In Allies or Adversaries Jennifer Brass takes on one of the most widespread nostrums of contemporary political ideology focused on developing and transition societies: the notion of an inherent conflict between states and civil society. In an account that is framed by careful conceptualization, impressively buttressed by available literature, and firmly rooted in a rich assembly of quantitative and qualitative data, Brass provides a convincing, but hardly Pollyannaish, refutation of this widely believed nostrum. The result is a model piece of political and policy analysis that should set a standard for subsequent treatments of this important issue.

For all its strengths, and they are considerable, however, Allies or Adversaries also reveals a variety of discontinuities and limitations that continue to befuddle, or at least cloud, analysis of this crucial relationship between states and civil society, not only in developing and transitional regions but more broadly as well. Brass has thus given us not only a powerful refutation of this prevailing nostrum, but also a canvass on which are visible some important fault-lines that continue to obstruct full understanding of evolving government–nongovernmental organization (NGO) relations throughout the world.

The book is fundamentally a case study of government–nonprofit relations in a single African country, Kenya, circa 2008. But it is a case study that taps an enormously rich array of available evidence on this central case, places this into a useful analytical framework, and enriches the resulting findings at every turn by linking them to an exhaustive array of relevant literature.

At base, the book falls into two main parts. The first part consists of two chapters that set the stage for the analysis by identifying the central thesis of the book, articulating an inventive analytical structure through which to pursue this thesis, and boldly identifying from prior research a set of hypotheses about the factors likely to determine whether the central thesis will be confirmed.

The thesis is essentially an assertion that the prevailing academic work on NGO–government interaction in the developing world mistakenly portrays “a hostile, conflictual relationship” between these two sets of actors (p. 3). Instead, Brass argues that the past 25 years have witnessed “an increase in collaborative working relationships between NGOs and governments” (p. 9) that have made NGOs “part of the de facto organizational makeup of the state in many developing countries of the world” (p. 3).

To pursue this thesis, Brass offers an analytical framework that identifies “four elements of stateness” through which it can be explored. These include: a) “territoriality,” the ability of the state to establish a meaningful presence in the territory over which it claims control; b) “governance,” the ability to guide the delivery and availability of important services; c) “administrative capacity,” the ability of states to deliver on their decisions; and d) “legitimacy,” citizen acceptance of the state’s authority to rule. She then draws on an impressive array of literature to identify the factors most likely to lead to such collaborative outcomes and thereby cause NGOs to strengthen states, not weaken them.

The remaining chapters (the second main part) examine how government–nonprofit relationships have affected these four elements of stateness in the case of Kenya. Thus, Chapters 3 and 4 establish that Kenyan NGOs effectively extend the territoriality of the state by filling service gaps left by a “relatively incapacious state” unable to extend its reach to all of its territory (p. 96). Chapter 5 shows how NGOs have forged collaborative ties in the operation of state programs, thus buttressing the state’s effective presence and governance capacity. Chapter 6 shows how cooperation with NGOs has strengthened the administrative capacity and effectiveness of the Kenyan government. Finally, Chapters 7 and 8 show that neither the growth of NGOs nor citizen engagement with NGOs has degraded the perceived legitimacy of the government.

Despite the power of the evidence and literature that Brass brings to her analysis, and the care she takes to condition her assertions with appropriate caveats, a number of discontinuities and limitations still mar this impressive account. Five in particular deserve attention. The first arises in the initial framing of the analytical structure of the inquiry. Each of the elements of “stateness” to which NGOs can be expected to contribute arises from state failure, from the existence of “places that the government has been unable to reach,” (p. 34), “weakly institutionalized” state delivery systems (p. 36), poor civil service performance (p. 176), and “extremely limited” citizen expectations about government performance (p. 209). Yet the types of governments that Brass identifies as facilitating collaboration and overcoming these constraints are just the opposite. In fact, they are effective governments with skilled personnel committed to poverty alleviation facing NGOs focused mainly on service provision rather than policy involvement, and already experienced in cooperating with government (pp. 46, 49). Cooperation, and hence presumably NGO strengthening of states, is therefore likely to occur, we are told, only where it already exists: where NGOs and governments “are committed to working together” (p. 54), where they “share common beliefs or values” (p. 55), and where legal and regulatory restrictions on NGOs are limited and benign (p. 51). But these are tautologies that beg the question of how such felicitous circumstances arise.

