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Walking the tightrope: the funding of South African NGOs and the governance of community development.

This chapter examines the role of intermediary NGOs in community development in post-apartheid South Africa, specifically exploring how these organisations have been shaped by changing funding modalities. It first summarises the socio-historical developments that have enabled NGOs to become significant actors in community development. It then examines partnerships as a specific neoliberal mode of funding that has shaped the role of NGOs in community development. It is argued that partnerships provide a context within which shared values, practices, and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development can be developed in NGOs. Partnerships link intermediary NGOs with corporations, the state, and communities, and enable claims of legitimacy, build consensus through homogenisation, and necessitate particular auditing techniques and capabilities.


Introduction
This chapter examines the role of intermediary NGOs in community development in Post-Apartheid South Africa, specifically exploring how these organisations have been shaped by changing funding modalities. The South African non-profit sector is very large and diverse, encompassing a great variety of organisations that differ in size, scope, activities, political orientation and location. Habib's (2003) typology remains useful in making sense of Post-Apartheid civil society, which he argues is made up of three blocs: 'formal' NGOs, 'survivalist' community-based organisations (CBOs) and social movements. CBOs, which numerically dominate civil society, are concentrated in areas of service delivery at a local level and might therefore be seen as more involved in community development; Habib (2003, p. 236) terms them 'survivalist' because 'they enable poor and marginalized communities to simply survive against the daily ravages of neo-liberalism'. However, this chapter focuses on the role in community development of the formal, or intermediary, NGOs, arguing that they are important sites in which to observe the dynamics and dilemmas of funding. 1 Describing such organisations as intermediary directs attention to their location between various types of authority (such as the state and corporations) and citizens or communities; to their organisational structure (they are structurally equipped to benefit from state, donor and corporate funding); as well as to the types of activities they undertake (such as capacity building, research, lobbying, advocacy and training) (Mueller-Hirth, 2012).
It is important to note that these intermediary NGOs clearly do not represent communities, although the two are often conflated. However, in many cases this is a role they have been assigned because government, international donors and the private sector rely on NGOs to channel their funds to communities. This renders their role in community development particularly significant.
In this chapter, community development is understood as essentially contested, enabling empowering and less empowering practices and policies to emerge from, and for, communities. Importantly, the chapter resists a vertical understanding of power in which communities or civil society 'at the bottom' are contrasted with the state 'at the top'. Rather, communities are elements in the transnational and multi-scalar governance of development; community development is also a discourse that corporations, NGOs and the state all employ to gain legitimacy. The following section summarises the socio-historical developments that have enabled NGOs to become such significant actors in community development. The chapter will then examine partnerships as a specific neoliberal mode of funding that has shaped the role of NGOs in community development. It is argued that partnerships provide a context within which shared values, practices and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development, can be developed in NGOs. Partnerships link intermediary NGOs with corporations, the state and communities and are shown to enable claims of legitimacy, build consensus building through homogenisation, and necessitate particular auditing techniques and capabilities. 2 2

The socio-historical context of South Africa's NGO sector
After the democratic transition in 1994, the move from adversarial to potentially collaborative relationships with the state, funding crises and the emergence of fairly extensive corporate responsibility policies have all shaped the contours of community development. During the Apartheid era, the state worked in mutually beneficially relationships with white civic organisations, whereas progressive Anti-Apartheid organisations provided a 'shadow' welfare system to the majority of the population neglected by the apartheid regime. Foreign governments and international donor agencies channelled funds through these civil society organisations to fight apartheid. The negotiated settlement had an enormous impact on state-civil society interactions: NGOs were shifting from an oppositional mode to a developmental mode and became increasingly involved in policy development, training, networking and implementation of service delivery programmes. As former civic leaders began integrating into the state bureaucracy and into the business sector, organisational capacity and expertise in non-profit organisations was depleted. NGOs and the state institutions were now seen as partners in the nationbuilding project, leading in some cases to co-dependent relationships with the ANC and to certain NGOs growing distant from communities. It also led to 'biographical alignment' between the NGO and state sectors: for instance, networks of former comrades in the struggle for freedom are evident in the composition of many NGOs' governing boards (Mueller-Hirth, 2010). The integration of many NGOs into state and corporate structures can be understood as a desire to contribute to the shaping of progressive policies in the newly-democratising South Africa. But by the late 1990s the NGO sector found itself sidelined and unable to challenge the government in a meaningful way over new inequalities that began to emerge as an outcome of its neoliberal turn.
