NGOs and Resources in the Construction of Intellectual Realms: Cases from India

Abstract

Resources received by NGOs, particularly in the developing world, are instrumental in shaping program activities and in establishing, through donors, the hegemony of Western knowledge. Building on earlier work involving the spatial and locational politics of knowledge, I argue that donors providing resources for designing and implementing programs, including that for capacity building, impact the structuring of knowledge to create intellectual realms. Intellectual realms structure knowledge and create bounded spaces in ways that maintain the centrality and power of knowledge producers in the West. The donors pre-determine activities to be pursued and utilize, the capacity building initiatives as mechanisms for promoting theoretical ideas and frameworks that conform to knowledge production in the West. Using two cases from rural India, I discuss the ways in which donor priorities can adversely impact local communities and how power relations at the local level and across the local and global levels facilitate the construction of knowledge.