Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa increasingly take on state-like tasks, becoming part of the infrastructure of local governance. Yet despite their ties to the state, the same NGOs at times also attempt to act as representatives of society, advocating for communities against the state.
In a rich ethnographic account of NGOs in Tanzania, Dodworth investigates how NGOs legitimate themselves to both state and society. She explores the daily ‘sayings and doings’ (40) of NGO staff, documenting six different ‘legitimation strategies’ that NGOs deploy, with varying success, in efforts to operate effectively. At the heart of her inquiry is the observation of the hybrid position NGOs find themselves in, straddling a blurry boundary between state and society. She terms this the ‘non/state’, documenting how NGOs simultaneously cooperate with state agencies, co-producing policies and goods and even sharing personnel, while at other times positioning themselves as distinct and oppositional to it.
While Dodworth's ethnographic analysis is careful, thoughtful and well-executed, many of her theoretical claims could be better situated relative to existing literature. Existing work already similarly details how Africa's state–society boundaries are fuzzy (Mitchell Reference Mitchell and Steinmetz1999; Lund Reference Lund2006; Hagmann & Peclard Reference Hagmann and Peclard2010; Cammett & Maclean Reference Cammett and Maclean2014), how state and society engage in co-production (Cammett & Maclean Reference Cammett and Maclean2014; Baldwin Reference Baldwin2015) and, importantly, contra a core claim in Dodworth's framing, that developing legitimacy is a central task for NGOs, not solely for states (Risse & Stollenwerk Reference Risse and Stollenwerk2018). Although it is briefly cited, Brass (Reference Brass2016) stands out as an especially ripe target for greater engagement, as it addresses very similar empirical terrain (in Kenya) and already theorises – to a more systematic degree – how NGOs navigate the same tensions created by their precarious position at the state–society boundary.
Yet Dodworth sidesteps some of these opportunities for synthesis with other research by engaging in a broad-brush dismissal of the legitimacy of other social scientific approaches. She laments repeatedly that research rooted in ‘positivist-leaning epistemologies’ (1) and ‘Eurocentric approaches’ (3) has failed to ‘explain and predict’ (4) NGO legitimacy and behaviour (without providing evidence for this claimed failure). The manuscript turns instead to critical and postcolonial theory, criticising existing research for attempting to distil the study of legitimacy and non-state actors down to ‘variables’ (1), false binaries and ‘flowcharts, tables, or causal inferences’ (4) and, in doing so, discounting ‘most of the world…as illegitimate and excluded from de facto theorizing’ (4).
Not only is this an unfair criticism of the positivist-leaning studies on similar topics, exemplified by Brass (Reference Brass2016) and Cammett & Maclean (Reference Cammett and Maclean2014), that do not force state and society into false binaries or exclude Africa from their theorising,Footnote 1 but the manuscript's extended attempt to stake out its epistemological stance becomes a burden that weighs down, and begins to drown, its empirics.
If the self-professed goal is to make one's research less Eurocentric, extractive and rooted in the siloed Western academy, it is not clear that eschewing attempts at simplifying complexity into more interpretable theoretical claims – of the sort to which a table or flowchart might yet prove amenable – or embedding one's argument so deeply in the jargon of critical and postcolonial theory – to the point that parsing much of the book requires PhD-level training in these fields – makes the resulting product any less siloed or Eurocentric. We're left with a book still ensconced within an elite academic (mostly Western) silo, just a different silo than positivists inhabit. Setting aside the ideological and epistemological feuding to focus more on substantive points of agreement and disagreement with empirical findings across approaches would have provided a more promising means to advance knowledge on the role of non-state actors in local governance.
