International Religious NGOs at the United Nations: A Study of a Group of Religious Organizations
Second, there has been a dramatic increase in the number and visibility of religious organizations involved in development and humanitarian aid, or faith-based organizations (FBOs) as they are often called. Naturally, religious organizations are not a new invention; throughout history, Catholic hospitals, Islamic foundations and Buddhist monasteries, among many others, have provided aid to the poor.[5] However, in recent years, contemporary religious organizations such as NGOs, charities and community associations seem to have achieved particular prominence. In the US, for instance, government funding for FBOs has almost doubled from 10.5 percent in 2001 to 19.9 percent in 2005.[6] Likewise, some of the largest international NGOs are religious (World Vision alone has an annual budget of 1.6 billion US dollars), Muslim NGOs are on the rise,[7] and locally, religious associations and community organizations are often some of the most important service providers. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, the World Bank estimates that as much as fifty percent of all health and education services are provided by FBOs.[8]
Third, the failures of the structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s prompted a surge of criticism from NGOs, grassroots movements and religious organizations, accusing the World Bank and other major actors for promoting a narrow economic conception of development. This resulted in a shift away from state and market-led approaches to a broader and more holistic conception of development, focusing on ‘civil society’, ‘human development’ and ‘participation’. This ‘opening of the development space’ facilitated the inclusion not only of mainstream NGOs, but also religious organizations as legitimate actors in the field of development and humanitarian aid.[9] Later, the World Bank’s own study Voices of the Poor (2000) further cemented the importance of religious organizations by concluding that many poor people had more confidence in religious organizations than in government or secular organizations.[10]
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The turning point for the conflict was the question of women’s and homosexuals’ rights – by the conservative wing understood as a direct attack on a God given traditional family structure and therefore ungodly, and by the progressive wing understood as (possibly god given) human rights. Even during preparations to the Beijing Plus Five conference, there were tensions between the conservative and progressive NGOs. In December 1999, Austin Ruse sent a letter to members of the conservative pro-family network through the news bulletin Friday Fax. In this he strongly condemns the so-called ’radical feminists’ and their attempts to promote abortion and other anti-family values such as rights of homosexuals and reproductive rights in general. The letter ends with an almost Messianic call to like-minded NGOs to participate in the conference with the purpose to fight these progressive forces:[45]
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