In a paper published by the UNRISD, author Catherine Agg considers the trends in government support for NGOs, asking whether the ‘golden age’ of the large international NGO (INGO) has passed.

The first part of the paper outlines the role of INGOs in development policy from 1980 to the present, arguing that, although the sector was promoted strongly during the heyday of neoliberalism, donor governments have always used INGOs as a tool to carry out aid policies in the South. However, in the current times, donor rhetoric stresses the need to work with recipient governments to reduce poverty; new aid instruments including budget support and sector-wide approaches (SWAps) aim to channel aid directly to recipient governments.

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