BINGOs (Big international NGOs) work in close coordination with centers of power nowadays. It is no coincidence that their “campaigns” seem to dovetail nicely with the agenda of power. In his book, The Democracy Makers Nicolas Guilhot described how the language of NGO activists has been adopted by powerful institutions and businesses:

They are now speaking a language that, once upon a time, belonged exclusively to protesters, campaigners, dissenters, or committed citizens. And so, this professionalization of activism also corresponds to the migration of socially progressive repertoires of collective action, inherited from anti-imperialist campaigns, struggles for rights, emancipatory causes, from social movements often opposing state institutions to the most dominant state institutions themselves. By the same token, the very same institutions that were associated with the cold war and were then most often attacked in the name of human rights or democracy are today at the cutting edge of a new global democratic activism. The U.S. State Department, once the foe of the human rights movement, claims now to be supporting transnational issue networks in the field of human rights; the World Bank, attacked in the past for indirectly supporting authoritarian forms of modernization in developing countries, now purports to follow exclusively “bottom-up” methodologies and “grass-roots” approaches, and promotes political participation, the rule of law and “good governance”. Market forces have not been lagging behind: faced with growing criticism, multinational corporations have developed ethical strategies meant to respond to this challenge. They sell not only commodities but also, increasingly, values, commitment, environmental awareness, or social responsibility…

Transparency International best exemplifies this ambivalent relation between NGOs and the concept of civic virtue. The organization has indeed established a reputation on the fight against corruption. It publishes every year a comprehensive list of countries ranked according to the levels of corruption found in public markets, state administrations, and the main sectors of international trade. The story of Transparency International shows that the exposure and denunciation of corruption needed to find an NGO channel in order to achieve credibility. The idea initially came from officials working in the African Bureau of the World Bank who realized that the issue of corruption could not be handled directly by the Bank. As a result, some of them left the bank and created Transparency in 1989 as an instrument that could perform this task. At the same time, although if was formally an NGO, TI placed the fight against economic corruption within the orbit of international financial institutions. Its success rested on the capacity of its founders to mobilize powerful networks close to the World Bank itself, multinational consulting firms or business circles. TI also contributed to establish the legitimacy of these circles as moral entrepreneurs and to demonstrate their civic virtue. This closeness between these social strata, the elite of the financial professions, and the issue-area of corruption appears very clearly in TI’s strategies. In its crusade against economic and political corruption, it therefore mobilized the instruments that were most familiar to its constituency and its founders: those of global financial regulation. For putting pressure upon individual countries, TI adopted the principle of evaluating and ranking countries, thus replicating in the field of civic virtue the instruments used by rating agencies such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s in the assessment of the financial standing of stocks or bonds.

This is not to say that NGOs are subservient to the needs or the interests of developed countries, that they are the Trojan horses of neoliberal globalization, or that they have been simply co-opted–although such strategies are sometimes deliberately pursued by foundations (Roelofs 2003). Many of them obviously engage critically with problematic aspects of globalization and sometimes successfully confront powerful organized interests. But, overall, NGOs as such have become key regulatory actors of globalization, on equal footing with financial institution or international organization. As a result of this success, their identity has been dissolved in a seamless web of “global governance” where they interact and sometimes overlap with government agencies, international organizations, and corporations. The NGO “format” has become a specific modality of the exercise of power. The very label “NGO” has become meaningless and political scientists are at pain attempting to classify the plethora of international institutional forms cohabiting under this label, ranging from state-sponsored organizations and international networks of professionals to neighborhood associations.