A crisis in funding after 1994 moreover led to many, particularly oppositional or critical, NGOs closing, and eventually to the professionalisation of those that remained. International funders now supported the democratically elected South African government directly through bilateral agreements, thereby reducing the resources available for NGOs. The re-classification of South Africa as a middleincome economy by the World Bank meant a further reduction in international donor funding. Those NGOs that survived found that they needed to reposition themselves as service-delivery organisations, carrying out contract work for the Government, or undertaking corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects for the corporate sector. The state accordingly provides the majority of funding to the NGO sector. This extract from an interview with the director of an education NGO illustrates these changing modalities: 'We were forced onto the market and had to become self-sufficient. [We] really walked the dusty streets of Pretoria from embassy to embassy and went to various big companies trying to 3 beg money and tried to get tenders, I mean we were pretty bad at that in those days. Now we are pretty good, now we churn out those tenders like we are a factory. A tender factory.' Accordingly, the state provides the majority of funding to the NGO sector, effectively outsourcing services it does not have the capacity to deliver. The funding crisis and demise of the traditional donor funding model then effectively created NGOs increasingly characterised by multisectoral linkages and professionalisation. Among the complex resource-mobilisation and sustainability strategies that NGOs now needed to employ, multisectoral partnerships were the most significant. Newer NGOs which have emerged since the early 2000s have become accustomed to these modalities and incorporated them into their organisational form. Many NGO staff described what might be called the 'partnership mode' in contrast to an older NGO model that was deemed inflexible, unsustainable and outmoded. Some interviewees explicitly distanced themselves from organisations they perceived as not versatile enough to adapt to the changing rules: "A lot of the NGOs are still working with the pre-'94 mindset, people and strategies. And that is where they're not much advancing"; or "those poor NGOs, they spend most of their time trying to find where next year's money's coming from, or next month's".
The contemporary partnership logic mirrors Post-Washington Consensus global developmental priorities. The Post-Washington Consensus had identified the state and institutions as important in the efficient functioning of markets and understands the importance of governing through consensusbuilding (Craig and Porter, 2006). In South Africa, the partnership approach to community development issues had initially been particularly characteristic of donor responses to projects concerned with HIV/Aids and education, but now applies to funding areas across the board. International donors are keenly supporting development projects that integrate voluntary, private and public sector efforts.
Government also emphasises the need for development collaboration through partnerships at all levels, evident in the recent South African National Development Plan and the 2011 Basic Education Accord, a partnership agreement between Government, businesses, trade unions, NGOs and community organisations.
A further influence on community development has been the rising importance of the private sector. Businesses in South Africa have been forced to adopt socially responsible policies that are more advanced than those in many of the richer economies, partly due to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation. BEE involves affirmative action policies adopted by the post-apartheid government to give historically disadvantaged groups economic opportunities. Any South African company's performance is rated on a number of BEE scorecards, with companies collecting points for CSR activities. Unlike in other countries and despite its non-voluntary character, CSR in South Africa has a strong emphasis on community development and poverty alleviation (Mueller-Hirth, 2016).
Importantly for the concerns of this chapter, most corporations channel their social investment through 4 NGOs and CBOs in order to reach beneficiaries and communities: CSR spending in 2015 was estimated to be about R8.1 billion (US$ 553 million), of which 52% went to NGOs (Trialogue, 2015).
However, it has been South Africa's rapid adoption of a set of neoliberal policies after the transition that has most significantly impacted NGOs and their role within community development.
Moreover, the changes outlined above -funding crises and the expanding role for businesses in development -are themselves associated with the adoption of free market models in global and South  (Marais, 2011). Trade liberalisation, exportoriented manufacturing, privatisation of state enterprises, wage control and progressive flexibility of the labour market were supposed to foster higher economic growth and private capital investment.
