Projects, Donors, and Discourses: A Critical Look at Experiences and Representations in a Chinese Environmental NGO

Abstract

Why are there so many assumptions about NGOs and so fewattempts to describe the projects and procedures of specificNGOs? My thesis looks at the experiences of the leaders andworkers of a NGO in Yunnan, China, and seeks to describe thepersonal stories of some of the workers in the organisation, aswell as their relation to government officials, internationaldonors and national policies in a way that might cast more lighton the study of NGOs more generally. While keeping a focus onlocal practices and events, I analyse some of the possible effectsof national and international policies and projects, and look athow the workers and leaders at the NGO relate to these policiesby claiming to represent them, or even seeking to change them.Different from much of the literature on NGOs and socialmovements, I do not assume that NGOs are assisting in theconstruction of a new global civil society', but rather thatpossible changes made by NGOs can be just as much the resultof unintended consequences and engagement in multiplecollaborations with diverging interests and interpretations.