International Development NGOs and Bureaucratic Capacity: Facilitator or Destroyer?

Do development international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) facilitate or destroy the bureaucratic capacity of the states in which they operate? The literature is split on this question. Some scholars argue that development INGOs weaken state capacity by delivering social services that the government is supposed to provide. Others argue that by increasing a country’s domestic demand for improved human rights, development INGOs improve a government’s capacity to fulfill them. In this paper, we show that the effect of development INGOs on state capacity depends on whether a state is democratic or nondemocratic. In our cross-sectional time-series analysis, we find that development INGO presence has a significant positive relationship with state capacity in democracies but no relationship with state capacity in nondemocratic states. These findings help explain the inconsistent claims in the existing INGO literature and are also relevant for development INGOs and the policymakers that support them.