NGOs in Bangladesh: Activities, resources, and governance

This paper reports results from one of the first large, nationally representative surveys of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in a developing country. The NGO sector in Bangladesh is highly organized and relatively homogeneous. Most NGOs utilize a branch and headquarters structure in which branches have limited autonomy from headquarters. At the branch level, most NGOs in the country, whether big or small, focus on credit services, derive more of their income from fees for services than from grants, rely on salaried rather than voluntary staff, keep detailed financial accounts that are externally audited, and hire middle-class college educated men as managers. The convergence to a modal institutional form probably is the result of the persuasive power of ideas, sociological pressures toward acculturation and conformity, as well as material incentives.     

Fiscal decentralization in Indonesia: A comment on smoke and lewis

In World Development Smoke and Lewis (1996) describe a local government capability rating effort in Indonesia, and conclude that this approach to decentralization has great potential. Their analysis is bound to a limited set of central level actors, and thus reflects only part of the decentralization debate in Indonesia. Consequently the authors miss the roots of this purportedly “new” approach and overestimate its actual or possible effects. Smoke and Lewis have also not taken into account the importance of a vastly different approach to decentralization, the regional autonomy pilot program, which was inaugurated by the Indonesian Government in April 1995. Providing the broader context to the rating effort, we try to reveal its conceptual and practical limitations and point on the ambiguous role of the rating effort in the decentralization arena in Indonesia.