Chapter 6 North-South Partnership and Capacity Building Tracing Ruling Relations in the Canadian-Bangladeshi Partnership Between Social Justice NGOs

The Study

This chapter focuses on a partnership between social justice NGOs, one Canadian and one Bangladeshi, as they worked together with funding from CIDA’s Voluntary Sector Program.2 The Canadian NGO received five-year funding from the Voluntary Sector Program in 2010 to support its partnerships with approximately thirty-eight NGOs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Canada, one of which was the Bangladeshi NGO.3 The Voluntary Sector Program provided multi-year institutional funding for Canadian not-for-profit organizations, in partnership with “developing-country” partner organizations, to carry out sustainable international development programs in countries in the Global South and public engagement activities in Canada (CIDA 2006). While CIDA/DFATD funds civil society through all branches, the Partnerships with Canadians Branch exclusively funds Canadian civil society organizations—including NGOs, professional associations, and universities—to do international development projects, research and policy analysis, and volunteer programs. Through its programs, the branch aims to “recognize and support the work of Canadian organizations dedicated to improving the lives of those living in poverty in developing countries” (DFATD 2013).

The Partnerships with Canadians Branch was undergoing review when the Canadian NGO applied and received the five-year funding it held at the time of this study. The review took place between 2008 and 2010 and resulted in many changes to the branch, including to its name, which had formerly been the Canadian Partnership Branch. The Canadian NGO was one of the last NGOs funded by the branch’s Voluntary Sector Program before it was replaced with the Partners for Development Program at the end of September 2010. The government, led by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, introduced significant changes to CIDA/DFATD’s partnership programming with the new program. Canadian NGOs were no longer able to submit applications for partnership funding throughout the year (or when their present funding ended). Instead, they had to respond to a call for proposals. For the new Partners for Development Program, to which the Canadian NGO hoped to apply once its funding ended in February 2016, there had not been a call for proposals since April 2011 and no indication of when the next one would come. This left many Canadian NGOs in a precarious situation as they struggled to find the means to continue funding their programs, and it also caused widespread fear of losing funding in the sector (Swan 2010).

In addition to these changes to its partnership programming, CIDA’s overall aid priorities also shifted. As part of its new “aid effectiveness agenda,” CIDA announced in May 2009 the agency’s three priority themes to guide development programming would be economic growth, children and youth, and food security. In response to a so-called emerging consensus on development effectiveness (CIDA 2001), CIDA released its Policy Statement on Strengthening Aid Effectiveness in 2002. This policy introduced a reduction in the number of countries to which CIDA would provide development assistance and a “strategic allocation” of resources to a small number of sectors in those countries (CIDA 2002, 11–12). Given the changes that were taking place, and that many other well-established Canadian NGOs had lost their CIDA/DFATD funding since the changes had taken effect, the Canadian NGO studied was concerned about being able to continue to secure DFATD funding to support its partnerships once its present funding ended. Its Bangladeshi partner was facing funding challenges of its own, having been unable to secure funding to replace a large grant from the British Department for International Development (DFID) that ended in 2009. This chapter looks at how the NGOs responded to their precarious funding situations and to aid agency priorities in their partnership.

The NGOs and Their Partnership

The two social justice NGOs at the centre of this study had worked as partners for over thirty years, most of this time supported by CIDA and its partnership programs. In line with the social justice aims of their work, equality and mutuality in their partnership were important to the staff of both NGOs. They saw roles for themselves in sharing knowledge and supporting each other with the challenges they each faced. The Canadian NGO described its relationships with partners as “two-way” and collaborative. In one of its publications, it explained, “Overseas colleagues strongly influence [our] thinking and our actions here in Canada, especially with respect to influencing Canadian policy and NGO discourse and analysis.”4 The Canadian NGO’s role, then, was not only to secure funding to support the Bangladeshi NGO’s work but also to learn from the Bangladeshi staff about the particular issues faced by the people they worked with and how they went about addressing them. This knowledge was then used to advocate for change in the various development policymaking circles to which the Canadian NGO had access and to educate the Canadian public. While the primary focus of the staff of the Bangladeshi NGO was carrying out work identified as important by its local members and funded by the Canadian NGO, they expressed the importance of mutuality in their partnership too. Bangladeshi staff talked about the importance of the Canadian NGO’s moral support and lobbying for their work.

