IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jdevef/v8y2016i2p157-170.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Justifying development financing of small NGOs: impact evidence, political expedience and the case of the UK Civil Society Challenge Fund

Author

Listed:
  • James Copestake
  • Anne-Marie O’Riordan
  • Myriam Telford

Abstract

We review government funding of small NGOs as a mechanism to promote international development, taking the UK Civil Society Challenge Fund (CSCF) as a case study. Within a broad institutional economics perspective, we contrast two possible justifications for such support -- evidence of positive impact and political expedience. Qualitative research suggests that empirical evidence of the positive impact of NGO actions funded through CSCF was relatively weak. Political expedience helps to explain why this was tolerated. The failure to generate better impact evidence can also be attributed to the lack of consensus about how to do so more rigorously, combined with a willingness to give small NGOs the benefit of the doubt in the absence of credible negative evidence of impact.

Suggested Citation

  • James Copestake & Anne-Marie O’Riordan & Myriam Telford, 2016. "Justifying development financing of small NGOs: impact evidence, political expedience and the case of the UK Civil Society Challenge Fund," Journal of Development Effectiveness, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(2), pages 157-170, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevef:v:8:y:2016:i:2:p:157-170
    DOI: 10.1080/19439342.2016.1150317
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19439342.2016.1150317
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/19439342.2016.1150317?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jdevef:v:8:y:2016:i:2:p:157-170. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJDE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.