View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles GUEST EDITORIAL New sectoral perspectives on international NGOs: scale, dynamics and influences Introduction The public narrative surrounding international NGOs (INGOs) often envisions sectors in crisis. Rightwing media narratives highlight growing popular hostility towards INGOs and record declining giving to development causes across the global North (Henson and Lindstrom 2013; Heinrich, Kobayashi, and Bryant 2016; Gulrajani 2017). Well-publicised safeguarding scandals in 2018 fuelled these fires, tarnishing the "legitimacy" of once impeccable brands. These have given strength to the idea that public faith in NGOs as altruistic and trustworthy actors is misguided. Yet this collection demands we be careful of any predictions of actual changes from these events and narratives among the existing allies of international NGOs. The Covid-19 crisis will undoubtedly cause casualties in the sector. But the underlying picture is more robust, and complex, than a crisis narrative can capture. Often there are simply no data on trends in actual levels of support. Where they do exist they do not portray a crisis. Research on INGOs has multiplied as their importance has grown, but this body of work highlights our ignorance as much as our understanding. Brass et al.'s (2018) systematic analysis of 35 years of scholarship on development NGOs highlights its rich theoretical roots and diverse empirical insights. But case studies dominate the methods, offering little insight into broader groups of development NGOs and focusing on the largest to the exclusion of others. Yet without understanding sectoral dynamics in more detailthe size, scale and mechanics of INGO sectors and the influence of government policies, public attitudes and media representations (among others) on theseit is difficult for policies for funding civil society to be evidence-based and hard for INGOs to respond to perceived trends as a sector. This Special Issue brings ten exciting new papers that combine methodological advancements, critical new empirical findings and important fresh insights. In this Guest Editorial we draw out some of the key findings across them. First, we consider methodological advancements offering new insights into INGO sectors in Britain (Banks and Brockington 2020), the Netherlands (Schulpen and Van Kempen 2020), and grassroots INGOs (GINGOs) in Canada (Davis 2020). Second, we examine the operating environments of INGO sectors in diverse contexts. The papers here explore a range of policies for funding civil society, including a comparative study across the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany (Verbugge and Huyse 2020), the Netherlands (Kamstra 2020), the US (Mitchell and Stroup 2020) and in the EU (Keijzer and Bossuyt 2020). Two papers then explore public attitudes to aid, and INGOs in particular, across the UK, the US, France and Germany (van Heerde-Hudson et al. 2020) and in Canada (Davis, Henson, and Swiss 2020). Finally, Vossen (2020) bri...
