by David Carruthers

In the disorienting international political and economic climate of the 1980s and 1990s, such central analytical concepts as "the state" and "civil society" have shown to be more dynamic than presumed. Among other factors, rapid changes in international trade and environmental regimes, the globalization of production, and new forms of cross-national linkages between citizens’ groups have combined to demonstrate a need to rethink the relationships among individuals, communities, and national and international political structures.

A central component of that analytical effort has been a sharp increase in attention given to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Emerging in that unclear, fluid space between civil society and the state, NGOs have become significant actors in domestic and international politics (Carroll 1992; Reilly 1995; Edwards and Hulme 1996). Their numbers literally exploded in the 1980s, and many countries now count their NGOs in the thousands or tens of thousands (Princen and Finger 1994).

In a climate of growing frustration and disappointment with both state-directed and market-based development strategies, NGOs came crashing onto the stage of development studies, putting a new institutional face to organized civil society. Their apparent diversity, flexibility, efficiency, closeness to locality, and participatory nature provide a stark contrast to rigid bureaucracies, on the one hand, and inhumane market forces, on the other. This perception encouraged a view of NGOs as a sort of "magic bullet," which might hold a crucial key to poverty alleviation, safer communities, environmental preservation, popular education, public health, human rights, and many other arenas of social life, including democratization. Discouraged by persistent authoritarianism in Latin America and elsewhere, this "thickening" of civil society has been viewed by analysts as a source of hope for a "bottom-up" form of democratization (Slater 1985; Fox and Hernández 1989; Salazar 1990; Fisher 1994; Escobar and Alvarez 1992).

Though development NGOs initially commanded the greatest attention, environmentally oriented NGOs also burst onto the scene in the 1980s. Indeed, as awareness of the environmental costs of development has grown in recent years, the environment-development nexus has itself served as the focal point for a global reorientation that now blurs those distinctions. This new vision culminated most notably in 1992 with the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Over 22,000 representatives from over 9,000 NGOs of the developed North and the less-developed South gathered at this "Earth Summit" and in the parallel "global forum" as major contributors to the articulation of an ecologically informed effort to reconceptualize the development problematic, under the rubric of sustainability (Princen and Finger 1994: 4).

Given the central importance of NGOs at UNCED (and at subsequent international fora in Cairo and Beijing), it is not surprising that nongovernmental organizations also emerged as significant players in the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Given the great diversity of these organizations and the interests they represent, it should also come as no surprise that there was a substantial strategic and ideological division within the NGO community regarding the NAFTA. On the one hand, a set of well-funded, mainstream, North American environmental NGOs took a conciliatory stance, throwing their support behind the agreement (Dowie 1992; Cockburn 1993).

On the other hand, recognizing the threat that unrestricted economic integration might pose to communities, workers, and the environment, dozens of Mexican, U.S., and Canadian NGOs, representing labor, environment, human rights, public health, indigenous communities, and other vulnerable groups, formed a sophisticated trinational coalition to better negotiate the local impacts of the North American integration process (Thorup 1991; Brecher and Costello 1994; Frederick 1994; Goldrich 1994). This trinational citizens coalition took a critical stance, drawing up an alternative trade and development initiative, derived in part from the European integration experience, and offering greater institutional safeguards for workers, communities, and the environment (Citizens Trade Campaign et al. 1994).

In spite of this division, and fueled by these very debates, NGOs did make a significant contribution to determining the shape of the final agreement. In particular, NGOs served as a major impetus for the eventual inclusion of the so-called "side agreements" on labor and the environment—agreements that have taken institutional form in the bodies discussed elsewhere in this report (BECC, NadBank, CEC). Without continued pressure from the NGO community, it is conceivable that the NAFTA might have been adopted without these limited institutional mechanisms for constraining environmental and human exploitation.

Many of the NGOs chronicled in this study continue to play this role, working closely with and monitoring the activities and practices of not only relevant government agencies, but of the new supranational bodies themselves. One particularly important forum for NGO activism on NAFTA-related affairs has been the "BECCNet" Internet list (server maintained by Tucson’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy), which also serves to demonstrate the importance of changing communications technologies. Like the facsimile machine, the internet has become a significant vehicle for NGO efforts to air controversies, develop and articulate shared positions, organize and mobilize direct actions and protest, educate and communicate with various constituencies, promote letter writing campaigns, and conduct a variety of similar activities that, ultimately, may leave their imprint on national and international political processes and decisions.