Large numbers of organised workers were made redundant, casualised or forced into the informal economy and the commodification of basic services had disastrous effects for the poor (Hart, 2014).
At the same time, since 1994 the government has undertaken a range of initiatives that are developmental and pro-poor, for example social grants and housing (Ferguson, 2010). In this analysis, neoliberalism is understood as encompassing a range of projects on multiple scales (supranational, national and local) that are concerned with expanding and universalising free-market social relations, but that play out in locally specific ways in different places (Ong, 2006). As Hart (2008: 4) argues, writing about South Africa, 'the challenge … is coming to grips with how identifiably neo-liberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them', that is to say, articulations of nationalism, development, community and so on are multiple projects and move in many different directions. In South Africa, a neoliberal ideology is differentially articulated with other political projects such as African nationalism and the developmental state.
This chapter draws from a larger multi-sited ethnographic study that explored transformations in South African NGOs in the Post-Apartheid era and highlighted that auditing and partnerships are increasingly core activities of NGOs that impact on their logic of operation and their location in wider 5 civil society (Mueller-Hirth, 2010;2012). This approach differs from studies of NGO accountability or effectiveness, instead focusing on NGOs in order to analyse modes of governance and power relations in development.
Partnerships: a funding mode that shapes NGOs and characterises community development Despite considerable differences among them, all of the NGOs in this study had working relationships with a range of different actors as well as with traditional donors. In interviews, NGO staff described what are in practice highly varied and often normative relationships as 'partnerships'. This was reflected in companies' documents as well as in data gathered through observation research, where reference to partners denoted anything from NGOs to CBOs, governments and companies, and comprised a range of activities such as funding, capacity-building technical assistance, sharing information or managing projects jointly. NGO professionals, despite their use of this partnership language, often appeared deeply uncomfortable with their corporate relationships and their contracts with governments. This is arguably because of the persistent claim of most NGOs to be government watchdogs and critical voices in civil society as well as being service deliverers. The dilemmas these multiple roles give rise to were acutely felt by NGO practitioners: 'We continue to do independent research with money raised from donors, and this often put us in a situation where we were critical of Government and sometimes they get sensitive about criticism. So one has to walk a tightrope, and I think we have been doing this for a long time and we still standing on the rope, maybe we are still sitting on the fence.' Drawing on older ideals of participatory development that originated in the 1970s and sought to encapsulate an ideal of co-operation and capacity-building between equal partners, partnerships are based on the argument that contemporary complex developmental challenges cannot be solved by one sector alone. Their proponents highlight that they allow for the participation of a range of actors, increase social learning and reduce NGOs' dependence on traditional donors (Banks et al, 2015).
Conversely, a range of critical scholars have argued that the rhetoric of participation and integration often serves to conceal the operation of powerful interests within communities and that it is deliberately employed to mask continuous unequal power relations in development (Baaz, 2005;Miraftab, 2004).
The contention in this chapter is that partnerships encourage the sharing of values, practices and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development. As such, they can be empowering or restrictive: the partnership mode gave some NGOs in this study relative autonomy and independence in relation to funding, while its multiple commitments and intensified 6 reporting demands had negative impacts for many others. Three main outcomes of this partnership mode are examined here: legitimacy and access to communities; consensus building and homogenisation; and the circulation of auditing techniques.

Legitimacy
The partnership mode in community development is a way for various partners to gain legitimacy. For the South African government for instance, they offer the potential to include potentially adversarial actors, such as oppositional NGOs, into the policy consensus on development. Moreover, both the Mbeki and Zuma administrations have seen explicit attempts to reign in critics, including human rights NGOs and others that have aligned themselves with social movements. For corporations, the need to win legitimacy with communities in order not to lose their so-called social license to operate has been one of the main motivations for direct involvement in development issues (Idemudia, 2014) and has been further encouraged by South Africa's BEE legislation. This is significant for the present discussion of NGOs' role in community development because corporations usually do not engage these communities directly, but rather through partner NGOs. Importantly, the partnership mode holds the promise of increasing legitimacy for NGOs, too.
