How NGOs Shape the State:  Informal Institutions and Public Service Delivery in India

Forthcoming, University of Michigan Press

Abstract:

NGOs have increasingly become central actors in the provision of basic public services in developing countries, alongside the state, yet the effects of these actors on state service provision remain poorly understood. Service-provision NGOs may build state capacity by providing models to the state and stimulating new demand for quality services, or they may erode state service delivery by prompting exit from the public sector and weakening oversight of government by mobilized citizens.  Recent empirical scholarship has documented instances of both, but has not offered a systematic explanation for this heterogeneity.  Using evidence collected during 14 months of fieldwork in India, this book offers a new explanation for variation in the effects of education NGOs on the government education system.  The book examines these effects in the context of two common models of NGO service provision – those that provide services directly, and those that work in partnership with states.  

The first part of the book draws on a paired comparison of villages in Rajasthan in which nearly identical NGO-run schools had divergent effects on the nearby government schools.  The second part of the book focuses on a five-year partnership between an education NGO and the government of Punjab that had inconsistent effects over time. The case studies rely on interviews, focus groups, school visits, and participant observation conducted in villages, district capitals, and NGO offices with over 200 community members, government officials, teachers, NGO workers, and teacher’s union leaders.  The study triangulates this data with quantitative data on learning outcomes, program documents, and newspaper articles to identify the conditions that drove these varying effects.  

The book argues that in both parallel and partnered provision cases, the key factor that matters in shaping NGO effects on the state is the nature of informal institutions that shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats in the education system.  In parts of the system where informal institutions support bureaucratic effort, the presence of NGOs improves public service delivery through a “learning effect.” Where informal institutions support rent-seeking, NGOs erode state performance by diverting community monitoring. Together, I find that these dynamics produce regressive distributive effects on the performance of the state.  The book traces these informal institutions to the broader political context, highlighting the capture of electoral politics by teachers unions and the institutional obstacles to citizen claim-making in India.  The study suggests that international flows of aid and philanthropic capital to NGOs in developing countries can better avoid displacing welfare states when we attend to the informal rules that govern public service institutions and the politics that constrain bureaucratic reform.