The rise of the term “non-government(al) organization” (NGO) seems rather improbable, as it serves to identy an organization’s mission by indicating what it is not (i.e. a non-governmental), rather than what it is or what it does. That said, the term “NGOs” is firmly rooted in the Western lexicon.
As many organizations, of varied sizes and missions, are non-governmental, what makes for an NGO?
Any ideas on how/when this term arose?
Is “NGO” basically a gussied-up term for “non-for-profit”?
Technically, the term NGO includes all nongovernmental organizations. I guess why the term is useful is that most organizations referred to as NGOs are performing functions that used to be seen as the domain of governments. In common usage, “NGO” and “non-profit” are equivalent, but “NGO” is more common in the international context. It is used to distinguish from governmental bodies and intergovernmental organizations (UN, WTO, IMF, etc.).
NGOs serve a public interest, either locally, nationally, or internationally. Those interests can be humanitarian, economic, environmental, or social - areas in which governments are generally expected to exercise authority and promote the interests of the people, hence the need to distinguish themselves from government agencies.
According to the World Bank, just about any non-profit organization could be called an NGO.
Not sure on when the term actually came about, but these organizations really started growing in the 1970s.
NGOs are almost always non-profit, so I think one could safely answer “generally, yes” to your last question.
I’ve been curious for some time as to the widespread use of the term NGO, so this OP sent me to the search engines to find out when it entered the lexicon. The underlying term dates back to at least 1945, as Article 71 of the U.N. charter says:
The earliest use of the abbreviation I can find is the 1975 NGO Tribune conference, but it doesn’t appear to have been in widespread use until the late 1980s. The earliest Usenet post I can find that refers to NGOs is this 1987 post.
As is mentioned above, “NGO” is regularly used in developing countries to refer to non-comercial organizations that perform development or quasigovernmental functions. In practice I have only heard NGO used to refer to organizations that do certain kinds of work that are done by PVOs, Private and Voluntary Organizations, such as family planning, HIV/AIDS prevention, refugee resettlement, etc. I have never heard anyone use the term NGO to refer, for example, to a road building contractor despite the fact that road building is both a traditional government function and, arguably, “development.”
However, although all PVOs are NGOs, many NGOs are emphatically not PVOs. In fact, the use of the term NGO is, in general use, more often ironic than not because many NGOs are nothing more than agents of the government. Many (hundreds?) of development NGOs derive >90% of their income from federal government contracts and are, in a sense, less “non-government organizations” than are General Dynamics and Raytheon.
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