For example, NGOs strategically used partnerships with the provincial or national government to increase their legitimacy with international donors or corporations, which they in turn use to leverage new partnerships. In the case of one of the NGO in this study, some of its HIV education programmes were funded through provincial health departments, some of whom would take these resources directly from their own budgets, whereas its Gauteng project was supported by a mining corporation which supported the NGO's work through its CSR strategy. The North West province project employed yet another funding model using budget support from the Dutch government. As one informant put it: "It becomes a little more complex than simply going to the funder looking for money directly. Sometimes it's about creating relationships that leverage and leverage and leverage to the point where we can actually get access to funds." Conversely, professionals at progressive human rights NGOs reported difficulties in accessing funding because of their activist and sometimes critical stance towards either the South African government or the corporate sector.
Many organisations in this study also strategically used the language of partnership to describe their relationships with CBOs in order to gain and enhance credibility with their corporate or government donor-partners. This is because community development discourses clearly envisage particular ideal-typical roles and functions for NGOs. In interviews with CSR professionals, NGOs' most frequently cited "comparative advantages" were service delivery, capacity building of smaller CBOs and their ability to deliver at local level due to their capacity to mobilise communities and reach 7 the grassroots. CSR discourse moreover frequently assumes that the objectives of NGOs and communities are congruent and that NGOs are able to represent the interests of communities. This conflation of CBOs with highly formalised NGOs is not coincidental but reflects the language, policies and concern with civil society of global institutions, which in turn has been integral to the neoliberalisation of development over the past decades (Banks et al, 2015). This makes it paramount for more formalised NGOs to demonstrate proximity to communities. The very concept of 'community' in development discourse is of course deeply problematic: its identification and discursive construction by various actors provides 'moral legitimation' to corporate or governmental authority and helps to underwrite their position of power (Rajak, 2011, p.47). In order to sustain the claim of their comparative advantage towards donors, NGO staff frequently evoked a common "we as civil society organisations", which sought to assert that they, and the CBOs they work with, are one and the same. This was sometimes done by NGO workers referring to their own pasts as activists or to their credentials as grassroots practitioners: "someone like me who comes from the purest background"; "some of my closest buddies are from hardcore social movement backgrounds"; or "I have always worked at a grassroots level" are just some examples of this invocation of commonality and authenticity from interviews.
This claim is not backed up by this research: all intermediary NGOs were urban, formalised and not close to marginalised or rural communities. In order to reach such communities, NGOs themselves must partner with CBOs. In practice, rather than being able to represent the interests of communities or grassroots organisations, NGOs are more likely to act as an intermediary between government or corporates and local communities, translating community needs and issues into a manageable solution for a corporation. For example, NGOs collected and translated narratives and qualitative data into formats that suited corporate reporting. They might also translate the language people use in relation to their development needs into one that is seen as more suitable to government or corporate needs by "tidying up" reports. The following quote from an interview with an NGO worker illustrates this at times uncomfortable positioning: 'We can travel, we can take the language, we can make that crossover into the board room easily and now we are putting our foot into the shanty town shack and the other foot in the boardroom and kind of creating a bridge in that way which is quite a subtle thing but it is has added a lot of value to [our] brand. That you can talk the boardroom speak and then they are learning more and more about meaningful development speak, too.' Overall, it was notable how NGOs were reproducing donor understanding of their nature and roles themselves, despite their awareness of critiques against these perceived advantages. While the present 8 research did not find claims of proximity to communities to be accurate, they serve to attribute legitimacy both to NGOs, and to state-or donor-run projects.

