The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations across the developing world has sparked discussions of the “NGOization” of civil society and concern that NGOs have become increasingly uniform and internally homogenous. Recently though, there has been a push to move beyond the “good NGO, bad NGO” binary (Alvarez 2009, 176) that depicts NGOs as passive and uniform.
This article responds to the call by addressing the nature and causes of diversity among Guatemalan NGOs. It begins with the historical evolution of NGOs in Guatemala since the 1960s, demonstrating that the diversity that exists today is partly a result of a historical process in which old NGOs adjusted to, and influenced, their environment at the same time that new types of NGOs were established. It then draws on long-term ethnographies of two microcredit NGOs in order to explore elements of change and continuity within NGOs that have further contributed to diversity.
Intraorganizational diversity is partly the result of strategic decisionmaking within NGOs, layering of old and new forms in unique organizational context, and these two processes’ unanticipated and unintended consequences. Agency on the part of NGOs and continued diversity within NGOs has important implications on the ground. The ability of NGOs to resist external pressures and to affect their environments means that they are important political actors that can play independent (positive or negative) roles in the process of development and democratization. Continued intraorganizational diversity also implies that people participating in different NGOs are likely to have distinct experiences, colored by unique organizational contexts. This suggests that broad assumptions about NGOs’ effects for people and communities need to be qualified.
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