struggle. Due to the NGO’s participation landless farmers were not only able to take actual possession of land allocated to them by the state, but were also able to retain ownership in the face of opposition from local elites long accustomed to controlling the distribution and use of khas.

Closer inspection reveals, however, that some landless farmers were favoured over others in the actual distribution of khas. This introduces an important note of caution to the ongoing study of NGOs. The non-egalitarian, discriminatory and exclusive nature of policy processes in Bangladesh is so entrenched that NGOs may find themselves partially implicated in the reproduction of inequality.

Wider implications of the study suggest that:

• Support from international NGOs is significant in achieving access for local NGOs to national policy networks and in allowing them to build farmers’ coalitions around principles of unity, co-operation and solidarity rather than patron-client relationships.
• The process by which some poor households are excluded is neither random nor accidental – NGOs risk creating new forms of exclusion and bias.
• When the poor move away from allegiance to elite patrons, and profess new loyalties to NGOs, there may be little change in their compliant and client-based behaviour.
• We should not assume that the new prominence of NGOs necessarily leads to changes in the underlying institutional structures of society.

Source(s):
‘Ethnography of a policy process: a case study of land redistribution in Bangladesh’ by Joseph Devine, Public Administration and Development, No 22, pp403-414. 2002 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 5 January 2004

Further Information:
Joseph Devine
Centre for Development Studies
Department of Economics and International Development
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
UK

Tel: 44 (0) 1225 383539
Fax: 44 (0) 1225 383423
Contact the contributor: J.Devine@bath.ac.uk

Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath

Other related links:
Report on NGO's and land reform in Bangaladesh (1998)

NGO effectiveness - ACFOA

NGO Policy Influence in sub-Saharan Africa

'Needs for land and agrarian reform in Bangladesh'