Civil society has always been defined by class struggle. As the social terrain that bridges the political and economic and that regulates relations between individuals and the state and market, civil society has always been shaped by conflicting forces. It can be bent to the service of aristocratic rule through philanthropic dependency, to bourgeois hegemony founded on market relations, or remade in the image of a popular associational culture of more or less democratic forms of self-organization for advancing collective social rights.

Over the last four decades, with the entrenchment of market relations and the withdrawal of the state, civil society has been occupied increasingly by a social form that advances very specific class interests—the private Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). Memberless, undemocratic, and highly bureaucratized, NGOs increasingly play the mediating role between state and citizenry, and between state and market. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this role was played by membership-based organizations, not least the trade union and modern political party. 

Mass political parties grew out of social movements to represent their members, make demands of the state, and seek to govern on behalf of the people. However, this bridge between politics and the people has in recent decades broken down, along with representative politics itself, creating a “void,” as the political scientist Peter Mair describes it. From the void has emerged a professionalized and marketized shadow of civil society’s former self, a “third sector” to the public and private sectors.

Civil society was once occupied by popular forces, which could function as a bulwark against both capitalist marketization and state authoritarianism, and generate radical movements struggling for socialism, communism, or more cooperative relations. Today, civil society has been colonized by the NGO, which, in turn, colonizes our hollowed-out politics. Elite rule over civil society has, of course, been common throughout history, not least through philanthropy. What’s different about today’s elite capture is precisely its claims to the participation, cooperation, and representation of the people. NGO forms of civic activity have effectively infiltrated the space vacated by more democratic or self-organized forms. How did we get here? And what does it mean for the future of capitalism, democracy, and class struggle?

A Brief History of the Third Sector

In the UK today, the third sector comprises over 160,000 voluntary organizations, ranging from village halls, playgroups, and food banks to small and large charities, religious organizations, and Parent Teacher Associations. It also includes environmental advocacy groups, think tanks, and grant-making foundations. Most of these are small, local organizations with an income of less than £100k a year—and over four in ten have an income of less than £10k a year. However, there are also some much larger institutions: around 780 report an annual income of over £10m a year and 64 over £100m. Largely based in London and the south, they together employ an estimated 950,000 people, two thirds of whom are women. The third sector includes not just registered charities, with traditional trustee-based modes of governance, but also a growing assortment of hybrid organizations such as B-Corps, social enterprises, asset-locked funds, and many more.

The standard story of the growth of this vast and complex array of organizations is that it emerged in the post-war era from “the government’s disavowal of its capacity to meet social needs,” as the late social theorist Randy Martin put it, as non-governmental actors increasingly acted to distribute wealth through non-democratic processes. Older, Victorian institutions such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (founded in 1889), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824), or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1884), often drew on Royal authority and shared a patrician responsibility to protect the vulnerable. The post-war growth of these bodies is well illustrated by the National Trust’s (founded in 1895) use of the post-war Labour government’s National Land Fund to acquire a large number of aristocratic country houses in the 1940s and 1950s. This post-war growth is part of the story of the building of the modern British nation that David Edgerton explores in his The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and includes the hospital-building projects explored in the first issue of Damage. 

As the counterculture of the 1960s developed in Britain, a much wider range of local and regional institutions emerged, with an equally wide range of charitable objectives. From the late 1970s onwards, Thatcherism redefined the purposes of government as part of a wider neoliberal shift, establishing new conditions for the emergence of a part of civil society oriented towards meeting social needs. In the late 1990s, the Third Way agenda injected entrepreneurial values and business dynamism into the third sector and enrolled it in New Labour’s pet project of tackling “social exclusion” (mirroring Clintonism in the US). The screw was tightened again in the 2010s with the turn to austerity through the Conservative party’s so-called “Big Society” agenda, a thin justification for the further withdrawal of the state and the bootstrapping of a “bigger” civil society. Significantly, the Big Society invited “social investors” to invest capital in the third sector and reap financial rewards, all while generating dubious “social returns.” Today’s non-profit sector is consequently more businesslike and “investment ready,” and more amenable to being utilized by the state for delivering policy objectives.

The more familiar contemporary language—at least to the American ear—of the “non-governmental organization” (or NGO) thus only fully emerged in the UK in the past few decades. The rise of the undemocratic private NGO signaled a break with the aristocratic and democratic nation-building concerns of the Victorian and post-war periods. Broad-based membership associations rooted in local and regional working-class self-organization were abandoned, while centralized, professionalized, staff-heavy, and memberless advocacy groups proliferated.

What became increasingly clear in the 1990s and 2000s was that the political actors in Western democratic politics had lost all ability to mobilize the citizenry, legitimate themselves, or organize and represent the interests of different parts of society. As Peter Mair described it in his 2013 book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, a “void” emerged where once representative politics functioned: political participation no longer connected the state to the people. In the European context, the solution to this void proposed by elites largely fell under the rubric of “European integration,” as the older legitimation mechanisms of political accountability of representatives to the citizenry were replaced by a dense network of policy, diplomatic, and lobbying relations between the elites of different nations. It is only in this context that the “NGOization” of society has been possible.