For analysts and policymakers concerned with the myriad environmental, economic, social, and political dimensions of the U.S.-Mexican border, the debate over the NAFTA provides a telling demonstration of the growing importance of NGOs. Indeed, the NAFTA has essentially institutionalized the participation of NGOs, demonstrated in an NGO role as formalized in the appendices and annexes of the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC). Some observers have claimed that NGO participation has become so essential to the BECC certification process that NGOs have acquired very nearly a veto power (Varady, et al. 1996).

Ongoing NGO participation in the NAFTA and its institutions, their ensuing corporate and public sector "watchdog" activities, and their ability to educate and mobilize significant numbers of people in all three NAFTA countries all confirm the need for policy analysts to take NGOs into account. NGOs are much more than narrow, locally oriented, non-political, single-issue groups; they have come to be major players in both domestic and international politics.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a rudimentary framework within which these critical actors might be better understood. The discussion that follows is comprised of three sections. The first section provides an orientational overview of NGOs, with emphasis on efforts to define, classify, and interpret NGOs and their activities. The second section narrows our focus specifically to the environmentally oriented NGOs active along the U.S.-Mexican border, providing an interpretive schema for the organizations listed in part three of this directory. The final section sketches out some tentative observations on the contrasting character of U.S. and Mexican NGOs, and concludes with a brief discussion of the evaluation of NGO effectiveness.

There is virtually no study of NGOs, descriptive, analytical, comparative, valuative, or otherwise, which does not find itself first facing questions of definition and classification. Nongovernmental organizations range from the smallest of voluntary neighborhood associations to the most powerful, far-reaching, and well-financed of international institutions. The term "NGO" has come to serve as a sort of shorthand, which in actuality includes hundreds of different types of organizations and associations within civil society (Carroll 1992; Korten 1990).

In one sense, the term "NGO" is a residual category; a grab-bag for all organizations that are nongovernmental in nature. This has led to a widespread, though disputed (see Uphoff 1996), conception of NGOs as a third sector, neither public (in the sense of the state), nor private (in the sense of the market) (Wolfe 1991).

The controversies and lack of definitional consensus in the NGO literature are largely beyond the scope of this essay (for further discussion, see Drabek 1987; Carroll 1992; Bebbington and Thiele 1993; Edwards and Hulme 1996). For the purposes of this essay, the most general of definitions will suffice: NGOs are legally constituted, non-profit, civic entities or associations. Though the definitional boundaries are contestable, for the purposes of this study we will exclude the consideration of labor unions, political parties, and university-affiliated research institutions.¹

However fragmented the definitional disputes in the literature might be, they are overshadowed by an order of magnitude by the lack of consensus on classification schemes and on criteria for evaluation.

This situation is even more complex than these words imply, and ranges well beyond the analytical literature on NGOs. Because they are active in nearly every aspect of social life, from public health, to popular education, human rights, community development, or environmental law, practitioners and experts in a multiplicity of specialized fields have developed their own nomenclature and criteria for defining, categorizing, and evaluating the performance of the NGOs with which they are concerned. ²

As we move now to discuss the classification of NGO types, bear in mind that the resolution of these controversies lies beyond the scope of this essay. The present discussion is concerned more narrowly with providing an orientation to the critical considerations that influence the debate, and with providing a backdrop for interpreting the classificatory criteria used in this study.

Perhaps the intuitive way to begin thinking about NGOs is to classify by size or scale, or more accurately, by "level of analysis." Beginning at the bottom, neighborhood or community organizations are the closest to home. Because such "base organizations" or "primary groups" are associated with activity at the grassroots or local level, they appear both in popular usage and in the academic literature under the rubric of grassroots organizations (GROs).

Grassroots Organizations (GROs)

There is, of course, great variety within the universe of grassroots organizations (itself a term fraught with multiple and disputed meanings). In many cases they form to address a specific neighborhood or community issue, such as a particular threat to environmental health. They sometimes subsequently dissolve, never pursuing legal or institutional status, but other times they are consolidated institutionally, and may even expand into new and different arenas of activity. Note that precisely because GROs may operate without actually taking a legally constituted shape, many analysts are reluctant to consider them NGOs at all; more accurately, GROs and NGOs are probably best seen as "overlapping sets" (Uphoff 1996: 27).

