India failed to answer the agrarian question after independence by not undertaking expansive land reforms and rural redistribution of resources and wealth. Instead, India followed the national bourgeois path of development, liberalizing agricultural production systems based on rural bourgeoisie and foreign interests. This path of development has led to unequal rural development and the NGOization of agricultural development. For agrarian and peasant producers in India, the liberal and privatized NGO development path of the Indian agriculture sector has had significant implications for their social, political, and economic well-being. The role of the private, for-profit NGO in the liberal, capitalist agriculture production system has not been given as much attention as the role of the Indian and foreign governments, international institutions, and transnational corporations. This thesis argues that private, for-profit non-governmental development organizations working in rural India reproduce imperial structures of foreign dependency and increases the subsumption of peasant and agrarian producers. NGOization conceals the global power structures at play within Indian agricultural production and can impede upon alternative solutions to the Indian agrarian question by appropriating local thought leaders, grassroots movements' narratives, and Indigenous knowledge, which further perpetuates imperial and colonial structures of rural communities and leads to the de-depeasantization of rural production systems. / Master of Arts / NGOs have arisen as popular and prominent actors within agriculture development. India's specific colonial history, the nature of its rural bourgeois and landlords, and the country's economic turn towards neoliberalism have led to the increased need for NGOs within rural communities. This thesis explores the implications of the NGOization of agricultural development in India, using extension methods as case studies.

In this thesis I investigate the impact of donor organizations on NGOs’ efforts to foster local community participation in environmental projects, by analyzing how conditions on project funding affect a sample of South African NGOs. Numerous NGOs take environmental justice as a key tenet of their work. Yet, promoting environmental justice is not an easy task to perform. Aside from cultural, political and social contingencies peculiar to specific contexts, there are external constraints that can help or hinder NGOs’ efforts, among which resource-dependency dynamics stand out as particularly relevant. In fact, donors hold power over NGOs, who must stick to specific conditions to secure their support. My aim is to understand what conditions and what type of donors facilitate or hinder community participation —a basic condition for achieving environmental justice— in environmental projects, where hindrances are exemplified by the presence of NGOization dynamics. I analyze donors’ guiding principles, eligibility criteria and monitoring and evaluation standards, delving into the provisions of five different funders that financially support local environmental projects in South Africa, classified according to their core values and organizational settings. Data are collected, coded, and analyzed with the help of NVIVO through a content analysis of calls for grants, project proposals, project reports, and semi-structured interviews to donors and NGO professionals. In this study, I argue that donor organizations can facilitate community participation and avoid NGOization dynamics by acknowledging the existence of unequal power relations between them and the NGOs they fund and by taking measures to respond to NGOs demands. This study highlights the importance of long-term engagement and a relationship based on trust between donors and NGOs as key to creating alternative funding models that help secure the goals that local communities define. Moreover, this study also claims that donors’ upward accountability has a weight in determining conditions on funds and eligibility criteria, and that many of the donors’ virtuous practices originate from their independence from upward accountability measures.