The term NGOization, as the sociologist Paul Stubbs points out, originally referred to the actions of international NGOs in influencing the political trajectories of overseas countries facing conflict, specifically the Yugoslav civil wars. However, “NGOization” increasingly describes a deeper contribution of NGOs to the transformation of domestic politics on both sides of the Atlantic. As political parties and representative politics became unable to legitimize the state, the moral support provided by NGOs developed into a crucial source of legitimation for elites within their own nations. Starting in the Balkans, NGOization has come home to roost. 

Participation without Participation

So what does NGOization look like in practice? As the historian Claire Dunning has argued, the US is the vanguard case of the experimental use of government grants to deliver “public goods” through non-profit organizations—that is, to deliver selective welfare through private entities with a public charter. The UK today seems to be moving towards a similar urban governance model dominated by the NGO and characterized by Nonprofit Neighborhoods,as Dunning’s 2023 book names it. Fiscal austerity since 2010 has massively hindered the capacity of local government to fulfill its statutory obligations, let alone develop more proactive approaches to urban regeneration and local economic development. As social and regional inequalities have widened with austerity, some neighborhoods have been “left behind” (as the latest policy fashion spins it) and NGOs have stepped into the void left by the retreating local state.

Two kinds of nonprofit are particularly important in this emergent NGOization of the local state. The first is the sort of organization that might call itself a “civic design consultancy” or “community development agency,” and sees itself as having a remit to work closely with communities on projects designed to address local problems that remain unsolved by the state or market. These projects are often branded as “urban labs” and conducted as social-scientific “experiments”— that is, they research, monitor, measure and are evaluated against a “theory of change” and a set of performance indicators. The second is the funder that bankrolls the project: a long-established charitable trust, perhaps, or a younger foundation endowed by a philanthro-capitalist. Community-based NGOs must apply to funders for competitive grants to deliver their projects, placing the funder in a privileged position to shape project objectives by specifying conditions of their grants. Local government plays a central role, too, but no longer as a direct provider of services in these neighborhoods, only as an enabler and commissioner of NGOs to fulfill their duties in more creative and inventive ways (and with far fewer resources).

A paradigmatic example of a pioneering “nonprofit neighborhood” in the UK today is the Participatory City project in east London. Bearing all the hallmarks of the NGOization of local governance, the agency behind the project is called Civic Systems Lab and managed to persuade several philanthropic funders to bankroll the foundation behind the project to the tune of some £9 million—no small sum in a deprived part of London facing severe public budget cuts. Barking and Dagenham Council for its part funded the Participatory City Foundation to work closely with some of the borough’s most “socially excluded” (i.e. poorest) residents to bring them together and help them develop resources in a context of deprivation and racial tension. The project was sold to the council on its promise to redesign deprived neighborhoods as what Civic Systems Lab calls “participatory ecosystems” and to get residents involved in new forms of cooperation. These include collective and sustainable activities like growing, cooking, mending, sharing, and recycling; these citizen-led “micro-projects” are intended to develop into social enterprises. Five “high street shops” were established in the borough’s most deprived districts, with a central HQ in a warehouse managed as a community makerspace. The ultimate vision for these nonprofit neighborhoods was an alternative local economic system that Participatory City’s founder Tessy Britton described as “Universal Basic Everything.” Such is the ambition of the NGO changemakers.

The stress in the Participatory City is, as the name suggests, on participation. Yet this is not a democratic form of participation driven by citizens themselves, despite all claims by the NGOs involved. Rather, residents are invited to “participate” in a project already designed top to bottom by technocratic experts and professionals. Participants are not equal members of the project, with voting, control, or ownership rights as in membership-based associations; they are merely participants in a memberless form of social engineering. All forms of civil organization encouraged by Participatory City are, in fact, mediated by the professional team and the platform infrastructure that supports the project.

NGO power over local governance is secured through the abstract models and pre-programmed “prototypes” that are cooked up in places like Civic Systems Lab and then rolled out as policy solutions across diverse local contexts. The onus is on NGOs to prove that their model works, as a replicable “Theory of Change,” a branded commodity for sale to philanthropic funders and public commissioners. Participants—that is, the actual people who live in a city that is being redesigned as “participatory”—are required only as more or less willing test-subjects in an experimental process whose principles are designed in advance. Participation thus enacts a new paternalism; it is deeply anti-democratic and post-political.

Five years after it began, having since been showered with awards for innovation in local governance, Participatory City has completed its planned project lifecycle and, with no further funding forthcoming, is withdrawing from Barking and Dagenham. Has it succeeded in meeting the objectives set by the funders and the council? The Participatory City Foundation has of course claimed so, marshaling its many resources to prove its concept through elaborate datasets presented in glossy brochures, in a bid to keep the show on the road or expand to other cities. However, a surprisingly confessional post on LinkedIn by Participatory City’s latest Chief Executive admits to the project having “fallen short of our original ambition”: “we have sometimes not explained these aims well enough to residents, local groups and partners.” Participation in a nutshell. But, as we explain below, such failure has more to do with the limitations and contradictions of the NGO “project” form than the idiosyncrasies of any specific NGO, participatory or otherwise. As para-institutions, NGOs attempt to fill the hollowed-out function of representative politics with an equally broken form of participation.