While recognizing the fuzziness of those boundaries, GROs are the most basic units by which social movements might begin to institutionalize. In Mexico, as throughout the developing world, grassroots social movement organizations representing development, environment, human rights, gender, peasant, labor, health, education, indigenous, religious, and other struggles comprise a rich tapestry of loosely structured networks, associated with the articulation of alternative, grassroots models of development, often marked by a "people-first," or "bottom-up" conceptual commitment (Esteva 1987; Poulton and Harris 1988; Korten 1990; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Brecher and Costello 1994; Shuman 1994). Hence, their smallness, closeness to home, and highly participatory nature are essential characteristics.

Grassroots Organizations (GSOs) and Membership Support Organizations ( MSOs)

As we move upward from the grassroots in this complex fabric, the second level of analysis is defined as another broad-ranging category comprised of so-called "intermediary organizations." Much scholarly attention has been focused precisely in this space, where GROs and NGOs overlap as the institutional face of social movement activity (Carroll 1992; Bebbington and Thiele 1993; Reilly 1995).

Intermediary organizations probably comprise the "purest" category of NGO, lacking the definitional contestability of grassroots or international organizations. In other words, intermediary organizations best fit, conceptually, legally, and institutionally, the term "NGO" as it is commonly used.

It is precisely for this reason that the bulk of the NGO literature has focused on intermediary organizations. In recent years, these organizations, have become the darlings of donor agencies and the focal points of great hopes due to their presumed efficiency and effectiveness at channeling support and resources directly to base organizations. As the name suggests, intermediary organizations perform the critical role of bridging the gap between the micro, or community level, and the macro, or global level. As such, they are prominent in many studies.

Here we follow the lead of Carroll (1992), Bebbington and Thiele (1993), Reilly (1995), and a number of other scholars who appear to be moving toward consensus on marking a distinction between two types of intermediary NGOs: membership support organizations (MSOs) and grassroots support organizations (GSOs). Both organizations pursue the same basic activities by providing resources, training, and support for grassroots or base organizations. Their distinction lies in the affiliation and inspiration of their participants.

Membership support organizations are those staffed by individuals who are elected to their positions from the base. MSO staff members come from the grassroots organizations that are themselves members of the MSO. Grassroots support organizations, however, are staffed by professionals, not elected representatives of the base organizations. GSOs thus tend to be staffed by educated, urban professionals, who may well be socially and ethnically distinct from the rank and file of the grassroots organizations with which they are affiliated.

International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs)

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are included at the highest levels of analysis. Long within the domain of international relations (see Koehane and Nye 1972; 1974), international NGOs have captured comparatively less of the recent attention showered on grassroots and intermediary NGOs.

International organizations are schematically difficult. Many are supranational in character, such as the dozens of organizations affiliated with the United Nations. Although they channel significant support and resources to NGO development efforts, to classify them as NGOs themselves is contestable at best. To muddy the conceptual waters even further, many national-level NGOs (such as Greenpeace, the National Audobon Society, and the World Wildlife Fund) have a decidedly international reach, with enormous budgets and global networks of affiliates and subsidiaries. Many large northern NGOs, for example, possess substantial lobbying power, and have been significant players in seeing that donor agencies steer funds increasingly toward MSOs and GSOs, and in turn, toward GROs.

This classification by level of analysis brings into focus a rough sketch of the NGO landscape. However, most analysts and practitioners find a need for greater detail and clarity in the form and function of the NGOs with which they are dealing. For that reason, most discussion of NGOs classifies them not only by scale, but by activity, in an effort to capture more precisely the nature of the relationship between an NGO and its beneficiaries.

There is little to gain here from an overview or explanation of the many categories that have been designated to identify NGOs by activity; the aim is merely to provide a backdrop for the scheme developed in the next section. Here too, there is a decisive lack of consensus concerning terminology and definitions. Different authors, depending upon the focus, aim, or reach of their study, configure their typologies differently. Among the most commonly defined categories are: lobbying NGOs, networking NGOs, policy-oriented NGOs, education NGOs, advocacy NGOs, social movement NGOs, direct action organizations, service-oriented NGOs, grassroots NGOs, NGO networks, charity and relief NGOs, and neighborhood associations.