The NGOs had their own institutional identities, histories, and practices, and each NGO had partnerships with multiple other organizations. Founded in the 1970s, the Canadian NGO was a feminist social justice organization. The NGO provided other social justice organizations—both in Canada and in the Global South—with funding, in some cases building their organizational capacity, doing advocacy in Canada and internationally, and educating the Canadian public on the issues they faced. The NGO was unique among Canadian international development NGOs for its feminist management structure, whose characteristics included sharing the management and decision-making of the organization among all staff, following principles of equal responsibility and equal pay, and working by consensus. The NGO had been evaluated four times by CIDA, with many positive results found. The most recent of these evaluations found the following: “Asked to describe what special value [the Canadian NGO] brought to their work together, all [NGO partners] pointed to the quality of the relationship, using words like ‘trust,’ ‘reciprocity,’ ‘rigour,’ ‘reward for time invested.’” The NGO’s partners were divided up among ten of the approximately fifteen staff members, who were the primary contact person for those partners. Paul was the person responsible for the relationship with the Bangladeshi NGO, a position he had held since 2008. Most of his time was spent at the NGO’s office in Ottawa, although he usually travelled once a year to visit partners in Bangladesh and India. While in Ottawa, he communicated with partners over email and less frequently by phone, participated in the work of Canadian-based coalitions, gathered information and prepared reporting documents for CIDA/DFATD, and attended staff meetings and public events.

The Bangladeshi NGO also stood out in its context. It had since its formation over thirty years ago focused on awareness building with the aim of developing the potential of economically poor people to challenge structural inequalities through education, organization, and mobilization. Practically speaking, this aim had led to the organization’s resistance to service delivery and micro-credit, two of the most prevalent activities of local NGOs in Bangladesh. Several researchers, from both Bangladesh and abroad, had recognized the Bangladeshi NGO for its tangible contribution to furthering landless people’s participation in combating oppression and claiming their rights.5 The NGO had over five hundred employees across Bangladesh. Approximately fifty of those were based at the head office in the capital city, Dhaka. The other staff lived in “sub-centres” in communities across the country where they worked to form small groups of landless people. The staff taught the people in these groups about their human and legal rights. Action was then taken on issues identified by group members as most significant, such as women’s rights, access to health care or education, or fighting the corruption of local officials. There were two staff members at the Bangladeshi NGO, Rahnuma and Shamsul, who primarily communicated with donors, including the Canadian NGO. As the coordinator, Rahnuma had been head of the organization since its formation, while Shamsul, the manager of reporting, documentation, research, and advocacy, managed a team to collect data and produce all the reporting required by donors. Rahnuma and Shamsul were both based at the head office but frequently travelled to the NGO’s working areas. Rahnuma was a prominent figure in Bangladeshi civil society and the face of the NGO. She was frequently interviewed on local television and made appearances at various public events.

The relationship between the staff of the two NGOs occurred most regularly through email and occasionally through phone calls. They shared documents back and forth; most of them were reports on the Bangladeshi NGO’s work used to fulfill the Canadian NGO’s reporting requirements to CIDA/DFATD. They usually met once a year when a Canadian staff person travelled to Bangladesh for an annual partners meeting, organized by the Bangladeshi NGO to bring together all donors. Less regularly, a staff member from the Bangladeshi NGO, usually Rahnuma, travelled to Canada.

A Problematic Emerges

As I collected ethnographic data on the NGO staff’s work, the Voluntary Sector Program and funding, a puzzling picture of their partnership emerged. The NGOs were highly critical of state-funded donor agency priorities and programming mechanisms; however, given they rely heavily on this funding, securing it was an important preoccupation for both. Around the time the Canadian NGO received its last five-year Voluntary Sector Program grant, the organization decided it would try to strengthen its institutional sustainability and that of some of its partners. When the Canadian NGO took up the term sustainability, it was concerned, along with other Canadian NGOs, about maintaining funding from DFATD. Changes in CIDA/DFATD’s relationships with NGOs, including the lack of any significant and predictable funding for the sector, had disrupted the relative long-term stability of these relationships and resulted in a significant number of organizations experiencing declining total revenues (CCIC 2014). A report by the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (2014, 35), an umbrella organization for Canadian international development NGOs, found that “these impacts have affected the capacities of organizations to maintain staff and sustain often long-standing programs and partnerships on the ground.”