Consensus-building function
Partnerships are emblematic of a global development project that sees cooperation and harmonisation as the most effective way to ensure broad-based growth, while further extending the reach of the market into social areas (Craig and Porter, 2006). This is particularly relevant in the South African context where consensus building resonates with the nation-building project and cross-sectoral collaboration is portrayed as necessary for the greater good of the nation. For example, patriotism was a key theme both in NGO practitioner narratives and in CSR staff's portrayal of their involvement in community development. Most respondents related their involvement in community development to their identities and responsibilities as South Africans and citizens in an emerging young democracy. Their motivation as development professionals was cited as wanting to "contribute to the future of South Africa" or to "to contribute to the bigger picture". Time and again, the idea was expressed that collaboration between the sectors is the only way to tackle developmental challenges of the magnitude that South Africa is facing. "The point is to try to get together and do whatever we can to make sure that it is in the interest of the greater good", as one NGO director put it. This notion of a greater good resonates with the normative claims generally made on behalf of partnerships, such as inclusiveness, participation, building broad-based support and sharing the goals of development. Interviewees often evoked an apparently self-evident and unproblematic commonality , as in this narrative by an NGO manager in Johannesburg: "I firmly believe partnerships in South Africa are so important and working so well because there is no arrogance … We'll reach a common understanding to make sure that we implement what is good for the country." It is suggested here that this understanding of partnerships as a necessary development modality is deeply rooted in the state-civil society relations after the negotiated settlement. As already indicated, the emphasis on being partners in a shared national project, frequently cast in terms of social cohesion and reconciliation, was an important discursive building block of the initial Post-Apartheid years and has significantly impacted on the funding models and value orientations of today's NGOs. However, the appeal to a not-quite-defined notion of the "greater good" or "common understanding" can also be problematic if it implies that non-adherence means being unpatriotic, or if it serves to marginalise alternative visions of development and change. This again highlights that partnerships are always also an opportunity for Government and corporations to bring adversarial groups into the nation-building project, turning 'potential civil society critics into consensual governing partners' (Craig and Porter, 2006: 79). 9 Auditing At the organisational level, calls for greater NGO accountability, transformations in public management and increasing funding scarcity have combined to lead to the growth of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and impact assessment. New Public Management, the philosophy guiding neoliberal public sector reform, has impacted on every kind of organisation, forcing them to 'organize their activities as if they were little businesses' (Rose, 1999, p.152). M&E and quality assurance mechanisms -what Dean (1999) terms 'technologies of performance' -are clearly not limited to South African community development but constitute a large part of (funded) NGO activity globally. Impact assessment has produced a wide range of indicators, instruments and methods, and monitoring and evaluation were negotiated in different ways by individual NGOs (see Mueller-Hirth, 2012).
Despite their heterogeneity, measurement and reporting were core activities of all of the NGOs in this study. Moreover, in order to secure future funding, NGOs must show that they are able to apply a range of auditing techniques, which crucially requires specific skills and capacities which do not fall into the core expertise of many NGOs. These include quantitative-analytical and statistical skills, epidemiological expertise and econometrics expertise, but also linguistic abilities, as the director of a human rights NGO highlighted: 'For me it's fine, I've got a postgraduate degree, I've got a lot of experience … But if you are a relatively young NGO, and you are in an area where your focus is addressing social work or something, you're expected to read EU-ese documents, which are not written in plain English.
If English is a second or third language for you, you're gonna have major problems.' These various requirements for new forms of expertise have the potential to shape the organisation cultures and forms of NGOs. Because target-oriented development favours particular ways of measuring the success of a project, modifies organisational structures and impacts on the types of activities or services provided, NGOs are transformed in line with neoliberal regimes of government.
The demands for efficiency and transparency of financial management necessitate organisational restructuring and the acquisition of financial skills. M&E practices require certain organisational conditions which favour and indeed produce highly organised and professionalised types of NGOs (Mueller-Hirth, 2012). Here however, the focus is particularly on the relationship between the partnership mode and the increasing demands for impact assessment.
First, partnerships as a preferred development mode necessitate multiple levels of accountability, and multiple ways of counting and evaluating. Different partners have different M&E requirements and the prevalence of multisectoral funding demands organisational and methodological flexibility. Partnerships in fact require heightened monitoring capacity due to a range of accountability demands by different partners. For example, international donors such as USAID or the European Union 10 frequently required high-level impact data to feed into results-based management or logical analysis frameworks. Large Northern NGOs who occasionally funded some of the organisations in this study required a mixture of M&E methodologies, including participatory techniques such as community surveys. Corporate partners needed qualitative and often visual data that could feed into CSR documentation for shareholders, staff and the public, and quantitative tracking information, although some corporations have also developed their own M&E tools that they want NGOs to be able to use.