Each of the entries in the directory of U.S.-Mexican Border NGOs is classified by type. With the preceding discussion in mind, a description of the classification scheme used in this guide is offered. No attempt is made to reconcile nor bring to a close NGO classificational or definitional debates, but the conventions that appear in the NGO literature, as discussed above, are loosely drawn upon.

What is offered her does not purport to be a "mutually exclusive" nor "exhaustive" system of classification. If some fuzziness, overlap, or blurry lines are found here, then that is the intent—a portrayal of the "cluttered landscape" of contemporary NGOs. Again, these categories are intended to serve only as rough guides for comparison, evaluation, and interpretation of the organizations chronicled in this study.³

Lobbying and Policy NGOs

Though lobbying is only one activity within the domain of policy-oriented activities, and thus for some purposes worthy of a distinct category of its own, for the purposes of this essay, lobbying and policy will be joined together as a single category.

NGOs within this category maintain an explicit policy orientation. They operate on the "input" or "demand" side of the political process, using various means to influence political decision-making and the direction of policy outcomes. Many lobbying and policy NGOs working along the U.S.-Mexican border region include work for the poor as part of their struggle. Most, however, are MSOs, and even the GSOs within this category tend to have few direct ties to grassroots organizations or the poor (Zabin 1996).

Typically, lobbying and policy organizations maintain a professional staff and often foster close ties to universities, think tanks, and research institutions. They may also be very closely networked to local or state governments, perhaps sharing background or positions, and may thereby possess advantageous personal and professional familiarity with policymakers and specific policy processes.

On both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border, lobbying and policy organizations are important actors in the environmental arena. Activities may range from specific localized policy issues (such as mining, solid waste, air, or water pollution), to broader political impacts (such as "right to know" legislation), or influencing the shape of international agreements (such as the NAFTA side agreements). Examples from the U.S.-Mexican border include Arizona’s National Law Center for Inter-American Free Trade, Texas’s Environmental Defense Fund, and Baja California’s Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental.

Advocacy NGOs

Inasmuch as they attempt to influence the policy process, advocacy organizations are close siblings of the lobbying and policy organizations previously discussed. Advocacy organizations, however, play a much more defensive role, gathering and disseminating information, and providing public pressure and representation on the behalf of marginalized or vulnerable groups. Advocacy groups vary in composition; some are themselves GROs or MSOs with very close ties to the base, while others are more professionalized GSOs, with greater linkages to academic and policy circles.

Advocacy NGOs are extremely significant players on the border, especially in the areas of specific environmental threats, the environmental justice movement, human rights, indigenous rights, and so forth. Examples from the U.S.-Mexican border include Arizona’s Border Ecology Project, Arizona Toxics Information, San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition, and Tijuana’s Grupo Ecologista las Gaviotas.

Service-Oriented NGOs

Service-oriented organizations may well be involved in policy issues that affect them closely, but they are distinct from lobby and policy NGOs inasmuch as they are less explicitly political in their orientation. While they share the advocacy groups’ inspirational commitment to the poor and marginalized, they differ in composition and orientation from advocacy NGOs.

Service-oriented organizations are usually grassroots organizations themselves, or GSOs that work very closely with their grassroots constituents. They are usually involved in the provision of specific services, projects, or programs, and play a supportive, facilitative, or outreach role. Most service-oriented NGOs are development-oriented, but as has been noted, the environmental dimension is increasingly seen as an intrinsic component of most development issues. Examples from the borderlands include Cuidad Juarez’s FEMAP (Federación Mexican de Asociaciones Privadas de Salud y Desarrollo Comunitario), I Love a Clean San Diego County, and Arizona’s Friends of the Santa Cruz River.

Education and Research NGOs

This category is not common to most NGO literature, but is especially relevant in the environmental arena. Cultivating broader awareness of environmental threats is of course an important component of the activities of many NGOs with, for example, environmental education intrinsic to the activities of advocacy organizations. Still, a distinctive category is maintained for education and research NGOs. These are principally GSOs that focus their energies specifically on environmental education and/or research by supporting public interest science, sponsoring workshops and forums, and disseminating environmental information through publications, newsletters, or on-line information services. As such, they make a critical contribution to the pool of knowledge that supports the base activities of GROs, as well as the lobbying, policy, and other activities of other GROs and MSOs. Examples include California’s Deadalus Alliance for Environmental Education, the Texas Center for Policy Studies, Santa Fe’s North American Institute, and Tijuana’s ECO-SOL (Educación y Cultura Ecológica) and Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental.