Given the imminent impacts of such changes to their work, the Canadian NGO felt it was necessary to “strengthen its institutional sustainability.” Investing private funds from the bequest of an individual Canadian donor, which were free of any guidelines or priorities, the NGO hired a consultant to build the staff’s capacity to fit their work into the results-based management documentation required by CIDA/DFATD. Paul offered the Bangladeshi NGO funding to strengthen its sustainability too, and discussions took place between Paul and Rahnuma and Shamsul about how the money would be spent. Paul suggested the Bangladeshi NGO hire consultants to provide English language and results-based management training to the reporting and central management staff. Shamsul explained these new activities to me:

Now [the Canadian NGO] is providing a small fund, which is not a part of CIDA’s fund. It’s an individual contribution for building [our] capacity on reporting, evaluation, and monitoring. At the same time, it contributes to improving our English language capacity, especially focused on the reporting cell but also some others in the Dhaka office. So, beyond the regular fund, [the Canadian NGO] would like to build the capacity of [the Bangladeshi NGO], to help [the Bangladeshi NGO] improve our own capacity for seeking future funding and for improving reporting systems.

Rahnuma and Shamsul agreed with Paul’s suggestions and also suggested updating the NGO’s website. Together, they also decided to fund a trip to Canada for Shamsul to attend a human rights training program and spend time with the Canadian NGO.

In seeking out funding, the NGOs had already worked together on a concept note directed at one of CIDA/DFATD’s three new priority areas, economic growth, which the Canadian NGO submitted in 2009. If accepted, it would have allowed them to apply for bilateral funding.6 CIDA rejected the proposal, however, and the Canadian NGO was informed in writing (one and a half years later) that the proposal didn’t fit with the agency’s programme in Bangladesh, but no other feedback was given. It was after this that Paul turned his attention to developing a funding proposal to address one of CIDA/DFATD’s other priorities—food security. He described it as “seeing the writing on the wall in terms of future funding from CIDA and the need to be able to describe the Bangladeshi NGO’s work in food security terms.”

Paul’s idea of “seeing the writing on the wall” to meet CIDA/DFATD’s priorities corresponded to changing features of the NGOs’ work and provided a point of entry into the ruling relations that the NGO staff entered through their partnership. Paul said he was motivated to describe the Bangladeshi NGO’s work in a way that aligned with CIDA/DFATD’s priorities to secure funding through the Partnerships with Canadians Branch for their organizations, a role he took on given this funding is only open to Canadian applicants. Given the Canadian NGO staff would be writing the application for further partnership funding and, if successful, receive this funding, I was intrigued by Paul’s efforts to also build the Bangladeshi NGO staff’s capacity to do this work of describing itself in terms that appealed to CIDA/DFATD.

Bangladeshi staff appreciated the Canadian NGO’s efforts to improve their ability to secure donor funding. They too saw value in building their capacity for different and newly required reporting, although they struggled to find the time to undergo the training given their heavy workloads. Rahnuma also found it challenging to describe their work differently and still do the work in the way she and her staff wanted to. As she explained,

We believe in transparency so for the staff to [understand] . . . that this is no different from the work [our organization] did before and the funding source and the reporting format has to be a little different . . . I mean we must keep reinforcing that nothing’s changed just because we’re getting funds from somewhere else and because there’s a different reporting format. In the end, it’s the same. But even in terms of our dealing with project staff we must reiterate that it’s the same, so it’s extra work, much much more extra work for the NGOs.

Not only were the reporting requirements that the Bangladeshi NGO must meet onerous, but they were also frequently subject to change, sometimes more than once a year for any given donor.

Rahnuma’s concern about the extra work associated with collecting data and reporting to meet the requirements of donors, despite her insistence that “nothing’s changed,” raised questions for me about not only the increasing volume of work for staff but also the changing nature of their work. While those working in organizations may primarily think of texts as means of information tracking, documents often serve as important instruments for organizing workplace activities and interactions (DeVault 2006). In part, this is achieved because of a text’s “capacity to carry a particular idea or meaning across sites and perpetuate it” (Campbell and Gregor 2002, 36). This feature allows ruling relations to coordinate “someone’s action here with someone else’s there” (33).

