| Humanitarian relief NGOs like Doctors without Borders, CARE, or Oxfam today play a materially and symbolically important role in the global order. Since the end of the cold war high hopes have been associated with these NGOs as providing the path to a more democratic and more effective approach to solving social problems on a global scale. Critics see them as simply a tool of interested governments. There has not been much empirical research on how they do their work. Based on semi-structured interviews with desk officers in 18 of the largest western-based humanitarian relief NGOs, I argue that these agencies form an institutional space of shared practice that mediates between values, outside problems, and outside interests on the one hand and outcomes on the other. Relief agencies have one primary product, 'the project'. The pursuit of the good project shapes the allocation of resources and the kind of activities we see, and it does so relatively independently of beneficiaries' preferences and needs. Agencies sell projects in a quasi market, in which donors are consumers. The project is a commodity and with that those helped, beneficiaries, become a commodity, marketed to and chosen by donors. While most critical approaches to global governance emphasize the coherence of global power and assume a form of direct domination exercised on oppressed subjects through states and NGOs, I find that humanitarian relief has a logic of its own. Both positive effects and power exercised need to be understood in the context of the indirect domination mediated by the market for projects. |
