Moral decision making in international development

On a global scale, the population of international development NGOs attending to missional priorities such as reducing poverty, improving quality of life, and advocating for human rights has expanded exponentially since the end of the Cold War. This in turn has heightened competition for scarce donor resources and empowered donors to demand that NGOs cultivate professional practices relating to governance structure, reporting procedures, and performance documentation. Although a few development organizations are relatively large and well funded (e.g., Oxfam and CARE International), many more are small (50 and fewer employees) and under-resourced. Thus, NGO leaders find themselves caught between a constitutive legitimacy of service for their beneficiaries and a representational obligation to meet donors’ expectations (see Peruzzotti 1997).

First used by the United Nations in 1949, the term nongovernmental...