NGO Mandate Change: Nonprofit And Voluntary Sector

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector
Quarterly
http://nvs.sagepub.com/

The Whole Story of NGO Mandate Change: The Peacebuilding Work of
World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and Mennonite Central Committee
Loramy Conradi Gerstbauer
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 2010 39: 844 originally published online 7 July
2009
DOI: 10.1177/0899764009339864
The online version of this article can be found at: http://nvs.sagepub.com/content/39/5/844 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:

Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action

Additional services and information for Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://nvs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://nvs.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Recently, there have been more critical appraisals or cautionary concerns about the effectiveness of NGO peacebuilding, qualifications of NGOs and their staff, undue influence of official actors in NGO agendas, and more (Gerstbauer, 2005; Goodhand,
2006; Reimann, 2005). Although many types of NGOs can engage in peacebuilding (such as human rights NGOs, refugee NGOs, and local grassroots NGOs), the focus here is on international relief and development NGOs that have purposefully decided to adopt the language of peacebuilding and to reflect and act on this as part of their mission.
Inevitably questions arise as to why these NGOs adopted peacebuilding mandates in the first place. The answer usually involves a litany of post–Cold War factors that have pushed or driven NGOs to make changes. Such factors can be empirically supported. However, this is not the whole picture. The focus here is not on these external factors, but rather views the mandate shifts from an internal organizational perspective.
What is the story that the NGOs tell about why peacebuilding is an important, emergent part of their portfolios? One key part of the story is that many of the relief and development NGOs engaging in peacebuilding are faith-based NGOs and that this faith
The article begins with a brief review of literature on NGO peacebuilding and mandate change, with a particular focus on changes in international relief and development NGOs and peacebuilding since 1990. The process by which three case organizations—Catholic
Relief Services, Mennonite Central Committee, and World Vision—decided to make peacebuilding part of their organizational mandates is then introduced.

NGOs and Peacebuilding
Within the relief and development NGO world, peacebuilding is the preferred term to describe a broad array of peace related activities across the time span of a conflict (see
Lederach, 1997, p. 20). Thus the term is now widely used in a different sense than the original United Nations definition, which limited peacebuilding to postconflict activities
(Boutros-Ghali, 1992). Most organizations use the term as an umbrella concept to describe
“different activities that nonviolently prevent, limit, resolve, or transform conflict and create peaceful and just societies” (Schirch, 2006, p. 9). Following are some brief examples of the types of activities that are labeled as peacebuilding work by these