The traditional monopoly of politics and international relations on theorizing power, authority and legitimacy has eroded in the late modern era. The complexity of these domains has been compounded in a strongly interconnected, post-Westphalian world, where sovereignty and statehood are increasingly negotiated, where centres of power and authority have shifted and where new configurations of governance have come to the fore. The conventional conceptual toolbox of inter-national relations has been slow to adapt, and so the need to embrace insights from other disciplines never greater. The study of legitimacy in particular has been hamstrung by conventional drawings of both sovereignty and authority. Public authority, in the Weberian idealist sense, is the legitimated exercise of power. The study of power has broadened considerably in this timeframe; legitimacy, or rather the practice of legitimation, must mirror power's analytical expansion. Even where the need to broaden our conceptualization of legitimation has been conceded, its empirical content has remained woefully thin. The question of how political actors legitimate their authority to act thus remains under-theorized and under-researched. This thesis contributes to contemporary debates regarding power, legitimation and authority in two key respects. The first is in theorizing legitimation as practice: the everyday 'socially meaningful patterns of action' (Adler & Pouliot 2011, p3) that render power authoritative. This practice-based approach, benefitting in particular from the legacies of Foucault and Bourdieu, moves firmly away from accounts of legitimacy as 'inputs' and 'outputs' towards a more processual account. The second is in locating these everyday practices beyond formalized institutions, undertaken by a range of actors in a range of forums. The increasingly blurred 'non-state' operates in the margins between global and local; national/international; public/private and indeed state/non-state, whilst nonetheless sustaining a claim to publicness. These 'twilight' institutions (Lund 2006a) include the non-government organizations in Tanzania on which this thesis is focussed. It draws on extensive critical ethnography in locating everyday governmental and non-governmental legitimation practice, whilst linking the local to the global. This is not solely about facilitating the travel of international relations to its hitherto geographical and theoretical margins, but to return with rigour to the centrality of legitimation as experienced in 'most of the world' (Chatterjee 2004). It asks, in short, how NGOs, as non-state actors, legitimate their authority to act in the everyday, within today's interconnected world.

A highly debated topic of the last few decades has centred on the idea of communication as a means for poverty reduction. With two-thirds of the world's population living in poverty, there is a dire need to understand why global poverty and inequality continue to increase, and what role communication can, and is playing in the fight against poverty. This study therefore seeks to understand how three aid and development agencies in New Zealand, New Zealand Aid (NZAID), Oxfam New Zealand (NZ), and Christian World Service (CWS), construct poverty in the context of international development. Additionally it seeks to establish how these three organisations view relationships between communication and poverty. Eleven semi-structured, in-depth interviews with key informants were conducted, transcribed, and analysed in order to extract information surrounding the issues of poverty and international development. From this analysis, it is evident that these three organisations recognise official and unofficial definitions of poverty. It is also apparent that these definitions of poverty affect the ways in which these organisations view the causes of poverty, as well as their outlook on international development. Furthermore, three topics emerged when examining relationships between communication and poverty: communication with local people and local organisations, communication about local people and local organisations, and dealing with communication issues through accountability, transparency, and legitimacy. Implications on communication and development theory as well as theory on the discursive constructions of poverty are addressed. Finally, this study addresses practical implications for aid and development agency practice, and offers recommendations for further study in the area development communication.

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This study is based on how rural poor Muslim women in Bangladesh have become the target of both international donor agencies and of Islamic preachers. In Bangladesh, religion and politics are not viewed separately, nor are they subsumed under the other. This thesis focuses on how Islam is currently being practiced by Islamic groups and attempts to analyse the socio-political conflicts between Islamic views and empowerment opportunities provided by NGOs in rural Bangladesh. Widely speaking, the secondary focus here is the hegemonic model of development espoused by multinational and local NGOs that offer poor rural women employment, and the opposing approaches offered by the main Islamist political party. In addition this study discusses the targeted women‘s capability of identifying the best option among the contested approaches offered by those dominant groups.

Despite recent phenomenal growth of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the developing world, especially in the field of primary health care (PHC), their performance currently witnesses many paradoxes. For example, a paradox between their growth in size and diversity, yet increasing concerns about their impact; another paradox is that of the intense questioning of their performance in development and health, and yet the increasing flow of support from most international agencies; and, a third paradox, is that of the increasing pressures for, and acceptance of the need for, performance evaluation, and yet a lack of institutionalisation within NGOs themselves, and the scarcity of models that can guide/help NGOs in that direction. Many explanations have been suggested for these paradoxes, and are likely to include the following: first, an NGO may lack the performance system which enables it to look at its own performance and analyse in a systematic way; second, an NGO, when undertaking a selfevaluation exercise, may confine itself solely to the project level (for accountability reasons) and overlook the other levels of analysis (namely, the organisation, service delivery, and individual levels); and, third, an NGO may not hold an holistic view as to what areas should be analysed, nor may it have the analytical tools readily available which help it to undertake such an analysis. Evidence from different literature supports each of these possible explanations. Accordingly, within this thesis, to help an NGO self-analyse its performance, a performance analysis framework (PAF) has been developed. This framework is structured to analyse the performance of an NGO service provider at three main levels: organisational; project; and, service delivery. Each level addresses an area for analysis, drawing upon a set of criteria for each area, raising a group of relevant questions for each criterion, and casting light on a cluster of possible investigative tools largely, but not exclusively, qualitative in nature. Theunderlying hypothesis of this framework is that the performance of an NGO in health and social development is the outcome of an interaction of many factors within both its external and internal environments. Hence, in the PHC setting, an NGO is confronted with an external environment composed of contextual elements (political, economic, legal, and socio-cultural), as well as a cluster of relationships with different stakeholders (donors, beneficiaries, government bodies, and other NGOs). On the other hand, the internal environment of an NGO is formed of a four-fold set of inter-related elements: its identity, its strategy, its operations, and its resources. Thus, the kinds of interactions taking place in both these environments are key determinants of the overall performance of the NGO. The PAF was then field tested in Egypt through a series of investigations, including focus group interviews as well as instrumental case studies. Four cases were selected from a pool of Egyptian NGOs (ENGOs) with different histories and geographic locations, but all being Community Development Associations (CDAs); participants in umbrella capacity building (CB) programmes sponsored by intermediary NGOs and funded by one bilateral donor; and, having service provision in the area of Maternal and Child Health (MCH). While the PAF was applied at the project level, the four PHC/MCH projects have also served as entry points to the analysis of the four organisations through a participatory self-assessment approach. The PAF, therefore, served as both research tool and conceptual frame of reference against all four cases, relying upon various triangulation techniques, in pursuit of research validation and quality control. The outcome is that of robustly testing the framework: by so doing, important lessons and insights have emerged both about the external and internal environment of ENGOs; and about the levels and kinds of performance CDAs operating in health currently attain, and can attain in the future. The research concludes with recommendations for a proposed capacity-building programme for CDAs guided by the PAF

