Mapping the Belgian NGDO Landscape in Relation to Development Cooperation: Dealing with Fragmentation and Emerging Complexities

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide a general overview of the Belgian non-governmental development organization (NGDO) landscape and the challenges it faces within the development cooperation framework. Belgium with its consociational federal state, historically characterized by deep linguistic, regional and ideological cleavages, has a NGDO landscape that bears similar traits. To a large extent segmented into ideological pillars (catholic, social democratic, liberal), divided into Walloon or Flemish regions, yet increasingly linked to international networks, the NGDO landscape is fascinatingly fragmented. Subsequent reforms in co-funding systems have attempted, with limited success, to partially fix the fragmentation problem. Today, fragmentation once more figures high on the agenda as a problem, because the recent aid effectiveness debate has put more international pressure on donors (bilateral, multilateral but also indirect actors) to harmonize, manage for results, professionalize, concentrate, specialize and become more effective in delivering aid. In Belgium, on the sides of both the government and the NGDO sector itself, there is a genuine concern to deal with these challenges and to improve the quality of the NGDO sector. Yet there is also resistance toward these new tendencies. Resistance is in part fed by the success of a huge number of locally embedded particular non-professional development initiatives and small organizations, part of the so-called ‘fourth pillar’¹ — which do not necessarily follow the recommendations of the international aid effectiveness debate, yet they compete with professional non-governmental development actors for 16 private donations and are very successful in doing so.