By addressing the question “Are the roles and values of stakeholder participation qualitatively different for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and national human rights institutions (NHRIs), and if so, how?” this article dissects stakeholder participation in UN human rights treaty body activities. First, it normatively posits that stakeholder participation in treaty body activities carries three values, which weigh differently based on the actor and the treaty body activity concerned: facilitating “bounded” national deliberations, promoting international deliberations on human rights treaty standards, and supplementing the treaty bodies’ fact-finding capacity. It offers concrete normative guidance for treaty bodies on their engagement with NGO and NHRI participation to maximize the benefits of these values. It then empirically analyzes their current practice in light of the above-mentioned normative guidance. This article contributes, first, to the theorization of stakeholder participation in treaty body activities, which has been discussed but only in generalized or fragmented ways in previous studies. Second, it supports the effectiveness and legitimacy of treaty bodies by endorsing their practice that is consistent with the guidance and finding space for improvement. Finally, it provides a rationale for establishing and strengthening NHRIs by showing that NHRI participation has unique roles distinct from those of NGOs.

This article examines the government purchase of social services in China as a window by which to investigate the evolving relations between the party-state and social organizations. Going beyond the conventional focus on state–non-governmental organization (NGO) dynamics in urban areas, we explore the expanded role of social organizations in rural service provision under state-led campaigns of rural modernization. Engaging with institutional theory and the consultative authoritarianism thesis, we argue that NGOs initially operated in an emerging organizational field where they exercised considerable autonomy in setting agendas and designing services. As the party-state's incentives to utilize and co-opt the social work profession grow, however, we observe a trend towards incorporation, wherein social workers now play a bigger role alongside the strengthening of state control over the sector. Through tracing the inception and eventual termination of a decade-long social service project in Guangdong, this article shows how state incorporation might undermine the future role of NGOs in rural development.

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China’s engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.

Maternal dietary feeding practice is one of the proxy indicators of maternal nutrient adequacy and it improves outcomes for both mothers and their offspring. The minimum maternal dietary diversity score of lactating women is defined as when the mother ate at least four and above food groups from the nine food groups 24 h preceding the survey regardless of the portion size. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine the minimum dietary diversity score (MDDS) and its predictors among lactating mothers in the Pastoralist community, Ethiopia. A community-based cross-sectional study design was employed on 360 lactating mothers using a multi-stage sampling technique from 5 January 2020 to 10 February 2020. Data were collected using questionnaires and anthropometry measurements. Data were entered using EPI-data 4.6.02 and exported into SPSS version 25. Statistical significance was declared at P-value <0⋅05 at multivariable logistic regression. Only one in four lactating mothers met the MDDS. The majority of them consumed cereals in the preceding 24 h of data collection. The most important predictors were maternal meal frequency (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 6⋅26; 95 % confidence interval (CI) (3⋅51, 11⋅15)), antenatal care (ANC) follow-up one to three times and four and above times (AOR: 2⋅58; 95 % CI (1⋅24, 5⋅36), 4⋅77 (1⋅90, 11⋅95), respectively) and secondary paternal education (AOR 2⋅97; 95 % CI (1⋅44, 6⋅11)). The MDDS among lactating mothers was low. Paternal education, maternal meal frequency and ANC follow-up were the significant predictors. Therefore, to improve maternal dietary diversity score emphasis should be given to those predictors.

This article traces the global humanitarian sector’s late twentieth-century embrace of human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. Drawing on evidence from NGOs in three Anglophone states (Britain, Canada, and Ireland), it examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the breakthrough for human rights activism in that period, and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. From that foundation, the article makes two claims. First, it argues that the ‘triumph’ of human rights in the late twentieth century was the product of a complex set of diplomatic, intellectual, and ideological factors that were of global, rather than simply of Western, origin. Second, by tracing what could and could not be done in the name of humanitarianism, the article brings us closer to understanding how even the most outwardly progressive vision of intervention was produced within a very specific – hierarchical and paternalistic – imagining of the Global South.

