Relationships between nongovernmental organizations and the main actors from their environment

NGOs can continue defend their operational independence in evolutionary conditions that imply from their behalf an important vigilant activity. The financial prosperity of big NGOs owes a lot to their conversion to direct marketing techniques, from the beginning of 1980s. This activity can be compared to a research activity of the financial partners, whose transaction costs are explicit, while they imply the forming of a folder of donors to whom there are sent messages of different form and periodicity. International financers ask from their associative partners a proved professional reputation. It is clear that an assistance action financed from public funds and meant for the assuming of tens, even hundreds of thousand persons, leaves the area of symbolic intervention in order to enter the area of complex programs of assistance. In a general way, written and audio-visual press justifies in an advantageous way NGOs action and, indissociable, their institutional image. The attitude of the great public towards the NGOs is more ambiguous. The public opinion is bad informed concerning the help for development and humanitarian action. Half private companies, half public administrations, NGOs prosper because of a reputation which, without absolving them from applying a concrete action, absolves them form producing an explicit utility. While institutions on the market prosper on an economic rent and the public institutions benefit from a statutory rent, NGOs - especially the most important – exploit a “symbolic” rent which strongly structures their administrative situation.