Political Obligations Toward NGOs

Abstract Governance is no longer—if it ever was—the exclusive purview of states. As Rubenstein has persuasively argued, NGOs often perform governance and other political functions. They may provide public goods and services, make decisions about resource allocation that affect the collective lives of the people they claim to serve, influence local politics in the communities where they work, and shape nascent global governance norms. This raises the question: if NGOs perform political and even governance functions, do people have political obligations toward them as we are often thought to have toward states? This chapter will survey several possible grounds for political obligations toward NGOs and several possible complications for theories of political obligations toward NGOs. For example, political obligations toward NGOs might be justified based on the natural duty of justice, the so-called “humanitarian imperative,” people’s responsibilities to oppose structural injustice, or the mere fact that NGOs perform governance functions. However, there are significant obstacles to founding political obligations to NGOs on each of these grounds. The chapter will explore these complications, ultimately arguing that people have a fairly circumscribed and very positionally dependent set of obligations toward NGOs.