{"id":942,"date":"2011-08-24T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T22:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/?p=942"},"modified":"2017-11-05T08:03:45","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T08:03:45","slug":"international-ngos-under-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/offtopic\/development\/942","title":{"rendered":"International NGOs Under Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article on countries that hinder international NGOs<\/a> starts off with ‘The news didn’t come as a surprise.’ While he may not be surprised, the writer clearly doesn’t agree with the changes. Personally, I can understand why countries would wish to limit NGO actions. International NGOs can’t help but bring biases from their own culture – after all, they have to report back on spending to their donor governments. It really should be no surprise that recipient governments want to keep a close eye on what they’re up to. Can we really complain that local governments want international NGOs to “refrain from doing any act which is likely to cause misunderstanding?”<\/p>\n

Donors are going to want to know that their money isn’t being spent on weapons that may be used against them in the future. I understand that there are limitations on what they’ll accept their money being used for, but I don’t think that donors have the right to, for example, influence the political system, pushing for democracy. As outsiders, we do have a different perspective and different skills that can be useful. We should be using them to assist in culturally appropriate programs run by locals to address issues identified by locals.<\/p>\n

That’s why half of the royalties from Dragon Bones<\/a> will go to Bhutanese organisations<\/a>. I intend the same for any books I write in the future because I believe that only local NGOs can identify the biggest issues and address them in a culturally sensitive way. It’s therefore exciting to me to see an organisation that seems to be taking that approach. In an interview<\/a>, the CEO of the UN Foundation<\/a> said, “That means aid won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be a large-scale gift but a series of small changes that make it possible for poor people to change their own lives.” I hope this becomes a trend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article on countries that hinder international NGOs starts off with ‘The news didn’t come as a surprise.’ While he may not be surprised, the writer clearly doesn’t agree with the changes. Personally, I can understand why countries would wish to limit NGO actions. International NGOs can’t help but bring biases from their own culture… Continue reading International NGOs Under Attack<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[90],"tags":[94],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":958,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions\/958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}