Dear Aseem and colleagues Congratulations on your excellent article in the WP. But please can I suggest that we all pause before fixing this narrative of the Oxfam crisis?
I am not for one second condoning the behaviour of the staff in Haiti, nor Oxfam’s economy of the truth in reporting it. But I do want to stress how the story about Oxfam, and the recent flurry of added allegations about the aid sector, have come at a time in the UK when there is a very clear campaign to discredit overseas aid. The UK passed a law in 2015 to make it a legal requirement to spend 0.7 percent of GNP on overseas aid, which has been vigorously opposed by the same politicians and newspapers who have fought to leave the EU. Many analysts believe that reducing trust in one of the oldest brands associated with international aid is an effective route to influencing public debate about aid along those same libertarian lines. Your article asks: "Why do nonprofit organizations behave in unprincipled ways?” That’s a very good question. But I think we also have to ask “What are the influences on the information we receive about nonprofits?” and “Do other sectors get the same scrutiny?” I suggest we need to be more cautious about how to interpret this widespread criticism of the aid sector before assuming the stories are facts, and that the lessons are clear. Best regards Tim F Professor, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science On 19 Feb 2018, at 18:32, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> wrote: Colleagues: Several scholars on this list study nonprofits/NGOs and have written on governance failures. The article we published on the Oxfam scandal in the Washington Post/Monkey Cage Today might interest them: The Oxfam scandal shows that, yes, nonprofits can behave badly. So why aren’t they overseen like for-profits? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/19/the-oxfam-scandal-shows-that-yes-nonprofits-can-behave-badly-so-why-arent-they-overseen-like-for-profits/?utm_term=.2c52a0e35df4 The civic sector plays an important role in the contemporary society.Yet, the Oxfam scandal (and other scandals that are now getting revealed as well as the cover-up at Oxfam since 2011 of the Haiti episode) raises serious questions about our theoretical understanding of the NGO/nonprofit sector. Yes, this is not the first scandal. Nevertheless, if a moral leader such as Oxfam has serious governance failures, we should seriously examine our conception of the NGO/NPO sector -- with the intent to reform it. To do so, we need to study both the successes and failures of NPO/NGO governance. Aseem ******************************************************************** Aseem Prakash Professor, Department of Political Science Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences Founding Director, UW Center for Environmental Politics 39 Gowen Hall, Box 353530 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195-3530 http://faculty.washington.edu/aseem/ http://depts.washington.edu/envirpol/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