These varying demands were putting increasing strains on NGOs. Increased skills in terms of standardised monitoring and evaluation are in turn considered indicators of improved capacity by partners.
Secondly, audit culture affects NGOs' relationships with other CBOs. Once a formalised NGO has entered into funding and monitoring regimes, it becomes harder to work with less formalised community-based organisations. This is because CBOs are not structurally equipped to prove resultsbased management or adhere to complicated reporting systems. As one NGO director put it, 'we only work with the ones who do have a photocopying machine, who can account for all the money and so on'. Where relationships with CBOs exist, NGOs often play a translator role: for example, participatory processes may be used to design or evaluate programmes but NGO staff repackage the stakeholder process in more quantitative formats to meet the demands of their funders. Here, the interface between partnerships and auditing becomes apparent: they are mutually dependent in that auditing practices are attached to the funding flows and inter-sectoral networks that connect actors in community development partnerships. This encourages a power relation within which intermediary NGOs are the experts that circulate particular ways of thinking about, practising and monitoring community development programmes.
Relatedly, the partnership mode works in positioning NGOs in relation to social movements and wider popular struggles. NGOs are far less likely to be able to support progressive (but not professionalised) actors in civil society, such as social movements that challenge the effects of neoliberal development. This can be especially problematic when communities want to challenge corporate practices in relation to working conditions or the environment. While NGOs may see themselves as aligned with the values of social movements, the extent to which they are able to support movements materially is clearly dependent on their own funding modalities. For example, staff at progressive NGOs revealed in interviews that their donors had expressed concerns about support of social movements and had indicated that funding could be withdrawn.

Conclusion
This chapter has explored development funding dynamics in South Africa, specifically examining how changing funding modalities have shaped intermediary NGOs as key actors in community development.
It has argued that a new NGO model -shaped in South Africa by Post-Washington neoliberalism but also by the country's post-conflict nation-building project -can be characterised by the ability to maintain partnerships, flexibility and fluency in auditing techniques. The significance of this contribution thus lies in its analysis of two areas that are critical to the study of community development: partnerships and auditing.
Partnership is a ubiquitous, ambiguous and ambitious concept that nonetheless shapes how NGOs think and act. Being involved in these increasingly complex partnerships and funding arrangements -with international donors, the state, corporations and CBOs -meant that the NGOs in this research were occupying a difficult position as simultaneous governing partner, community representative and critical civil society voice. NGOs seemed to be caught in the middle, claiming alignment with civil society organisations that resist corporate and government policies while needing to access corporate monies and government funds for survival. It is this paradox that renders claims of legitimacy so central for NGO staff. As this chapter demonstrated, legitimacy and authenticity was often asserted by reference to organisational independence, to personal pedigree and to struggle credentials, or by evoking a common civil society.
The image of "walking the tightrope" that was used by an NGO director cited earlier describes NGOs' positions in relation to broader civil society, government and corporations. But the tightrope is also a useful metaphor for the pressures they face by having to balance the requirements of their diverse partners, their distinct ways of working and their partners' differing M&E needs. Partnerships as the central mode of funding for South African NGOs then pose significant dilemmas for intermediary NGOs in terms of their roles and identities, but partnerships and their associated technologies such as M&E may also lend certain types of capital to some, with particular technologies and vocabularies being adopted strategically and empowering a number of NGOs in this study. However, it is intermediary NGOs that are supposedly bridging the gulf between a shack and a global corporation's boardroom, as one of the informants cited earlier put it. The problem is not only that intermediary NGOs may be structurally unable to progressively engage with the grievances of the majority population. As translators, they come to speak for those actors that may be able to bring about progressive change, further shrinking the space for marginalised groups and voices in community development. This is particularly alarming given the inequalities and developmental challenges facing South Africa.