13 Three Problems Facing Civil Society Organizations in the Development Sector in Adopting Open Institutional Design

Over the past forty years, one enduring source of criticism of the contributions of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the development sector has been their increasing neoliberalization as alternative and more efficient channels of development aid delivery (Desai and Imrie 1998; Hulme and Edwards 2013). Wallace and Porter (2013) went so far as to argue that this trend has created a crisis of representation. It is a crisis because CSOs were often considered to be working in the public's interest because of their geographic proximity to their relevant publics, their use of alternative participatory methods, and their public advocacy work (Bebbington, Hickey, and Mitlin 2008; Lewis and Kanji 2009). Yet, the neoliberal approach to development has increasingly dominated CSO practice over the decades, encouraging managerial forms of program design, implementation, and evaluation (Eyben 2013). This mode of development practice is not seen as being compatible with representing a relevant public's interest, thus inducing a crisis of representation.