For many analysts and policymakers, nongovernmental organizations are an attractive alternative when governments and firms fail to deliver services efficiently or fully serve the public interest. Yet as the subtitle to this edited volume claims, virtue is not enough to ensure that NGOs can shape public policy or reach underserved populations. Peter Gourevitch, David Lake, and Janice Gross Stein have brought together a number of interesting case studies that demonstrate how NGOs establish and defend their credibility, and in doing so, they have advanced a larger conversation about the ways in which NGOs, nonprofits, and other nonstate actors are able to exercise influence.

The Credibility of Transnational NGOs is primarily intended for a specialist audience of international relations scholars interested in nonstate actors, but should interest those who study nonprofits and interest groups as well. The volume raises a narrow but important question: Why does anybody pay attention to some transnational NGOs but not to others? In IR, recent scholarship on NGOs has struggled to unpack exactly when and how these organizations are able to define state interests and shape global policies, and this volume suggests that a first step might be to identify the relevant credible NGOs in an issue area. Credibility is “no guarantee of success,” but, as Gourevitch and Lake argue, it is necessary for NGOs seeking to bring about social change (p. 193).

What does credibility mean? For the contributors, an NGO is credible “when its statements are believable or accepted as truthful by one or more audiences” (p. 10). Unlike virtue, which is more or less a constant for NGOs (as public benefit or charitable organizations), credibility varies among NGOs. In the framing essay, Gourevitch and Lake explore three issues related to NGO credibility. First, they identify internal and external sources of credibility, focusing on the latter (pp. 13–18). NGO credibility is shaped by 1) the commonality of interests between the audience and the organization, 2) visible costly efforts by the NGO in defense of principles, 3) the presence of penalties for misrepresentation, and 4) external verification of NGO claims. Second, Gourevitch and Lake enumerate a half-dozen strategies that NGOs employ to increase their credibility (pp. 18–23), including professionalization and transparency. Finally, they note, NGOs face multiple audiences—ranging from donors to the general public—with often conflicting interests and values.

These three themes run through the subsequent chapters, whose authors bring together an impressive range of cases. These cases cover NGOs in two key roles—as monitors (more commonly referred to as advocacy NGOs) and as service deliverers—and span a variety of issue areas. Part I presents cases of election monitoring (Susan Hyde), certification of child labor standards (Irfan Nooruddin and Sarah Wilson Sokhey), and human rights promotion (Wendy Wong), while Part II explores development aid (Carew Boulding), humanitarian assistance (Laura Thaut, Janice Gross Stein, and Michael Barnett), and peer-to-peer lending (Craig McIntosh). Three key insights emerge from these chapters.

First is the nature of the credibility problem for NGOs. It is interesting to note that the first contribution to the volume—Hyde’s chapter on election monitoring—demonstrates that the problem is not unique to NGOs. Hyde’s discussion is divided roughly equally between monitors, such as the Carter Center, and target states seeking to establish their own credibility as true democratizers in the eyes of other states and intergovernmental organizations. For NGOs, the credibility problem takes on particular dimensions. International NGOs in particular often operate in environments where public regulations are either absent or poorly enforced; as a result, ethical behavior is regulated by private rather than public standards (p. 7). In those situations, individual actors often must first construct standards of behavior and then convince other actors to accept them (rather than simply monitoring adherence to established laws and regulations); that is, they must defend the desirability of the standards that they use to evaluate the behavior of others. NGOs often do so collectively, as in the case of the election-monitoring groups that established an international code of conduct in 2005 (pp. 54–55).

Relatedly, the second insight of the volume concerns the tensions that emerge as NGOs engage multiple audiences that frequently have different ideas of what is desirable. For local-development NGOs in Bolivia, Boulding argues, efforts to attract and satisfy international donors can alienate local audiences or absorb already limited resources (p. 129). A similar outcome can be seen for the humanitarian aid group Islamic Relief (Thaut, Gross Stein, and Barnett). Since its founding in 1984, Islamic Relief has faced a “legitimacy trap” (p. 159); in an attempt to placate Western authorities and other humanitarian NGOs, the organization has worked hard to demonstrate its transparency and professionalization, but this has alienated some Muslim supporters.

Extending these insights, one reason for the limited credibility—and perhaps influence—of some NGOs may be that the audiences they could potentially serve are too distant in their interests. In fact, the volume suggests that the pursuit of credibility may result in an increasing centralization of the NGO community. As organizations grow in size and scope, they may adopt a range of practices to defend and enhance their credibility, producing a “race to the top” among a small top tier of organizations but also squeezing out “smaller and potentially even more credible” NGOs (p. 30). But credible with whom, and to what effect? Clifford Bob’s recent book, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (2011), enumerates a number of small NGOs working on contentious issues that are highly credible with some audiences and totally illegitimate to their opponents. Bob’s research suggests that the top tier of transnational NGOs that have managed to establish credibility with a wide range of audiences may have done so by skirting contentious issues, an odd and potentially troubling outcome for organizations whose purported raison d’être is social change.

The final insight that emerges from this volume concerns the independent effect of NGO actions on the social change that they seek. In a discussion of the microfinance group Kiva, McIntosh questions the efficacy of microfinance as a mechanism for social change. Local NGOs seeking to maintain a good rating with Kiva make loans to reliable clients —clients that they would have probably made loans to anyway. More troublingly, NGOs may make social problems worse. In their discussion of ethical standards for the production of rugs and soccer balls, Nooruddin and Sokhey argue that NGO monitoring both is ineffective and lets states off the hook (p. 84). They suggest that NGOs should instead focus on building state capacity for better enforcement of existing laws that outlaw child labor.

As a contribution to the NGO literature, The Credibility of Transnational NGOs does a valuable service by revealing the inadequacy of relying on virtue alone as an explanation for the influence of these groups (see also Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay Gugerty’s Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action [2010]). In addition, by focusing on the problems facing NGOs as a particular type of actor, this volume offers a different perspective on ways to generalize about when NGOs are likely to exercise influence—and when they are not.