Development NGOs and the Challenge of Partnership: Changing Relations between North and South

This paper reviews the changing relationships between Northern development NGOs (NNGOs) which are organizations with their roots in industrialized countries, and local southern NGOs (SNGOs) which exist in many aid‐recipient countries. It draws on selected experiences from the Bangladesh context. There are three main changes which have taken place. Firstly, many NNGOs in the past decade or so have moved from implementation of development projects towards a partnership approach in which they fund and attempt to work with SNGOs. This has increasingly led to the idea of NGO "capacity‐building" as a key objective, but a significant growth in SNGO capacity in a country such as Bangladesh increasingly renders such objectives less meaningful. Secondly, official bilateral or multilateral development donors are…