Most international NGOs engaged in development cooperation, humanitarian action and/or peace-support work exclusively or predominantly in non-Western continents and countries. But international ‘solidarity’ tomorrow demands that INGOs (also) do much more, and more structural, work in their home societies. For the wellbeing of a few billion people around the world, and if that is not convincing enough, also for their own survival.
For the past decades, the largely international orientation was fundamentally grounded in a notion that ‘You have the problems, we have the solutions.’ The ‘solution’ came in the forms of finance, technical expertise, organisational competency, managerial skills, alleged high moral integrity, and the political superiority of ‘democracy’. Sadly, we now see that the Western countries are also facing a mounting pile of ‘problems’ and are important drivers of rapidly deteriorating global problems. Key ones are global warming and biodiversity collapse; immigration and asylum; profound economic disruption; extreme inequality; polarisation and de-democratisation; and rejection of international norms.
If Western INGOs want to be more than a project factory and really behave as ‘civil society’, they need to engage with the growing pain points in their home societies. That may result in less income as they will sometimes have to forgo government funding. But there are plenty of examples of Western NGO-style organisations that had and have considerable influence notwithstanding their modest size. At the same time, there will be plenty of opportunities to work with governments, if they go beyond protest to proposition, and engage a wider public in their own societies. More detail here.