Collaboration

Collaboration is a common strategy for improving TNGO impact and legitimacy. Chapter 10 examines different collaboration types, levels, and approaches, considers the benefits and obstacles to collaborations, and identifies various capacities required to collaborate strategically with a broad range of partners, including “unlike-minded” actors. In general, collaboration requires a greater focus on the external environment and leading without having top-down control. Success is largely driven by the attention given to the alignment of informal expectations, understandings, and behaviors. Cultural factors thus emerge as a common obstacle to collaboration effectiveness. Additional considerations include challenges related to competition, unequal partnerships, and credit-sharing for collective outcomes.

Legitimacy

Chapter 5 explores how the foundations for TNGO legitimacy have changed over time, creating imperatives for TNGOs to invest in new capabilities and adopt new practices. In the past, TNGOs derived legitimacy from their espoused principles, representational claims, elite expertise, demonstrated financial stewardship, commitment to charity, and patterns of conformity. More recently, TNGOs themselves have helped to bring about a shift toward new bases for legitimacy that focus on effectiveness, strategy, leadership, governance, transparency, and responsiveness. However, transitioning to the legitimacy practices of the future is complicated by the persistence of an antiquated architecture that still demands that TNGO conform to legacy expectations. Nevertheless, new approaches to enhancing legitimacy provide a wide range of opportunities that invite organizations to proactively align their aspirations with emerging stakeholder expectations.

Change

Chapter 12 summarizes the main themes of the book, with an emphasis on how the sector’s future potential remains constrained by its normative and institutional architecture. To help ensure future success, TNGOs can invest in organizational metamorphosis and sector-wide collective action. Metamorphosis may involve a polycentric model, embracing a facilitation role, adopting a hybrid model, engaging in deeper collaborations, pursuing mergers and acquisitions, and investing in operational platforms. However, such initiatives will require significant change leadership, which introduces its own substantial challenges. Ultimately, TNGOs can best serve their missions not only by changing themselves, but by also organizing collectively to change the architecture in which they operate.

Leadership

Chapter 9 identifies specific leadership blind spots that frequently emerge as TNGOs move to adopt more ambitious mandates and implement strategic changes to secure organizational relevance and legitimacy. Traditional leadership in the sector has often lacked a culture of inquiry while also struggling to work in an environment of growing complexity and ambiguity. While organizations in crisis may be tempted to rely on charismatic leaders and their promises, new leadership models emphasize shared, distributed forms of leadership, post-heroic leadership styles, collaborative skills, humble personalities, a capacity to self-reflect and identify personal needs, and a focus on results, credit-sharing, and the building of authentic relationships. There is growing consensus around a shift in leadership needs, but sectoral norms tend to relegate leadership development to an area of underinvestment and neglect.

Governance

Chapter 8 discusses how governance reforms have been designed to improve legitimacy and alleviate structural inequalities among TNGO (con)federation members. TNGO governance reforms may involve centralization, decentralization, global restructuring, adding new governance bodies, and experimenting with digitally enabled global fora, although each type of governance reform carries risks and trade-offs. Specific considerations include structural inequalities, dual citizenship, board composition, roles, culture, power centers, and resources. Appropriate governance reforms may be able to address long-standing disparities, but their results remain uncertain. Additionally, organizational agility and transaction costs remain concerns, and long-established norms and patterns of learned behavior remain powerful inhibitors of successful change.

Digital

Chapter 6 examines an array of strategic options provided by digital tools, including broadcasting, analytics, convening, and distributed organizing. Such digital strategies can be deployed to broaden participation as a means of generating more inclusive activism and to deepen participation to intensify supporter engagement. Leveraging digital tools and shifting from staff-led to supporter-led activism can help TNGOs become more authentic, representative, and legitimate. But despite these opportunities, features of the legacy architecture make it difficult for TNGOs to invest in new technologies or accord them a major role in shaping programmatic strategies and organizational structures. Moreover, “going digital” carries its own inherent risks. For example TNGOs must be careful to avoid overemphasizing superficial metrics or underappreciating the need to complement digital strategies with other resources and capabilities.

Measurement

Chapter 7 describes innovations in TNGO measurement and evaluation practices and considers the many internal and external challenges that organizations confront as they attempt to bring their measurement capabilities into better alignment with their rhetoric about achieving impact. An enhanced focus on assessing effectiveness and impact at the program and organizational levels requires not only strategic investments that are hard to make, but also broader cultural changes in how TNGOs and their staff think about organizational learning and their roles in bringing about social change. Despite being an area where many organizations still struggle, TNGOs will need to improve their measurement and evaluation capabilities to demonstrate their value and relevance and satisfy changing legitimacy expectations that increasingly emphasize data and results.

Power

Chapter 4 explains why and how TNGOs have become powerful advocates in global affairs. It argues that TNGOs were at the “right place at the right time” and benefited from favorable geopolitical conditions in previous decades. The chapter examines the nature of TNGO power historically and explains how TNGOs have exerted influence throughout various stages of the policy process, including issue emergence, agenda-setting, policy formation, and policy implementation. Even as TNGOs have largely benefited from professionalized activism and elite access, their power today may be plateauing, if not waning, because of a less favorable operating environment and the increasing incongruity between their contemporary ambitions and their legacy forms and norms. Such conditions suggest that the sector is likely to struggle to live up to its rhetoric of social transformation without significant changes.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Chapter 11 argues that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) can be an important strategic tool for acquiring capabilities needed to improve organizational effectiveness, relevance, and competitiveness. However, typically M&As within the sector are rare and often reactive in nature. They usually involve the joining together of a smaller, financially stressed organization with a larger, healthier TNGO looking to expand. Much less common are more proactive M&A efforts where both partners come together from positions of strength. M&As appear to be underutilized as a strategic tool to increase scale and impact due to a variety of normative and institutional barriers. These include legal structures that disincentivize or prevent takeovers, cultures of uniqueness among TNGOs and their supporters, and the lack of M&A matchmakers and resources for competently exploring and executing the M&A process.

Strategy

Chapter 3 describes major shifts in the strategic orientations of TNGOs that represent a concerted movement from their historical roots as charitable conduits to social and political change agents seeking sustainable impact and long-term transformations. Three illustrative strategic shifts—from direct service delivery to championing rights and supporting entrepreneurship; from reactive advocacy to proactive global campaigning; and from capacity-building to systems thinking—underscore the growing mismatch between the inherited institutional and normative features of the architecture and the sector’s contemporary ambitions and strategies. The evolution in TNGO strategies over the past several decades suggests new future roles for TNGOs, but future-oriented change is complicated by the need to overcome architectural challenges and confront past legacies.