Abstract
As in other parts of the global South, the NGO sphere in Cameroon has experienced a remarkable expansion since the 1990s. The contours of this expansion, its drivers, logics, and effects, are in need of exploration. William Markham and Lotsmart Fonjong’s study of environmental NGOs, Saving the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Organizational Dynamics and Effectiveness of NGOs in Cameroon, is a valuable contribution toward a better understanding of this phenomenon. The authors mobilize data gathered over the course of 52 interviews with leaders of NGOs across five of the country’s ten regions and identify some key challenges these organizations face in conducting their activities and staying in business.
The book is organized in eleven chapters. The first five chapters introduce the research project, its theoretical framework, and its methodology; and they acquaint readers with the political, economic, and environmental context of the study. The following five chapters present the research findings: Chapter Six characterizes the NGOs surveyed by the authors, Chapter Seven analyzes their financial resources, and Chapters Eight through Ten dissect these NGOs’ relationships with the government, with the communities where they work, and with other environmental NGOs. The conclusion in Chapter Eleven discusses the implications of these findings.
The book sheds light on what scholars working in East Africa have called “the rise of the NGO as contractor” (Mercer and Green 2012). In a context marked by a long-term economic downturn and massive unemployment, the opportunities offered by the programs and projects of a broad range of international development actors are particularly prized. Some NGOs do better than others at the “grant-writing game” (p. 131). This is reflected in the authors’ categorization of environmental NGOs into Type I (high capacity) and Type II (low capacity) organizations, according to their financial resources, staff numbers, and level of expertise. Eloquently titled “The Biggest Problem: Money,” Chapter Seven makes this point most forcefully. The constant pursuit of outside funding translates into ephemeral or erratic trajectories, from short-lived organizations to those that undergo periodic spells of inactivity. Priorities are strongly aligned with the donors’ shifting interests, and the possibilities for long-term specialization in specific environmental issues are severely restricted. Imposed reporting requirements and budgetary guidelines (excluding overheads, for example) create glaring gaps between procedures on paper and how things are done in practice.
In terms of research design, the project behind the book leaves readers asking for more creativity and ambition. The book’s unquestioned objects of analysis are formally distinct NGOs. Within such a framework, there is practically no room to document what science and technology scholars would call assemblages. The authors’ insight on the importance of financial constraints, for example, would have warranted paying attention to generously funded, multi-year programs that have made their effects felt in recent years on the country’s NGO sphere generally and environmental NGOs in particular. I have in mind examples such as the European Union-sponsored Program for the Structuring of Civil Society in Cameroon (Courtin 2011) or the initiatives launched in Cameroon under the United Nations Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Somorin et al. 2016). Transcending the view of NGOs as compartmentalized objects and analyzing the assemblages formed around large programs is crucial to understanding how people, expertise, and ideas circulate in Cameroon’s environmental field.
A compounded problem is the fact that in the book NGOs speak only through the voices of their leaders. The authors seem well aware of the limitations that this entails. As they point out, “organisations find themselves caught between numerous constituencies and have to carefully manage what they say” (p. 100). The authors further acknowledge the effects that such reputational concerns are bound to have on the interviews themselves: “Interviewing NGO leaders is not an effective methodology for determining whether recipient NGOs falsify or distort data in order to make themselves look good” (p. 139). In light of this, it is hard to see what prevented the authors from interviewing interlocutors other than NGO leaders or from undertaking ethnographic observations of NGO work.
While the book offers considerable insights into what the authors call NGOs’ “organizational dynamics,” readers are left wanting to learn more about what these organizations actually do in the name of environmental protection. The discussion of the country’s environmental problems contained in Chapter Four (pp. 52–55) offers only a sparse checklist. There is little sense of the ways in which certain issues become problematized within specific contexts and the implications of such “framings” (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010). A deeper engagement with the recent social science of environmentalism would have befitted a book entitled Saving the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa. It would have also helped make more compelling the authors’ choice to focus on this area of NGO activity as opposed to, say, public health.