Social Movement NGOs

This is a contestable category, for reasons that are by now clear. Many NGOs essentially comprise the institutional faces of the social movements they represent. While it is recognized that the boundaries are blurry and given to overlap, this category highlights an important distinction: social movement organizations view their work fundamentally as part of a larger transformative effort, often resorting to different tactics.⁴

Social movement organizations may include GROs, MSOs, or GSOs. Their relationship to a beneficiary might emphasize policy, advocacy, or service. They may participate directly or link with groups involved in policy, lobbying, networking, and so forth. Or, they may be involved directly with service provision at the grassroots level.

Social movement NGOs are classified separately in order to highlight their larger emphasis and goals, as well as their distinctive strategies and tactics. In contrast to specific project orientations, these organizations include cooperatives, producers’ associations, urban popular organizations, and so on, that envision their work to be a demonstration, participation, or action that is a part of a larger project, such as democratization, or the reconceptualization of development itself (Esteva 1987; Korten 1990; Brecher and Costello 1994). Strategically, social movement NGOs are often associated with "direct action" forms of social mobilization, including teach-ins, letter-writing campaigns, protests, sit-ins, blockades, and so forth. Examples from the U.S.-Mexican border include San Antonio’s Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, and Tijuana’s Consolidación de Luchas Populares.

NGO Networks

Networking is one of the most important activities of many NGOs. Although there are many organizations that might be good candidates for a "network" category, the term is used here more exclusively to distinguish a particular type of intermediary (or supra-intermediary) NGO. This intermediary NGO serves as an "umbrella" organization, a centerpiece around which linkages among other, composite NGOs might coalesce. Examples from the borderlands include Hermosillo’s Red Fronterizo de Salud y Ambiente, Tijuana’s AIRE SANO (Agrupación Internacional de Respuesta Ecológica y Salud Ambiental del Noroeste), and the Environmental Committee of the San Diego-Tijuana Region.

Though this class of NGO exists to facilitate networking among various groups, the larger NGO linkage picture is a complex, essential feature of NGO activity. NGOs of all stripes have found common causes that bind them together—linkages that are sometimes ephemeral, sometimes enduring, sometimes strategic, and sometimes spiritual.

As noted in the introduction, this propensity toward coalition building and the formation of innovative alliances has captured the imagination of NGO observers. The giant hopes that are pinned to NGOs often derive from the dazzling, bewildering, and ever-shifting tapestry of vertical and horizontal linkages among organizations (Esteva 1987; Poulton and Harris 1988; Fuentes and Gunder Frank; Korten 1990; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Fisher 1994; Shuman 1994). These connections are formed across social movements, such as those between environment and development, health, civil rights, or indigenous rights (Keck and Sikkink 1992; Brecher and Costello 1994; Carruthers 1995). They cut across social class, ethnicity, levels of education, and urban-rural divides, and form at and across all levels (local, state, national, regional, and increasingly, international).

Cross-national linkage formation has attracted particular attention (Alger 1988; Fuentes and Gunder Frank 1989; Hernández and Sánchez 1992; Barry 1994; Dresser 1994) and the U.S.-Mexican border is an especially interesting case of an emerging "international civil society" (Lipschutz 1992). The participation of NGOs in the debate over the NAFTA, and their ever-increasing role in informing subsequent institutional processes is a good example.

This notion of an "internationalizing" civil society, stemming largely as a defensive reaction to the destructive side effects of a rapidly globalizing economy, is a nascent one. This study makes no claim toward evaluating the efficacy of such links. Cross-border linkages may have been oversold, or their promise may exceed all expectation; the promise and limitations of linkages is yet to be revealed.

Still, because linkages are so central to NGO activity, each entry in this directory includes membership to NGO networks, alliances, coalitions, and many other classes of linkages or institutional affiliations.

We now turn to a set of concluding observations regarding the widely varied character and effectiveness of NGOs in the U.S.-Mexican border region. Given the tremendous heterogeneity and indeterminacy of the NGO universe as it has been discussed, these generalizations are approached with great caution. No formal field research has been conducted to address these issues, and the existing literature is sparse indeed. Hence, only subjective and rudimentary observations are presented here.

