Exploring de-facto accountability regimes in Muslim NGOs

This paper aims to deepen and advance our understanding of the de-facto accountability processes and practices within Muslim non-governmental organisations (NGOs). We employ a three-fold accountability framework of felt, imposed and adaptive accountability, supported by insight from the Islamic perspective to elucidate our empirical findings. We adopt this framework because it enables us to localise the notions of accountability, allowing a more complete understanding of the de-facto nature of Muslim NGO accountability to emerge within the context of religious ideals and between accountabilities that are externally imposed and those that are internally generated.     

A Generalized Nash Equilibrium network model for post-disaster humanitarian relief

We develop a Generalized Nash Equilibrium network model for post-disaster humanitarian relief by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs derive utility from providing relief supplies to victims of the disaster at demand points in a supply chain context while competing with each other for financial funds provided by donations. The shared constraints consist of lower and upper bounds for demand for relief items at the demand points to reduce materiel convergence or congestion. This game theory problem is reformulated as an optimization problem and numerical examples and a theoretical case study on Hurricane Katrina given.     

Supplier Development Practices for Sustainability: A Multi‐Stakeholder Perspective

Supplier development for sustainability is a critical element of sustainable supply chain management and requires extensive multi‐stakeholder collaboration. This article establishes a conceptual four‐stage framework to analyse the collaborative mechanisms of supplier development practices, and presents an exploratory, qualitative analysis to identify the major contributors of sustainable supplier development practices, such as NGOs, industrial associations, consulting firms etc. Based on semi‐structured interviews about 63 organizations from different regions and industries, this article identifies three types of contributor: drivers, facilitators and inspectors. Instead of traditional stakeholder engagement processes, these contributors actively collaborate with buying firms and suppliers to design, implement and evaluate sustainable supplier development programs. The article then provides a matrix to describe the supply chain coverage and supplier performance of supplier development practices, given the absence or positive involvement of facilitators and inspectors. We conclude our study by suggesting future research directions as well as discussing managerial implications. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Cross-cultural competence in the context of NGOs: bridging the gap between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’

Abstract

International human resource management research in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is scarce and it predominantly focuses on the recruitment and retention of volunteers. The context of NGOs is different from conventional for-profit international business settings with different kinds of challenges, especially in terms of providing appropriate training on managing multi-cultural teams and working with local project partners and communities. The literature also tends to focus on expatriate perspective and not on a host country perspective. We address this gap by examining how project managers and hosts experience cross-cultural issues on overseas assignments. We study volunteer project managers leading international and local youth volunteers during the Raleigh International programme in Malaysia. We use a qualitative methodology and data collected at 3 case locations via participant observation during 120 days contact with the respondents as well as interviews and surveys. We propose the CPACE (Curiosity, Passion, Adaptability, Communication and Empathy) framework describing competences needed in cross-cultural encounters and based on respondents’ actions as well as their words and it is relevant to a NGO context. The framework is intended to lay the foundation for future research and in particular to demonstrate the need for cross-cultural competence to be more grounded in particular contexts.     

When an NGO Takes on Public Participation: Preparing a Plan for a Neighborhood in East Jerusalem

It is often non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) that promote empowered participation processes, and assume active roles in leading them. However, the ability of NGOs to take on such processes is under‐theorized. In many cases empowered participation involving NGOs takes place without political support from above (or with limited or conditional support). Our goal in this article is to use a case study of participatory planning in East Jerusalem to theorize processes of empowerment in an oppositional political environment. We argue that it is useful to analyze such processes of empowered participation through the concept of power. We describe the process of empowerment as a speculative process in which the NGO has to hedge two mediums of power: it has to build the power of the community to discuss its own goals; and it has to simultaneously manage the transfer of decision‐making power from government bodies to the community.     

The Struggle for Alternatives: NGOs' Responses to the World Development Report 2008

This paper analyzes the response by NGOs to the 2008 World Development Report (WDR08). It does so at two levels of analysis, which in turn reflect two possible ways of reading the WDR08. The first is to read the WDR08 as a document for policy guidance on 'agriculture for development'. In this respect the paper shows how NGOs expose and challenge the WDR08's optimism for the benign impact of unregulated agribusiness investment on poverty reduction, and put forward a convincing alternative. The second, and politically more fertile, way of reading the WDR08 is to make sense of its numerous internal contradictions. These contradictions are functional to the World Bank's hegemonic effort of establishing a common, and broader, agenda for rural development. Having highlighted the WDR08's incoherent messages on (i) rural labour markets and their role in poverty reduction and (ii) what constitutes the most promising driver of poverty reduction in agriculture (returns from wage labour vs from own account farming), the paper documents NGOs' failure to detect and politically exploit these contradictions.