ed through economic modernization have left largp segments of the population behind.

In many countries, the development gains of earlier decades are evaporating in the 1980s. The World Bank's _World Development R :porlt 1988_ reports that poverty in developing countries is on the rise, estimating that the number of people with inadequate diets in developing countries (exduding China) increased from 650 million to 730 million between 1970 and 1980. Decines are reported in life expectancy, per capita calorie supply, and real wages in the 1980s.3 The countries of Sub-Saharan Africa experienced an annual dccline of 2.9 per cent in per capita income from 1980 to 1987. Declines in real per capita income were also experienced during this period by oil exporting and heavily indebted countries.!

It is little wonder that thoughtful development theorists and practitioners are searching for new approaches to dealing with Third World poverty. In this search, a growing number of aid donors and national governments have turned to NGOs as potential instruments for implementing official development projects, especially those intended to channel public resources to the poor.

We share this interest in organizations that are neither governmental nor commercial and in their distinctive potentials for support of national develop. ment. We are concerned, however, that these organizations are too often viewed through conceptual lenses that miss important aspects of their nature. Their developmental roles and performance have most often been assessed through theoretical frameworks developed to assess organizations in the commercial and government sectors. The resulting analysis offers only a partial view that often leads to working with these organizations in ways that diminish rather than enhance their contributions to solving critical development problems. In this essay we will propose a conceptual lens for analyzing such agencies that offers a more complete and accurate picture of their special development roles.

# THE NGO: A RESIDUAL CATEGORY

The labels "non-profit and "non-governmental" (we will use these labels interchangeably throughout this section) say more about what the organizations so classified are not than what they are. The terms define organizations that are residuals of more standard classificadons. A wide variety of diverse, structurally and functionally unrelated organizations fall under the non-profit and non-governmental category, as illustrated in Box 1.

Bringing order to this chaos is a challenge. The World Bank has defined NGOs as 'private organizations that pursue activities to relieve soffering, promote the interests of the poor, protect the environment or undertake community devc!opment."5 This definition emphasizes the development related actvities pursued by these agencies, but offers little help in understanding their fundamental nature.

Prevailing analytic dcassifications reflect the reality that though social scientists from a number of disciplines have studied NGOs, no social science discipline _speciaes_ in the study of this group of organizations, in the sense that political science specializes in the study of governments and economics specializes in the study of market-oriented institutions. Consequently more analytic work has been done and more conceptual clarity exists about the public governmental and private commercial sectors.

When social scientists do turn their attention to the "residual' organizadons, they are inclined to apply analytical perspecdives that have been developed to analyze the other sectors. The following brief characterizations of commonly applied perspecdves seek to capture their essential elements. These perspectives are useful and accurate, as far as they go.

# The _I1n_ of Economic Analysis

The lens of economic analysis has often been applied to explain why NGOs exist and what motivates their behavior. Economic analysis tends to focus on the implications of their non-profit status. Of particular concern to the economist is the question of how the productive efficiency of non-profit organizations differs from that of for-profit and governmental organizations.

_Public_ Goods. One common explanation for the presence of non-profit organizations parallels the economic argument for governments, ie., economists argue that certain "public goods", such as clean tir, can be enjoyed by everyone once they are produced, whether they have paid for them or not. Economists note that there is no economic incentive for an individual consumer to pay for products from which others benefit equally at no cost. This wfree rider problem explains why markets seldom produce public goods, such as clean air, because the use of such goods cannot be restricted to those who pay for them.

Governments, in contrast, can use their power to tax and regulate all citizens to compel shared support for producers of public goods. Provision of public goods is generally considered to be one of

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