Paper short abstract:

I employ critical ethnography in Tanzania to re-examine assumptions around how NGO legitimacy is constructed. Drawing on Bordieuian idea of symbolic ‘capital’, I trace legitimation as process whereby NGOs continually create, negotiate and entrench the political space within which to operate.

Paper long abstract:

The sustained growth in the size and scope of the international development sector, and the attendant proliferation of non-governmental organisations, has served to intensify the debate on the 'legitimacy' of non-state actors. The location of this debate, however, has often remained within the purview of state-centric international relations and/or specific policy communities. The discourse that has emerged around NGO legitimacy oscillates between, or indeed fuses, the technical, de-politicised language of policy and the inherently normative language of developmental goals. I argue that this discourse inhibits a more profound understanding of legitimacy. This is not legitimacy in its traditional guise as a political good, but legitimation as a localised, socio-political practice via which the use of power, influence and resource by development actors is negotiated and rendered acceptable in a crowded, and often chaotic, aid environment. I draw on an extreme district case study in Tanzania, saturated by NGO activity, to examine how NGO workers negotiate, establish and entrench their presence in practice, drawing on different forms of Bordieuian 'capital'. An interpretative, sociological account of legitimation necessarily attends to the wider contexts in which aid takes place, in contrast to the 'vertical' epistemology of development agencies' movement to the village. I employ the tools of critical ethnography to challenge 'vertical' bias and to interpret both how NGOs legitimate their presence and how NGO activities themselves are interpreted and contested in their areas of operation.