Can Nongovernmental Regulation Resolve NGO Trust Deficits? Policy Considerations for the United States

Abstract Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States and globally are at a historic juncture. The available data on trust and confidence in NGOs internationally suggests that NGOs suffer from trust and reputation deficits, implying that concerns about NGO effectiveness and accountability may not be adequately addressed through existing systems of oversight and regulation. Compounding this challenge, NGOs in many countries face a backlash in which governments restrict, reduce, or eliminate funding sources for NGOs and curtail freedoms with implicit and explicit threats. This paper argues that understanding the nature of this inflection point in the United States is enhanced by placing it in the larger context of the global NGO regulatory architecture. The past few decades have seen the proliferation across the globe of a wide variety of institutional arrangements for regulating NGOs, resulting in a complicated patchwork of governmental and nongovernmental regulatory regimes operating across many overlapping jurisdictions. We examine the nongovernmental regulation of NGOs as a response to information deficits that remain under-resolved by governmental regulation. We argue that NGOs require trust and reputational legitimacy to attract public support and funding. But NGOs face real challenges to greater transparency at the same time that government regulation struggles to provide adequate quality assurances for current information disclosures to the satisfaction of all relevant stakeholders. This gap creates a market for information that is often filled by nongovernmental regulation systems. In this article we explore the structure of these private, nongovernmental regulation regimes at the national and transnational levels to derive insights for increasing NGO trustworthiness and legitimacy by bolstering the NGO data ecosystem.