Through an exploration and analysis of the roles of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in education policy reform particularly at the Basic Education level in Zambia, this thesis argues that over the past few decades, NGOs have become increasingly visible. Indeed, since the 1990s, many NGOs supporting education have entered the arena of advocacy and policy dialogue with government; yet the success of internationally recognised goals - such as Education For All (EFA) – seem as remote as ever. To address the concern regarding the role of NGOs in education policy, qualitative methodological approaches were utilised. These included interviews, participant observation, focus group discussions and documentary analysis. This research finds that the participation of NGOs in Basic Education Policy Reform in Zambia needs to be “reformulated” to end problems concerning access, inequity and quality in education. Although NGOs are involved in policy through their roles as service providers and policy advocates, the majority depend on foreign donor funding which creates tensions between government strategies and donor priorities. Due to their dependence on international funding NGOs in Lusaka province appear to have made a limited contribution to educational developments. The government of Zambia, because of its indebtness, has accepted neo-liberal policies in education which are frequently tied to conditionalities in aid packages. Therefore, it has been found that NGOs have helped the neo-liberal agenda of donors rather than the needs of local communities and schools. The conclusion one must draw, is that if NGOs are to contribute to minimising educational problems, they need to support policies that are indigenous that put educational needs of all children, especially the marginalised and vulnerable, first.

<p>Det svenska biståndet inriktat mot demokratisering uppgick 2008 till ca 4 miljarder kr. Det civila samhällets roll i demokratiseringsprocesser har fått ökad uppmärksamhet de senaste 15 åren och är numera ett av de vanligaste fokusområdena inom demokratibistånd. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka det svenska demokratibiståndet inriktat på det civila samhället och dess effekter och dess möjligheter att påverka demokratiseringsprocesser Genom att undersöka utvärderingar av olika projekt, vars syfte varit att stärka det civila samhället, har biståndets egentliga effekter kunnat redovisas. De länder som undersöks i denna uppsats är Moldavien, Etiopien, Zimbabwe och fyra län-der i Latinamerika; Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua. De resultat som redovisas i upp-satsen ligger först och främst i attityd- och beteendeförändringar på individnivå hos de som varit inblandade i organisationer, men även bland vanliga medborgare. Människor har blivit mer medvetna om deras politiska och civila rättigheter. I vissa fall har även förändringar skett främst på lokalnivå, där kommunalpolitiker blivit mindre rädda för det civila samhäl-let, och dialoger kunnat föras och där organisationer och vanliga medborgare vågat ställa krav på vissa av deras rättigheter. På detta plan har biståndet alltså kunnat påverka det civila samhället.Vad som dock utgör ett hinder för det civila samhällets möjligheter att påverka på nationell nivå är den bristande respekt som de statliga institutionerna visar. För att det civila samhäl-let ska kunna påverka beslut och öka demokratin i de länder som undersöks behöver en ömsedig respekt utvecklas mellan staten och det civila samhället.</p> / <p>The Swedish aid focused on democratization amounted to approximately 4 billion SEK in 2008. The role of civil society in democratization processes have received increased atten-tion in the last 15 years and is now one of the most common focus areas of democracy as-sistance. The aim of this thesis is to examine the Swedish democracy assistance focused on civil society and its effects and its ability to influence the processes of democratization. By examining evaluations of different projects, which aim was to strengthen civil society, the actual effects have been possible to show.The countries examined in this thesis is Moldova, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and four countries in Latin America, Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua. The results shown in the thesis is primarily in attitude and behavior change at the individual level among those who have been involved in organizations, but also among ordinary citizens. People have become more aware of their political and civil rights. In some cases, even changes primarily at the local level, where local politicians have become less fearful of civil society, and dialogue, and where organizations and ordinary citizens dared to make demands on some of their rights. On this level, the aid has been able to influence civil society.What, however, is an obstacle to civil society's ability to influence at the national level is the lack of respect which the state institutions show. For civil society to be able to influence decisions and increase democracy in the countries under study there need to be a reciprocal respect developed between the state and civil society.</p>

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