Rahnuma indeed found having to present her organization’s work in formats digestible to donors a challenge not only due to the time and effort she and her staff were spending on this but also because donors’ priorities are in many cases not understood or implemented in ways that align with her staff and members’ views and in some cases even in ways that undermine their work. She said,

Now each government has decided they will be looking at food security or at education or whatever and they would be looking at parts of it, and then they decide which type of education and what they mean by food security. And a lot of the food security they’re looking at is related to private enterprise. And they call it the private-public partnership. And so of course all of this affects us very deeply because it’s totally against the principles for which [our organization] was founded and is working and is committed to upholding.

Despite the significant time and resources being put into building staff’s capacity to respond to donor priorities, and the ways donors’ understandings were different or even in conflict with the NGOs’ priorities, both NGOs also insisted that the required reporting was not having a significant impact on their work. Paul said, “We must do [the report to CIDA], fine. The necessary evil. I don’t consider it all that important really.” He continued to explain what he saw his work and partnership with the Bangladeshi NGO to really accomplish:

So, reporting for me is just not what I’m here for. We do it and we do it well to keep CIDA happy but for me we’re here to have relationships with our counterparts and to bring the messages that they’re trying to get across and the work that they’re trying to do to talk about that to, to bring it to the Canadian public’s attention, to work on those campaigns. That’s what the relationship’s about. It’s not about reporting to CIDA.

Reporting may not be what was most important to Paul or to the Bangladeshi NGO’s staff, but the desire to do it well to “keep CIDA happy” prompted capacity-building activities in which the NGOs invested significant resources. It also prompted shifts to their partnership, including a greater role for Paul in building the Bangladeshi NGO’s capacity to respond to donor priorities.

Besides funding consultants to build the Bangladeshi NGO’s capacity to respond to current and potential donors, Paul undertook more direct capacity-building work to strengthen what would help the Canadian NGO secure the funding it shared with the Bangladeshi NGO. Using his trips to Bangladesh and subsequent trip reports, Paul discussed with Bangladeshi staff issues related to CIDA/DFTAD’s priority theme of food security. He wrote the following in a report following one such trip: “I focused on the global rise in food prices and said that food was going to be an increasingly important theme for international cooperation (yes, I had an agenda in pushing this point with the [Bangladeshi NGO]) and something that would have growing impacts on Bangladesh.” The Canadian NGO staff’s perspective on trends in international development funding had long been an important part of their partnership and was valued by the Bangladeshi NGO, as Rahnuma expressed in saying, “What is very important that we get from [the Canadian NGO] is the global donor and economic position, which helps us to understand what and why funding patterns change. And they’re very critical of this, so they provide us information.” While providing information, as Rahnuma described it, we see that Paul was also advancing a particular “agenda,” and the interactions that stemmed from this agenda appeared intimately connected to CIDA/DFATD’s priorities.

What I found and want to explain is that as Paul took steps to build the capacities of the Bangladeshi NGO to appeal to donor priorities and secure further funding, shifts in the organizations’ everyday work and working relations were taking place. The Canadian NGO had taken on a new role in the capacity building of the Bangladeshi NGO. While these activities were appreciated and seen as important by the Bangladeshi NGO staff, they were placing greater responsibility on the Bangladeshi NGO’s staff to respond to donor priorities. They were also challenging their ability to focus on the priorities identified by their members, a social justice aim that had always been central to the NGOs’ partnership. Capacity building was not being driven by the priorities of the Bangladeshi NGO or the people its work sought to empower. This work consisted of building skills to construct alignment between the work of the organizations and the priorities of the Canadian government.

As an institutional ethnographer, I understand such shifts to be socially organized, shaped by ideologies and discourses situated beyond the immediate context. Before examining these translocal forces, I will explain how the NGO staff were taking up the work of capacity building in their partnership. Then, from these realities, my inquiry begins to track the ruling relations in this context by examining CIDA/DFATD’s partnership discourse and programming, including funding mechanisms and reporting requirements.

Ruling Relations, North-South Partnership, and Capacity Building

The Canadian NGO staff demonstrated in their new initiatives an understanding that the strength of their organization’s sustainability and that of their Bangladeshi partner was tied to both NGOs’ capacity to prepare funding proposals and reports and to continuously secure funding. For the Canadian NGO, which received most of its funding from CIDA/DFATD, this capacity involved knowing how to prepare funding proposals and reports using results-based management and involved being able to describe their work in ways that aligned with CIDA/DFATD’s priorities. The Bangladeshi NGO, however, received its funding from other NGOs, most of whom received funding from state development agencies, such as CIDA/DFATD in Canada. Bangladeshi staff preferred this to receiving state development funding directly, due in large part to the reporting and monitoring requirements that accompany funding from state agency donors, which they found to be overly onerous. This conclusion was informed by their experience of receiving a grant from DFID, which involved major work for staff to develop the reporting systems required, including the establishment of a management information system (MIS) to collect and track data from its sub-centres. A member of the Central Management Team, Ershad, explained to me the problems he saw with the reporting requirements imposed by the DFID grant:

