NGO insights
Papers about NGO project and organisational resilience in complex times and places.
NGO insights consist of two parts. The first is papers that we have written specifically for and about NGOs, as well papers from other contexts which which contain especially transferrable guidance (a number of other Harmattan papers might be useful too - check our Insights main page for more). The second part consists of a few samples from our past capacity-building work with NGOs. Click on a title in either section to open a paper in a separate window in PDF format.
NGO-specific and NGO-relevant practice papers
As the paper, NGOs in a Fractured World (just below) makes clear, NGOs are facing unprecedented challenges. Political risk has received limited attention within international NGOs, who tend to focus their intelligence and planning efforts on operational mission delivery as opposed to the organisation itself. This might need to change if NGOs are to remain robust enough in their own right to undertake their missions. This paper provides reference points to help guide NGOs' discussions about the merits of having an explicit political risk management capability and how it might work.
NGOs in a Fractured World - Challenges and Questions 2026
This paper looks at the implications of the new world disorder for international NGOs. Much work has been done to understand the effects on businesses, but NGOs are as just as exposed, if not more, since they have been intimately linked to the international system which is now being ushered out the door. The paper examines some of the challenges the emerging world order presents to international NGOs before suggesting some searching questions which NGOs can ask of themselves as they plan to adapt.
Managing Trade Offs in NGO Security 2025
Guidance on NGO security tends to focus on policy and procedure. That is useful, but it does not account for some of the underlying conundrums that need to be resolved in order to shape a security strategy appropriate for a specific context. This paper articulates a few trade offs and dilemmas that NGOs can face when it comes to shaping a broader approach to security, and suggests some relevant considerations in each. These are not comprehensive, but hopefully contribute to discussions on NGO security in challenging contexts where an NGO needs to balance competing imperatives and pressures.
Political Risk and Emerging Market Private Equity Impact Investing 2024
As the title of this piece suggests, it was not directly written about or for NGOs. However, the structure of the relationship between an impact investor and its investees in fragile environments is quite similar to the one between an international NGO and a local NGO partner. The paper is therefore relevant to international NGOs, even if some contextual extrapolation might be required. The paper's original summary is just below.
This paper was informed by prior experience working with EMPE firms and subsequent ruminations. The premise is that EMPE impact investing is most needed where political risk tends to be more acute, specifically complex emerging markets. Yet the sector is not particularly conversant in political risk compared to international firms which undertake operations in complex environments. The paper examines the relevance of political risk to EMPE impact investing, and sets forth a few key suggestions for political risk management. An important message herein is that investee companies can become more vulnerable to political risk because of their investee status, and this needs to be well understood and planned for by funds and managers, as well as by investees who, in many cases, could be their own best political risk managers.
Lessons from Lebanon: Political Risk Management and NGOs 2024
This paper captures learning from training conducted with local NGOs in Lebanon in April 2024. International NGOs face risk, but local ones based in fragile and high-risk countries do not have the option of leaving. They must be adroit with the tools they have, and the main one is local knowhow and connections. The paper covers both the practical matters of conducting training in a sensitive context, and what participants had to teach each other and indeed the instructor based on their experiences building and sustaining NGOs in a notoriously volatile political environment.
Political Risk Considerations for International NGOs 2019
This is an extensive discussion paper, or nearly a booklet, testing the applicability of political risk concepts and management to international NGOs. The paper conceptualises political risk in an NGO context, and distinguishes it from conventional risk management. It then examines specific, current types of socio-political challenges to NGOs at both the global organisational and country presence levels. The paper concludes with a consideration of how political risk intelligence and planning could work in both large and small NGO organisations.
International NGOs and the Challenge to Civil Society Space 2019
This paper looks at one of the predominant challenges facing NGOs in the last several years and now, the clampdown on civil society space and its corollaries of genuine democracy, human rights and civil liberties. The paper posits an interpretation of why the restrictive atmosphere arose, poses some interpretive questions for NGOs, and considers options for strategic responses to the clampdown. This is a very complex topic and even this rather long paper cannot do it justice. However, it hopefully brings a fresh angle to the collective assessment of the challenge and what NGOs could do about it.
Political Risk Management: What NGOs and Businesses Can Learn from Each Other 2019
This short paper started life as a LinkedIn piece. It is very top level but readers on both the NGO and business sides could gain from a sense of how the other deals with political risk. There are obvious reasons why they need to have a different perception of political risk, but there is considerable scope for beneficial cross-learning.
