This article examines foreign aid and government funding to NGOs as forms of patronage, and explores the impact of such funding on the nature and role of civil society. Using qualitative research from Palestine and Morocco, we argue that patronage transforms NGOs into apparatuses of governing. NGOs become key sites for the exercise of productive power through the technologies of professionalization, bureaucratization and upward accountability. The article explores how this transformation of NGOs depoliticizes their work while undermining their role as change agents within civil society. The findings have implications for understanding the transformation of NGOs, the relationship between patrons and their grantees, and, finally, for exploring the limitations of NGOs as vehicles for social change in sensitive political environments.

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This article examines the Egyptian government's evolving policy toward Egypt's NGO sector and its effects on organizations' efforts to support democratic political reform. The January 25, 2011 uprisings that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak seemed to present an opportunity for Egypt's NGO sector to break free from decades of government co-optation and repression and lead Egyptian civil society's political reform efforts. NGOs did initiate democracy promotion projects immediately following the uprisings, and for a few months it seemed that NGOs would be torchbearers of political reform. By the summer of 2014, however, NGO employees were predicting the looming "death of civil society" in Egypt. Drawing upon data from over 90 interviews, this article analyzes the ways in which authoritarian adaptation, through both discourse and policy toward the NGO sector, constrained NGOs' capacities to advance political reform efforts.

This article examines how the Egyptian government produced a legal, regulatory, and operational environment designed to “divide and throttle” the country’s NGO sector. We identify a two-pronged government strategy toward the NGO sector – namely, flooding the field and bureaucratic overload – the effect of which was to fragment and weaken the sector and prevent it from forming an effective oppositional bloc. We furthermore argue that this government strategy promoted competition rather than cooperation among NGOs. Organizations espoused competing strategic visions for the sector that divided organizations into camps of “charity,” “development,” and “advocacy.” The ultimate consequence of this competition was a sector of NGOs that, instead of valuing pluralism and building upon diverse comparative advantages to create sector-wide strength, belittled each other and failed to coalesce. Egypt’s NGO sector became a tool of the state rather than a force for collective empowerment or a voice for societal change.