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Do Aid Donors Plant the Grassroots? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in the US and Uganda



Author(s)

Danny Walker

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2015.03.003

Recent literature dealing with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claims that NGOs have little incentive to base their decisions and strategies on local needs and instead are governed largely by their current and prospective donors (McGann & Johnstone, 2006; Prakash & Gugerty, 2010; Bollen et al., 2005). To test this claim, I have created a quantitative experiment in the US and Uganda in which organizations were randomly assigned to a control group or one of four treatment groups based on the main stakeholders of the NGO market—donors, local government officials, project beneficiaries, and NGO peers. In each group, organizations were invited to take a survey and were told that the results of their survey would be published to one of these four stakeholder groups. Thus, differences in response rates between groups are attributed to differences in the degree of concern that NGOs felt about the opinions of a given stakeholder. I hypothesized that NGOs care more about the opinions of their donors than other stakeholder groups and found support for this hypothesis among NGOs in the US.

Nongovernmental organizations, field experiments, aid accountability, Uganda