Many of the problems that NGOs address are generated by the same factors that make an operating environment challenging, such as weak governance, instability and conflict. Thus, in seeking to enact their missions, NGOs often work in high-risk contexts where both operational performance and the NGO organisation itself are exposed to potentially harmful dynamics. These come not just from being in proximity to hardball political games, but from the direct responses of political and politically-connected interests who see an NGO’s activities or symbolism as a challenge to their preferred status quo.

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Although NGOs have long faced risky operating environments, for a long time they were also closely aligned with a relatively cohesive international community, in terms of shared values around humanitarian principles and human rights. This provided NGOs with a degree of tacit political support which helped to mitigate pressures in specific operating environments.

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The international community, generally defined as states adhering to the rules-based international order, has been creaking. Since around 2005 there has been decreasing commitment to democratic and humanitarian principles in much of the Global South, driven by governments’ fear of dissent, and emboldened by rise of authoritarian great powers and the West’s weakening commitment during the “War on Terror”. The rise of far-right nationalist populism in the Global North intensified pressure, and with Trump’s second term, the international community seems to have finally fractured.

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NGOs now face the same challenges that they always did when working in difficult developing and transitional country environments, but without the backing of a sympathetic and influential international community. Additionally, political attitudes in HQ countries in the Global North are increasingly subject to nationalist populist influence. NGOs’ values and mainstream political values are diverging to varying degrees. This has meant increasing exposure to the kinds of pressures that used to be limited to authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian states in the Global South.

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There has always been a strong rationale for NGOs to have a capability to understand and plan for the issues that a given political context might pose. Experienced NGOs have developed much relevant capacity, but even in those cases, there is often room for more a more explicit and holistic capability to account for the NGO’s intersection with the political domain. This holds for both the country operational level, and the level of the whole organisation in the global environment.

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Harmattan does not have ready answers to NGOs’ challenges or conundrums, nor do we deign to understand NGOs’ contexts and needs better than they do. However, we can help to generate clarity, and more importantly we can support NGOs’ efforts to build their own capacity for understanding and planning for the political pressures and issues they are likely to encounter.

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Click on the Services box to see how we support NGOs. The NGO insights box leads to NGO-specific Harmattan papers.