Are non-governmental organizations working in development a transnational community?

At the end of this millennium, poor people in low-income economies have lived through a series of extraordinary changes. The latest has been the rise of the transnational community of workers in NGDOs (non-governmental ‘development’ organizations), a community expressing shared values, language and practices which differ from those of local everyday life, from Orissa to Oxfordshire. NGDOs are not new but have burgeoned beyond recognition. For a Mexican peasant, NGDOs may be a more relevant, more immediate reality than NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Area). One thread of ideas in the community treats of women's self-empowerment. Very similar discussions of ‘autonomy’ have been witnessed among speakers of Mixe in Mexico and Telegu in India. How may we understand a community of ideas which produces such strikingly parallel local talk in such distant and dissimilar locales? More important, how may these very speakers best understand it? This paper will set what we, as academics, know about the community against selected, positive, rice-roots responses to one feminist thread within it.