The purpose of this somewhat speculative discussion is to provoke reflection and consideration for some very interesting questions in an area where there are few definitive answers. We will look first at comparisons between U.S. NGOs and their Mexican counterparts, and conclude with a few comments regarding the dimensions of efficacy of NGO activity.

Comparing U.S. and Mexican NGOs

The relationship between U.S. and Mexican NGOs is in many ways a microcosm of the larger U.S.-Mexican relationship. That is, the most glaring distinctions between U.S. NGOs and their Mexican counterparts mirror the distinctions between the U.S. and Mexico more generally.

The most prominent distinction is financial resources. While this survey did not investigate funding sources nor any other financial aspects of NGO operation, the comparative differences in funding and resources are obvious. Funding is of course no small issue; it is one of the most central concerns of all NGOs, and can easily consume a disproportionate amount of attention and time. While many U.S. NGOs are perpetually starved for financial resources, and NGO work itself is generally a "labor of love" by a typically over-burdened and underpaid or volunteer staff, these characteristics are greatly magnified on the Mexican side of the border. Even those Mexican NGOs directly affiliated with northern donor agencies cannot be placed in the same financial league as their northern counterparts.

Periodic economic crises, such as the wrenching economic crisis that has afflicted Mexico since late 1994, make this situation much more difficult, materially, logistically, and even spiritually. Many Mexican NGOs operate almost as civic counterparts for Mexico’s expanding "informal economy," and may consist of nothing more than a spare room, a fax machine, some letterhead, and an almost-infinite amount of ingenuity, patience, perseverance, and passion on the part of a few bright and dedicated souls. But acute crisis can grind down even the most resilient and strip organizational functions down to a bare minimum.

One seemingly mundane, but telling demonstration of this difference can be seen in the use of personal computers. In the late 1990s, the computer is a key technology for social action. In particular, the Internet—itself emergent, spontaneous, and largely uncontrolled—is a technological mirror of the "thickening" of civil society, domestically and internationally.

The importance of the BECCNet was noted earlier as a nodal point for NGO consultation, communication, and cross-fertilization. Its impact on policy can be significant when BECCNet communication informs and mobilizes the NGO community. A quick perusal through BECCNet archives reveals many such exchanges. Yet given the resource and infrastructure barriers that they confront, Mexican NGOs have been largely left behind in this process. Mexican groups are dramatically under-represented on the Internet, and as a result, opportunities to participate and leave an imprint on the subsequent policy process tends to pass them by. This is a serious constraint on the openness and representativeness of the means by which NGO activity influences the realms of policy, education, and social action.⁵

Closely related is the issue of scale, which was noted earlier. There are many community-based GSOs on the U.S. side of the border. In general, U.S. NGOs are larger and more effectively networked, often possessing a number of regional offices, and even a national affiliation or reach. With some exceptions (such as the Movimiento Ecologista Mexicano [MEM]), most Mexican NGOs are much more geographically bound, maintaining a local focus and a strong community orientation.

Another key difference has to do with the capacity for specialization. Most U.S. NGOs that are concerned with environmental issues are afforded the luxury of issue specificity, working exclusively with environmental issues. Even within the environmental dimension, NGOs can subspecialize in specific environmental issue areas, such as endangered species, toxics, deforestation, pesticides, water resources, wilderness, and so forth.

Such specialization is out of reach for most Mexican NGOs. Part of this has to do with the comparative legal and rational character of the institutions that U.S. NGOs deal with. More important is the nature of the larger environmental problematic itself in the third world. For Mexican NGOs, as in most less developed countries, environmental issues do not stand independently of pressing development issues (hence the environment-development nexus at the heart of UNCED). For Mexican NGOs, most environmental concerns are fundamentally enmeshed within a context of larger, structural contradictions within the development process itself.

In other words, environmentalism in Mexico is not simply a mirror of U.S.-styled environmentalism, with its wilderness aesthetic, historic conservation/preservation orientation, and the more recent single-issue focus that dates from the 1970s. Environmental degradation in Mexico persists at a much more egregious and life-threatening level, and is itself a manifestation of larger structures of oppression and inequity.

Environmentally oriented Mexican NGOs thus find environmental struggles inherently embedded in larger struggles for social justice, human rights, fair workplace standards, public health, and community development. Given the daunting nature of these struggles, the exclusionary and repressive character of Mexican politics, and the power imbalance that this implies, it is little wonder that Mexican NGOs must measure their successes in small footsteps.

