Cutting the Cloth to fit the Organization: On Beyond “Participatory” Assessment & Strategic Planning for Civil Society Organizations

Social justice calls for righting the power imbalance between “developers” and those being “developed” with foreign aid, including indigenous civil society organizations (CSO). So-called “participatory” approaches to CSO assessment often involve giving CSOs organizational scales and allowing them to read/interpret the scale, and then put themselves into pigeonholes that correspond to a spectrum of pre-established criteria. This approach may sometimes be appropriate for “mechanistic” organizations, such as facilities delivering a similar array of clinical services (or McDonald's). However, many vibrant CSOs do not fit the “mechanistic” model. For example, HIV prevention organizations operate in a complex and politically contentious environment. They are very different from one another, and need a tailor-made process. Based on a series of workshops with 10 PEPFAR-funded CSOs (youth associations, Muslim community-based, network organizations with varied purposes, etc.), we describe a self-assessment and strategic planning process designed to allow maximum control and ownership by indigenous CSOs, and how that process led to different kinds of plans and ways of measuring progress. The process, which is adjusted to fit each NGO, uses Gareth Morgan's “Images of Organization” metaphoric approach, as well as tested analytical frameworks (e.g. SWOT), and political/stakeholder mapping to facilitate a rigorous self-analysis of everything from internal operating systems to external trends in the environment. The resulting strategic plans and ways of “measuring” progress are tailored for and rooted in each CSO's "administrative will" – tapping internal energy, potential and interests – taking each CSO where it wants to go.