The Contradictions of the NGO Form

In the past five years, as Malcom Kyeyune and others have detailed, the failure of left populism has seen its supporters pivot from politics to “civil society”; the social transformations out of the grasp of Corbyn and Sanders are now hoped for through “social movement” organizations such as The Peace and Justice Project or a wide range of 501(c)(3) institutions. In addition to remaining vehicles for the ultra-rich to exert their influence, NGOs have thus also become expressions of the contradictions of the post-left populist moment. In a particularly striking example, after 60 years of charitable grant-making, the Lankelly Chase foundation—one of the key funders of Participatory City, and whose mission is to “dismantle racial capitalism”—has now decided to dismantle itself and offload its endowment. It now concedes that “the traditional philanthropy model” is “so entangled with Colonial Capitalism that it inevitably continues the harms of the past into the present.” This tension—in which those employed by or leading NGOs designed to protect or advance values are also those most involved in a wider politics that looks to reassess those very values—is seen across the contemporary NGO sector beyond the UK.

Being creatures of the void of representative politics explains some of the internal tensions within NGOs. The NGO as an institution is governed by a very specific institutional logic. Over and above the bureaucratization common to all sorts of institutions, the NGO employs the particular figure of the “projectariat,” moving ceaselessly from one project to the next. NGOs today occupy precarious ground, constantly hustling for grants, contracts, or commissions to stay afloat, and geared towards delivering successive, time-limited projects, each with their own objectives and performance metrics that must be monitored and managed, made accountable to project funders and commissioners. What better example than the Participatory City Foundation packing up shop and moving on now that its project funding is finished, leaving in its wake only a shiny five-year final evaluation report, some angry residents, and a number of buildings left vacant to be leased or sold off to the highest bidder?

This operating culture has the peculiar effect of “projectifying” NGO activity, such that the political and social missions that NGOs pursue are distorted by the form of the project and the mode of project management. NGOs thus have specific material interests shaped by “projectified” incentive structures that are rarely conducive to democratic decision-making. If NGOs are to be the guardians of progressive social change—as so many increasingly position themselves—then “projectification” has serious implications for our post-political era.

NGOs also occupy an unclear position with respect to their internal governance. Since they do not have the democratic mandate that exists (at least formally) upon the state, nor the recourse to profit that translates questions of the “rightness” of any course of action into a clear metric, the ways in which NGOs make decisions are not obviously grounded. Sometimes decisions are made simply according to the whims of funders, but when ostensibly “objective” criteria are trotted out, one of the most plausible bases for decision-making  is “impact”: the extent (ideally quantified) to which an NGO is achieving its stated aims and helping its identified beneficiaries. However, this impact metric lacks the clear-cut nature either of the democratic mandate or the bottom-line, bringing in a chaotic mass of assumptions and measurement challenges and an enlarged role for expertise in those areas. The theorist Jason Blakely sees in this turn to impact evaluation and monitoring “the increasing deferment of power to the bureaucracy and experts in democratic societies.” The NGO unsurprisingly mirrors the technocratic (or, as Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti have it, technopopulist) nature of our politics.

NGOization thus channels what Randy Martin called, in his book Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative, the “derivative logic” of late capitalism. NGOs seek to create speculative futures markets in the policy products that they sell (as a kind of derivative) to cash-strapped public commissioners with the assistance of private funders. What derivatives are to finance capital, professional-managerial NGOs are to the state: para-institutions. This derivative logic feeds back into itself. The NGO is the central para-institution of our age, simulating participation while preventing any meaningful public form of it. NGOs remain accountable only to their benefactors and the progressivism of their staff, not to citizens or the public.

If civil society is the “system of needs” (as Marx characterized it in his commentary on Hegel) through which individuals organize to discover and advance their interests under capitalism, what happens when this system gets disorganized and captured by elite interests? What happens when atomized individuals are no longer able organize themselves effectively on the terrain of civil society to define and fulfill their needs? When the distance between the state and the market collapses, and when civil society is vacated by representative organizations, what does this mean for the possibility of breaking free from capitalism’s domination of social needs and for the hope of collectively coordinating a future beyond relentless, mindless accumulation?

Any route out of this impasse must surely involve the democratic reorganization of civil society. Even those apparently in control of the private NGOs that dominate civil society increasingly recognize that this organizational model cannot address current crises; that contemporary civil society is a system out of control. Lankelly Chase’s voluntary dissolution of its fund confirms the deep pessimism at the head of this top-heavy sector. But such decisions as these cannot be left to private discretion, however enlightened. We need more robust and democratic forms of debate and organization across civil society before we can slay this bodiless monster.

Matthew Thompson is a London-based researcher and the author of Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

George Hoare is the co-host of the global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga. His most recent book is Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (Polity, 2023).

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh is a writer and activist interested in democracy in politics, civic society, and business.