There are two problems I face in the MIS system. One is that the staff are working with the MIS system, if they leave then others can’t complete it, and there are different areas and districts, and they are all required to submit the same information, but each sub-centre is different. The donors are giving us new instructions like “Report to us this way or that way,” so with these instructions, the donors are making us mentally dependent on the donor. Like, “We know everything, and you don’t know anything.” This is a global system.

Ershad was concerned about the resources put into training Bangladeshi staff to enable them to use the reporting systems, such as the MIS, that were lost when staff left the organization, when a donor changed its reporting requirements, or when the organization was no longer able to obtain funding from a particular donor. He was also concerned that the standardization of information collected did not account for differences in the various communities where they were working. He understood the requirement for his NGO to use an MIS to be part of a “global system,” revolving around donors’ knowledge about why and how reporting and monitoring should be done and involving processes and documentation that require specialized knowledge to complete. These requirements positioned him and his coworkers as lacking capacity rather than as the competent and skilled community organizers they are.

In comparison to state development agencies, the Bangladeshi staff appreciated the efforts some of their NGO donors took to reduce the reporting burden for them, including accepting reports in formats the Bangladeshi staff were already producing, such as narrative formats, rather than formats requiring specialized knowledge, such as results-based management. For example, two of its NGO donors, including the Canadian NGO, agreed to accept the report that the Bangladeshi NGO submitted to another NGO to reduce the work for its staff. Rahnuma also emphasized how important the Canadian NGO staff were in helping her push back against the demands of her NGO’s other donors.

Pushing back was becoming increasingly difficult as donors directed their funding toward narrower priorities and projects. The Bangladeshi NGO had been unsuccessful in finding a grant large enough to replace the funding it received from DFID, so it was seeking smaller grants from a larger number of donors. This was significantly increasing the time and energy staff, such as Shamsul, were spending preparing funding applications, on top of their already heavy workload associated with reporting on the funding they were receiving. It was in response to this situation and with the intention to help its partner get funding that the Canadian NGO took on a new role in helping the Bangladeshi NGO build its capacity to prepare funding proposals and reports that responded to donor priorities. Paul initiated a new project called “Strengthening the Sustainability of the Bangladeshi NGO,” funded with the bequest of an individual private Canadian donor. After discussing with Rahnuma and Shamsul the project’s activities, he asked them to prepare a proposal. When he did not receive one, he figured it was largely because they were so busy with their other work, and he ended up putting together the proposal himself, in which he described the problem to be addressed, the expected outcomes, and the activities. In this proposal, he wrote, “As [the Bangladeshi NGO] moves to a situation where there are more funding agencies and more individual projects it is necessary to increase the capacity of staff to be able to respond to the demands.”

With these efforts, I noticed the work of the partners shifting. As the Canadian NGO began designing and funding a project that identified the Bangladeshi NGO’s lack of capacity (to get funding), Paul found himself in a position of trying to support the work of his partner in a new way. This new role of helping build the capacity of Bangladeshi NGO staff accounted for the way Paul drew their attention to issues he considered important, including CIDA/DFATD’s priority of food security. During one of his trips to Bangladesh, he spoke with some members of the Bangladeshi NGO, farmers in this case, about the challenges they were facing. After this discussion, he shared his thoughts on this experience with Bangladeshi staff:

And we talked as well about the meeting I had had with the farmers who said, “Well, actually for us land is not the crucial issue, it’s control of our seeds and it’s the marketing of our produce.” And I said that’s an interesting message that I hadn’t heard before and I don’t know to what extent that is common but everything I read from you guys, [the Bangladeshi NGO] says land is the issue. The struggle for land is what we’re all about and here I’m hearing from people: “Actually, we’ve got a bit of land, but our family economy is screwed because of this mess.” So I don’t know. I mean I don’t pretend to be a big expert coming in with any comprehensive view of [the Bangladeshi NGO’s] program and saying, “Ok, I’ve done this big evaluation study, and this is where you should focus your efforts” or something like that, but I try to make it as useful as possible to them and to us.

