A parallel service state weakens the state it works beside

The argument

A second argument concerns what the sector does to government. Proponents observe that where nongovernmental organisations deliver health care, schooling, water or relief, they are performing the functions by which a state ordinarily earns its legitimacy. Proponents argue that this creates a substitution: citizens look to the organisation rather than the ministry, the ministry loses the pressure that would have forced it to improve, and the political relationship between a population and its own government is replaced by a relationship with an agency no one elected. The mechanism proponents describe also runs through personnel and pay. The sector recruits the trained administrators, clinicians and engineers a poor state most needs, and can offer conditions a ministry cannot match, so the capacity to govern is drawn out of public institutions into bodies answering abroad. Proponents argue the result is a state progressively less able to do the things it is judged on, in a cycle where each failure justifies more external provision and each round of external provision deepens the incapacity. Proponents argue that this is the specifically neocolonial element, because the outcome is a country whose essential services are administered on terms set elsewhere and withdrawable at the funder's discretion. They accept that the services are real and often good, and argue that this is precisely what makes the arrangement durable: it is difficult to object to a functioning clinic. The objection, on their account, is not to the clinic but to a structure in which the capacity to provide clinics never transfers, so that dependence is renewed rather than ended.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument blames the substitute for the absence. Organisations move into service delivery where the state has already failed to provide, often because of conflict, debt or collapse, and refusing to act would leave the need unmet rather than compel a government to meet it. They add that much of the sector's work consists of training staff, building systems and handing programmes to ministries, which is the opposite of entrenching dependence, and that the recruitment objection applies equally to private employers and to emigration without either being called colonial.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Organisations typically enter where the state has already failed to provide, so they fill an absence rather than displacing a functioning claim to legitimacy. [Rejecting P2] Withdrawing provision does not create the political pressure the premise imagines; it leaves the need unmet while the government's incapacity persists. [Rejecting P3] Competition for trained personnel comes equally from private employers and emigration, neither of which is described as colonial, so the premise does not isolate the sector. [Rejecting C] The premises describe harms of substituted service provision, which argues for better handover and state building rather than establishing a colonial relationship.