Brass inadvertently provides the answer to this question in her chapter on the background of NGO development, but it turns out that the explanation has little to do with the analytical framework previously outlined. Rather, it has to do with social and political power—in this case, the rise to power of President Mwai Kibaki, who replaced the long-standing repressive regime of Daniel arap Moi. This becomes the second discontinuity in her account: the failure to emphasize the critical importance of social and political power relationships in conditioning the prospects for fruitful government–nonprofit relations (for further development of this point, see Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, and Megan A. Haddock, Explaining Civil Society Development: A Social Origins Approach, 2017). Not until well into her account does Brass even acknowledge that the recent turns toward collaboration in Kenya “exist in a broader and fragile political context” (p. 174).

A third discontinuity involves the one-sidedness of the thesis that Brass explores. Enormous and quite effective attention focuses on the impact that NGO–government collaboration has on “stateness,” on the Kenyan state’s territoriality, governance, administrative capability, and legitimacy. But little or no attention is paid to the impact of this collaboration on Kenyan NGO “nonprofit-ness,” on the qualities and functions that make nonprofits special. Indeed, only one function of NGOs is identified: service delivery. Not until well into Chapter 5 do we learn that NGOs bring a distinctive participatory element to their service activities (p. 159). And not until the concluding chapter is there explicit reference to the fact that NGOs are expected to “provide a civil society, democratizing function” (p. 230). But whether these features were advanced or retarded by the collaboration is largely unaddressed.

One-sidedness also mars the treatment of government–nonprofit interaction outside of Kenya. Brass does a masterful job of drawing on a vast wealth of literature that focuses on how this relationship is working in developing and transitional societies. But largely missing is any hint of the extraordinarily massive pattern of government–NGO collaboration that has long existed in the developed countries of Europe and the United States, a pattern now well documented in available literature that shows that Western Europe does not have a “welfare state,” but rather a massive “welfare partnership,” and that America’s nonprofit sector is not fundamentally philanthropic but, rather, part of a collaborative system of “third-party government” that has integrated nonprofit organizations into the fabric of the state. What is important in this fourth discontinuity is not that certain facts have been overlooked, but that this blind spot highlights a deeper problem that may lie behind the misleading nostrum that forms the core of Brass’s thesis: the existence of a powerful set of ideological blinders that regularly keeps the reality of fruitful government–nonprofit cooperation “hidden in plain sight,” not only in developing regions but in developed ones as well.

Finally, while Brass has been enormously inventive in tapping available sources of data, those data sources continue to have serious drawbacks. Official registries of NGOs of the sort that she uses to define the geographic locus and substance of NGO activity are known to have immense limitations: they are rarely kept up to date, record where organizations are based but not necessarily where they operate, and equate tiny one-person shops with substantial multipurpose conglomerates in ways that can grossly distort where NGO activity is really taking place. Better data are available, even in Kenya, thanks to a systematic cross-national body of research into the economics of the nonprofit sector in which Kenya was involved, and the recent issuance of United Nations statistical guidance on how to integrate the nonprofit sector into official national statistics, but there is little evidence that this account tapped into these data. Moreover, some of the survey data analyzed could have been explained more fully to make them accessible to a wider readership.

Despite these discontinuities and limitations, however, this book is a notable achievement for its challenge to much of the received wisdom on government–nonprofit relations. As such, it is a much-needed breath of fresh air for which we all owe this author a debt of gratitude.