Although there has been widespread attention to the apparent rise of a transnational society of cross-border non-state actors alongside the international society of states, transnational society and international society have traditionally been treated as distinctive domains with different institutions. This article, by contrast, aims to transform theorization of world order through its investigation of how actors in transnational society have developed institutions that mirror in notable respects some of the primary institutions of the international society of states such as through serving constitutive and regulative functions. In addition to delineating these institutions of transnational society, the article interrogates the interdependence of these institutions of transnational society and those of international society, as well as their differences and repercussions for world order. The analysis considers how, in conjunction with the contribution of institutions of international society to international order, institutions of transnational society contribute to transnational order. By exploring not only the tensions between but also the complementarities of transnational and interstate institutions, the article both provides a reinterpretation of contemporary world order and helps reveal the potential for its more harmonious operation.

From a regulatory perspective, philanthropy in China has been officially modernized. Since the government established a legal framework in 2004 based on models from overseas, the number of private foundations in China has grown more than six-fold. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of 214 private foundations conducted in 2012, we present a landscape view of these new philanthropic institutions, discussing both who begins foundations and how their monies are used. We find that despite the rise of new private wealth in China and the adoption of the private foundation form, government priorities are structuring the field of Chinese philanthropy in key and consequential ways. We conclude with some considerations of the implications of these findings for the development of broader civil society.

Can concerns for one’s reputation cause non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to alter their behavior to the detriment of achieving their policy goals? To answer this question, we explore the relationship between NGOs and their donors. Our theoretical model reveals that reputation can be a key piece of information in the decision to fund an NGO’s activities. Reputation can become so important to the NGO’s survival that it interferes with the long-term policy goals of the organization. As such, reputations can become a double-edged sword, simultaneously providing the information donors seek while constraining NGOs from realizing policy goals. We apply this logic to the problem of NGO accountability, which has received increasing attention in recent years, and demonstrate that the tools used by donors to improve accountability can trigger unintended consequences. We illustrate this strategic dynamic with two types of NGO activity: water improvement and international crisis mediation.

This article uses an institutional approach to examine Chinese NGOs as an emerging organizational field. In mature organizational fields, the organizations are powerfully constrained to follow the institutional practices of that field. However, in an emerging organizational field, the institutionalized constraints are not yet established, so actors can try out a wide range of practices. Some of these practices will become the new “rules of the game” of the organizational field when it is established. The content of these rules will shape the relationship between NGOs and the Chinese party-state for future generations. We find that a Chinese NGO's resource strategy is shaped by two interacting factors. First, NGOs operate in an evolving ecology of opportunity. Second, the social entrepreneurs who lead Chinese NGOs perceive that ecology of opportunity through the lens of their personal experiences, beliefs and expertise. As a result, the initial strategies of the organizations in our sample were strongly influenced by the institutional experience of their founders. Former state bureaucrats built NGOs around alliances with party-state agencies. In contrast, NGO founders that had no party-state experience usually avoided the state and sought areas away from government control/attention, such as the internet or private business.

The ecological network of Natura 2000, an European Union (EU) initiative to halt biodiversity loss across Europe, has dominated biodiversity governance in the new EU member states in recent years, as implementation was a condition of accession. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have generally assisted Natura 2000 implementation. In two Central and Eastern European countries (Poland and Hungary), NGOs became involved in different ways; this paper seeks to analyse and explain these national differences by researching the theoretical background of policy networks and advocacy coalitions in both countries. In Hungary, NGOs worked closely with governmental authorities and contributed significantly to site selection. In Poland, NGOs initially opposed government plans, but later moved toward close cooperation with public institutions; this resulted in a significant expansion in the area and number of designated Natura 2000 sites. In both countries, NGO influence increased during the Natura 2000 process owing to the establishment of multi-level policy networks with the European Commission and public institutions, based on resource dependencies and shared beliefs. In post-socialist countries, the progression from government-monopolized biodiversity conservation implies a growing importance and contribution of NGOs, and their ability to use resources appropriately in the new governance contexts.