Transnational NGOs are a huge phenomenon. There are thousands of them all over the world; they play a notable role in the ecology of the global political system and have an impact on policy and outcomes. This valuable book helps us understand them.

NGOs, transnational or local, are institutionally less formal than both governments and businesses. Their influence comes from the role they play in our civil society in the space between these actors. They claim legitimacy from not being “bought” or corrupted by interests as is alleged to be the case on the government side and by the profit motive on the businesses side. They claim legitimacy from the virtue of their cause—whether it be child labor, human rights, climate, or numerous other issues. Yet do these virtues produce efficacy? How do we evaluate NGOs’ influence and effectiveness? To what degree do they attain their goals? Do they operate outside the political sphere, as substitutes for the failure of governments and businesses, or is their impact made through the political sphere and, if so, how? If we are concerned by the weak accountability of governments and businesses on these matters of value, to whom are the NGOs themselves accountable?

To understand NGOs, the strategy adopted by the authors of this volume Between Power and Irrelevance, George E. Mitchell, Hans Peter Schmitz, and Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, is to think of them as organizations and study their properties as such. Their 12 chapters provide huge amounts of information on a vast array of organizational properties that transnational NGOs possess: “strategy, power, governance, leadership, soul, measurement, mergers and acquisitions,” and so on. Its chapter titles read like ones that might come from a business school management course or book.

That is a virtue of this book, not a criticism: NGOs should indeed be seen as organizations and analyzed as such. We should not be blinded in our inquiries by their idealism or their goals, however virtuous. To achieve aims, even lofty ones, NGOs have to hire people (we hope effective ones), and fire them (when incompetent), raise money, create authority structures, carry out tasks, and pay some staff more than others. Some will do this well, others not so well. In some cases, the management process may distort the mission, eating up its funding or rewarding NGO bureaucrats at the cost of achieving the goals. Welcome to the real world, as many of us teach our students, while encouraging them to take courses in accounting, financial management, quantitative analysis, program design and evaluation, and other practical things that virtuous organizations need.

How do we know in the end whether the NGO, transnational or local, achieves its mission? This is a complex issue. Chapter 7, “Measurement,” one of the best in this volume, explores it in some detail. Measuring performance is very difficult even with lots of resources. Donors want such evaluations, as do voters and legislators. But the organization fears its mission could be altered by the tasks of producing that kind of information, or that it could be punished if there are poor results. Many of us have encountered NGOs that do not want to conduct a particular measurement study because it will reveal bad outcomes.

Entrepreneurs have correctly sensed a market for evaluations; Charity Navigator is one of the most well known. It provides a number, which readers take to mean a quality standard, for a very large number of nonprofits. Yet what is that standard? It is the percentage of money the NGO spent on overhead. That information is interesting, important, and useful: no one wants money wasted on overhead. But it can also be most misleading. Organizations know the smaller the percentage, the higher the rating, so they game their figures. Moreover a low number is not necessarily proof of the quality of output. For many tasks, overhead may be central to effective mission attainment. A significant reason this measure is used is cost: low-skilled, hence low-paid, people, can be hired to go through publicly available tax forms and find the numbers. Defining goals and actually measuring output quality to match it to the level of that attainment would be vastly more labor intensive and expensive. There are organizations that do evaluations, but they cost much more than Charity Navigator. What you get is connected to what you are willing to pay for. The chapter titled “Power and Irrelevance” provides no simple answer to this problem because there is none: these organizations are very complex and deal with multidimensional situations. Evaluating performance is simply not simple!

This brings us back to core issues that deserve even greater discussion than they get in this book. What drives NGO behavior? Even more important, are NGOs really able to be substitutes for government and business, to actually play the role many of them claim as the monitors and supervisors of the issue space in which they operate? A famous example has to do with labor in the clothing supply chain: workers confront crowded, unhealthy, underpaid, dangerous conditions, facing even death from fire or building collapse or chemical spills. Because controversy over these conditions caused big problems for manufacturers, they came to support mechanisms for monitoring the system that would be credible to the consumers of their products. This led to the creation of the Fair Labor Association, which sent out inspectors to factories. Its board was made up of representatives of the companies, labor, and university bookstores, because students were major protestors. But then the Worker Rights Consortium complained that the presence of the manufacturers undermined the credibility of the investigations; yet, lacking representation, the manufacturers were less likely to cooperate. This expresses well the dilemma: necessary buy-in at the cost of lower credibility. Full disclosure to the readers of this review—these credibility problems were the major focus of the 2012 book I coedited on this topic with David Lake and Janice Stein (The Credibility of Transnational NGOs). We share with the authors of this volume the worry that NGOs get too much of a free pass by assuming that the virtue of their goals gives them the cover of good performance. We agree they should be pushed like everyone else to see what actually happens.

NGOs cannot replace both government and the private sector. They are not able to solve the problems of monitoring worldwide for the vast production of clothing or foodstuffs. Nor can they solve the immense problems of coordinating standards in the high-tech sector, though sometimes the market compels coordination for safety or uniformity. Health care, climate, and safety initiatives all need governments to establish and enforce standards, and they need markets and capital to coordinate production and distribution. The UN Global Compact makes an important contribution to this end. But transnational NGOs can play a huge role that otherwise goes unfilled: as societal monitors. They can be vital watchdogs and supervisors, serving as key pieces of the “fire alarms” system, in contrast to police patrols, as Matt McCubbins and Tom Schwartz called them (“Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science, 28 [1], 1984).

Shouting loudly when abuses happen is vital to ensuring that enforcement and punishment happen. Without the NGOs, the system of politicians, courts, regulators, and administrators is less likely to see those abuses. “Police patrols” can help, but they need a mobilized citizenry. Without them the political process is less likely to be effective. Interest groups have played this role. As this book makes clear, transnational NGOs are vital components of this process as well.