Why pay NGOs to involve the community?

Burger, Ronelle; Dasgupta, Indraneel; Owens, Trudy

Abstract

We examine the case for donors providing financial incentives to, i.e. subsidizing, NGOs to increase community participation. We show that the introduction of such a ‘participation subsidy’ may reduce beneficiary welfare. Thus, eliminating community participation from the set of conditions for funding an NGO may in fact benefit target communities. We show how our theoretical analysis may be operationalized by applying it to data from the NGO sector in Uganda. Our empirical findings appear to reject the case for providing a participation subsidy in that context.

Citation

Burger, R., Dasgupta, I., & Owens, T. (2015). Why pay NGOs to involve the community?. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 86(1), https://doi.org/10.1111/apce.12065

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 16, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Feb 9, 2015
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Nov 7, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 7, 2016
• Journal: Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics
• Print ISSN: 1370-4788
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-8292
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 86
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/apce.12065
• Keywords: Regulation of non-governmental organizations, developing countries, community participation, Uganda
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/984514
• Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apce.12065/abstract;
• Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Burger, R., Dasgupta, I. and Owens, T. (2015), Why pay NGOs to involve the community?, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/apce.12065. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.