Paul spoke of his interest in seeds and marketing produce as a personal one, but his interest was also related to CIDA/DFATD’s priorities and his efforts to get further funding. He saw these issues connected to building the Bangladeshi NGO’s capacity to describe its work in a way that aligned with CIDA/DFATD’s priority of food security. As he explained, “I was also trying to talk to them about this food security focus program. And say, ‘this is a way of describing your work, it’s not a matter of changing what you’re doing but you do food security related work now.’”

In discussing a proposal for funding a food security project, Paul’s intention was to secure further funding to support the work of the NGOs; however, his learning about the Bangladeshi NGO’s work to describe it in ways that met CIDA/DFATD’s priorities was displaced by his efforts to help the Bangladeshi NGO learn to describe its work in this required way. From here, his role of supporting the Bangladeshi NGO’s capacity building to secure funding also enabled him to express suggestions about the issues his partner should work on. We see the way their work became organized supports a form of partnership that neither NGO wanted. This is reflected in the following statement from Paul: “I wouldn’t couch [what I’m saying] in terms of recommendations because I don’t want to be a funder saying, ‘Do this.’ That’s not what we’re trying to do but it is observations.”

As I learned about the new capacity-building activities the Canadian NGO was initiating for the Bangladeshi NGO, I found deep connections between the concept of capacity building and the discourse on North-South NGO partnerships. I first noticed traces of the discourse in the Canadian NGO’s “logic model,” which described one of two activities it did with partners as capacity building in organizational development, programme development, and policy analysis.7 Paul found this description misleading. As he explained,

We have described a lot of our programme to CIDA as we build the capacity of fellow organizations. We have a two-way relationship. They help us, we help them and depending on the relationship, we may do capacity building with them, or they will very often do capacity building with the beneficiaries they work with. Clearly that’s most of what [the Bangladeshi NGO] is doing. How do we build the capacity of [the Bangladeshi NGO]? Well, we don’t have a programme where we say, we go over and do a training workshop for [them] and it’s a bit presumptuous on our part I would say.

While it didn’t align with Paul’s understanding of his partnership with the Bangladeshi NGO, the ideas his NGO’s staff were relying on to provide this description of their North-South partnerships were provided through clear means. This description of the Canadian NGO’s work as building the capacity of its Bangladeshi partner appealed to the concept of partnership found in other texts, including the Voluntary Sector Program’s guidelines and the Partnerships with Canadians Branch programs more broadly.

According to the guidelines, a Voluntary Sector Program–funded project “is a long-term strategic partnership between a Canadian not-for-profit organization or consortium and one or more developing-country organizations” (CIDA 2010, 2). The guidelines state, “Past aid programming often failed because it focused on resource transfers and did not provide enough support for local capacity development efforts to sustain these investments once donor countries had withdrawn support” (9). To build sustainability, then, the first objective of the Voluntary Sector Program was to strengthen the capacities of developing-country organizations, and Canadian applicants were told, “Your program proposal should clearly articulate the capacity-development needs of your partner organizations and how you propose to address those needs” (9). This meant demonstrating Canadian “value-add” beyond financial support (2). Benefit to Canadian NGOs because of their partnerships was not required. In fact, to the contrary, the program guidelines explicitly note the following: “The Canadian applicant(s) is not a beneficiary” (8). These guidelines clearly contradicted the NGOs’ commitment to equality and mutuality in their partnership.

The role of Canadian NGOs to respond to southern NGOs’ lack of capacity through their partnerships that is normalized through the Voluntary Sector Program is also found in the discourse of the branch offering this program. CIDA/DFATD’s Partnerships with Canadians Branch asserts that Canadian NGOs possess specific values beneficial to development efforts, stating on its website, “Working in partnership means that efforts to reduce poverty will have positive outcomes and reflect Canadian values of compassion and caring” (DFATD 2013). Lavergne and Wood (2008, 7), former CIDA staff, identify additional Canadian values: “To these financial contributions [of Canadian civil society organizations] can be added contributions of voluntary time and expertise, and the dedication and commitment that Canadians bring to the task. . . . They also reinforce the expression of Canadian values internationally such as the importance of democracy, human rights, justice, and pluralism.” Thus Lavergne and Wood suggest Canadian NGOs, in their many shapes and forms, are categorically equipped with the capacity to positively influence development as they work with southern partners, largely due to the “Canadian values” they hold. There is no shortage of places to question this line of reasoning (for one, Indigenous peoples might disagree with the characterization of Canadian values as being compassionate and caring); however, my concern here is that the discursive recognition of North-South NGO partnerships benefiting from Canadian NGOs’ expertise, initiative, and values implies that southern NGOs lack the capacity, not simply the resources, to effectively do development. Capacity building by northern NGOs is framed as the solution, falling in line with Crewe and Harrison’s (1998, 76) finding that “the aid industry continues to rest on the assumption of inadequacy on the part of the institutional recipients in ‘poorer’ countries.”