A few examples from past NGO training and workshops
This section provides some material from different training courses, both to stir thinking on a given theme and as brief illustrations of our approach. Only one of the following is an entire document, and even then it was only a supplementary module. The rest are brief excerpts. Showing full course documents is not really appropriate, since courses are often for specific organisations and hence at least partly context and client-specific. As well, these were not meant for independent self-learning, and any first encounter with a course should be a "guided experience". A final preliminary point is because of our confidentiality policy, we do not get into case specifics in document synopses, although we do try to convey the purpose and general context.
Again, click on a title to see an excerpt, which opens as a PDF in a separate window.
The organisation in challenging times
This brief excerpt came from a 2025 presentation and Q&A with an association representing community forests. Prior to the community forest programme, local communities had strictly been on the receiving end of government and big business decisions about their local natural environments. Under the programme, decision authority went to local communities, and this often resulted in a nuanced and far-sighted balance between conservation and job creation. The slides here are in the context of Trump's trade policy in his second term. US trade barriers began to threaten the lumber revenues which community forests depend on to fund conservation and to generate local jobs. This put community forests under intense pressure, and the slides here speak to organisational preparedness to handle periods of change and uncertainty.
The closing of civil society space and considerations for NGOs
This excerpt is from a 2019 political risk management workshop with members of a national NGO association. The Contents slide shows where this discussion fit within the event's first session (later on, political risk management as a process and capability became the focus). These slides are about the pervasive global clampdown on civil society, including on NGOs, and stirs discussion about how NGOs could respond. This did indeed generate considerable discussion, and in the current global context the issue is even more germane.
Stakeholder analysis for NGO interventions in sensitive contexts
The slides here are from a course on stakeholder analysis and engagement planning for an international animal welfare / anti-trafficking NGO, undertaken in 2011. The main focus was analysis towards planning the NGO's own intervention for optimal effect, but this extended to planning for potential responses towards the NGO itself. In this course, the main object of team exercises was one of the NGO's active cases, but to illustrate some of the thought processes, a hypothetical NGO doing similarly sensitive work was utilised.
Political risk management planning for local NGOs in complex environments
This is from a course for a group of local NGOs in Lebanon in 2024, wherein the focus was the NGO organisation itself, as opposed to its projects or programmes. The excerpt is about the planning step in the wider political risk management process. We do not see the prior steps that feed into planning. Those included environment assessment, scenario analysis, and stakeholder analysis, as well as thorough consideration of the NGO's fit within its socio-political and cultural context. The excerpt illustrates how the array of articulated challenges can be condensed into a more concise set of holistic issues which then form the basis for planning. This avoids fragmented, piecemeal approaches, and on a practical level it makes it much easier for a small team to keep on top of plan implementation.
This is also from the Lebanon training mentioned above. This is a complete slide set, not an excerpt. It was made on the fly one evening when it became clear that traffic and other conditions might make some participants late or require them to leave early. This "supplementary module" would give us something useful to do without leaving others behind with respect to the main course. We actually ended up using it one morning. It is a brief overview of NGO threat assessment and security, moving from concepts to analysis to approaches and planning. It also covers some dilemmas and sensitivities in NGO security. Security was a facet of the main course but was not explicitly covered, and this proved to be a useful accompaniment. Note that it was developed with small, local NGOs and a Lebanon-type environment in mind, and in some nuances it diverges somewhat from mainstream guidance. In any case, it was intended as an introductory snapshot and there was not much time for contextualisation within a larger body of knowledge.
Personnel security capacity organisational structure
Unlike the other excerpts here, this one actually came from an advisory engagement as opposed to training. The client was an international NGO based in SE Asia, with a remit to help poor communities to develop, sustain and gain from local natural resources. The engagement, conducted in 2009, was aimed at developing the outlines of an appropriate personnel security policy. To that point, the NGO only had a health and safety policy, and threats and violent conditions were accounted for on an ad hoc basis. The wider engagement examined the NGO's global exposures, hazards and risks, existing capabilities, and relevant NGO security manuals to outline a policy and suggest where personnel security could be organisationally situated. This brief excerpt focuses on the organisational fit question. It is interesting to note the difference between this, and the operating assumptions in the Lebanon case above. In the Lebanon case, organisations were flat and small, and people wore multiple hats. In this case, there was enough organisational complexity that the question of who did what was a necessary consideration.