In the context of NGO professionalism, people are actively and strategically participating in capacity-building discourses. Discourse, in this sense, is a social relation, connecting how Canadian and Bangladeshi NGO workers interact with one another and with farmers in rural Bangladesh and ensuring that Canadian state priorities are met through these coordinated complexes of ostensibly non-governmental activity. While the two NGOs in my study held egalitarian beliefs and sought to empower rural Bangladeshis from poor communities to gain more control over their lives and livelihoods, I found their practices were being organized into ruling relations in which northern capacity and southern incapacity are reinforced. Ultimately, such a construction of the South as lacking capacities that the North can provide sustains traditional power relations across these regions.

Conclusion

I have described how, through efforts to strengthen the sustainability of their work and their partnership, the Canadian and Bangladeshi social justice NGOs I studied were hooked into the ruling discourse of capacity building. The Canadian NGO’s capacity-building efforts to strengthen its institutional “sustainability” and that of its Bangladeshi partner were a response to CIDA/DFATD’s changing partnership funding policies and mechanisms. These changes, including unpredictable and decreasing funding opportunities, have posed significant challenges to Canadian civil society organizations and have been found to impact the effectiveness of both donors and recipients (CCIC 2014, 36). Given these detrimental impacts, CIDA/DFATD’s changes to its partnership funding opportunities are particularly troubling. These policy changes were part of a larger shift in the agency, in which support for civil society organizations was being replaced with an increased commitment by the Canadian government to partnering with the private sector. These new partnerships, involving Canadian private sector investors, most notably from the extractive sector, were one piece of CIDA/DFTAD’s aim to “broaden and deepen its engagement with the private sector in order to achieve sustainable economic growth and reduce poverty in developing countries” (CIDA 2013). Through a commitment to “achieving private sector-led sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction” (CIDA 2013; emphasis mine), the Canadian government was turning away from any responsibility to promote initiatives that ensure local communities benefit from economic growth, and as development researchers Douglas and Kindornay (2013, 13) point out, this shift “risks turning development projects into appendages of private sector investments, whether by the extractive sector or companies working in other areas.” In placing development in the hands of the private sector, the strategy represents a more direct form of what Kamat (2004) calls “the privatization of public interest.”

For Canadian NGOs and their southern partners, CIDA/DFTAD’s new strategy is a threat to the sustainability of their development assistance work. In undertaking various types of capacity-building activities, the NGOs in my study are responding to this threat. My study contributes to research critical of the role of capacity building in North-South partnerships (Fowler 1998; Lewis 1998) by revealing how the discourse of capacity building operates in practice. In outlining the institutional processes that allow for it to take place, I have demonstrated how CIDA/DFTAD’s partnership programming provides the institutional discourse for advancing a ruling development agenda. I have explicated how the NGOs I studied are caught up in these processes as they take on specific roles, supported by ideas that originate outside their partnership and that emphasize northern expertise and southern incapacity. These roles conflict with the NGO staff’s experiential knowledge of how best to engage in partnership with one another to accomplish their social justice aims of equality and mutuality, as well as challenge the Bangladeshi NGO staff’s capacity to use their local experiential knowledge and that of their members to guide their work. The result is that development assistance turns away from the knowledge and experience of local communities, suggesting, as Arturo Escobar (1995, 44) does, that “the most important exclusion . . . was and continues to be what development was supposed to be all about: people.”

References

1. Campbell, Marie, and Frances Gregor. 2002. Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2. CCIC (Canadian Council for International Cooperation). 2014. Establishing an Enabling Environment for Civil Society Organizations in Canada: Key Issues Affecting Canadian International Development and Humanitarian Organizations. Ottawa: CCIC. https://ocic.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Final-Draft-Full-Report-Establishing-an-EE-for-CSOs-in-Canada.pdf.
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