As these observations suggest, a final key difference between the two sides of the border has to do with the relationship of NGOs to the state. In general, it seems fair to characterize U.S. NGOs as more rational/legalistic than their Mexican counterparts. Even among U.S. service, education, or advocacy groups, a direct impact on state or national policy is an implicit, and often explicit, goal that directs their activities. In a sense, NGOs adopt the form of the policy context in which they operate. In their organizational structure, operation, and strategy, U.S. NGOs tend to follow this rational/legal pattern, so that, for example, there is nothing unusual about grassroots and advocacy groups participating in litigation, or even instigating litigation themselves.

Mexican NGOs, on the other hand, are traditionally much more distanced from the state, and rely less on legal means. Neither observation is in any way surprising. Given the Mexican political regime’s legendary capacity to co-opt or repress its opposition, civil organizations in Mexico have long fashioned themselves as apolitical, and have instead embarked on a decades-long struggle precisely to enhance their autonomy from the state.⁶

Likewise, the comparative reluctance of NGOs to resort to legal strategies is a logical consequence of their familiarity with limits to the rule of law in Mexico, and the legendary gap between the letter of the law and its enforcement—an observation best demonstrated in the environmental arena.

NGO Effectiveness

Implicit in the above discussion is the statement that many U.S. NGOs enjoy material, institutional, and contextual advantages that most of their Mexican counterparts do not. Does this mean that U.S. NGOs are more effective? Given the dramatic differences in those contexts, how could effectiveness be measured? For example, in the grinding poverty of a border city slum, a clean water tap could yield an enormous public health improvement in the real quality of people’s lives; is this more or less effective than a precedent-setting battle won in court by a U.S. NGO?

In contrast to the tentative quality of these comparative observations on NGO character, the efficacy of NGOs has been the object of a number of significant studies (Carroll 1992; Reilly 1995; Edwards and Hulme 1996). Given the high hopes that have been placed upon them, it is not surprising that a literature would develop to consider that most basic question: how well do they work?

Thomas Carroll (1992) essentially set the "industry standard" for the evaluation of NGO performance. According to Carroll, its key dimensions included: (1) development services (measured by "service delivery" and "poverty reach"), (2) participation and empowerment (measured by "responsiveness" and "accountability"), and (3) wider impact (measured by "innovation" and impact on policy). More recently, Michael Edwards and David Hulme (1996) suggested similar dimensions for assessing NGO effectiveness. Principle variables that they considered included poverty reach, cost effectiveness, sustainability, participation, flexibility, innovation, and democratization. In addition, we might also wish to add the impact of cross-border linkages, along with their potential to both enhance national policy impact and inform the supranational institutions of border environmental administration and policy.

One important caveat: assessment of the effectiveness of the NGOs listed in this directory is not a part of our project. No attempt to evaluate the efficacy of organizations surveyed herein is made. Still, the extant literature gives us "food for thought" regarding measures of the successes and failures of NGOs. Those dimensions are sketched out here only so that they might be kept in mind while considering the real and probable impact of the organizations included in this directory.

This cursory glance at the range of measures of NGO effectiveness is a telling indicator of a theme that has run throughout this discussion: a great burden of expectation has been laid at the feet of NGOs. The border region is no exception. NGO participation in environmental administration and policy along the U.S.-Mexican border is a microcosm of a changing world. NGOs are not just new actors on a more complex political stage; they are a defining feature of an emerging structure of world politics and economics.

¹ Most (although not all) of the organizations listed in this directory are non-profit organizations, a legal status generally recognized by 501C3 tax status in the United States, and in Mexico as A.C. ("Asociación Civil sin fines de lucro," or non-profit civil association) (Raíces de Arena 1996). This emphasis has led many analysts to use the term PVO (private voluntary organization), which for our purposes can be considered essentially synonymous with NGO.

² As an illustrative example, specialized literature from the field of public health tends to classify NGOs into three broad categories: (1) social planning (including advocacy, lobbying, and policy-oriented groups), (2) social action (direct action and protest groups), and (3) locality development (community, base organizations) (Elder 1994).

³ Given the diversity of organizations surveyed, and reluctance to impose any particular framework on a field in which the terms are so contestable, the surveys did not ask the organizations listed in this directory to classify themselves. The misclassification of any organization appearing in this directory is purely the responsibility of the author.

⁴ Please note that this distinction is not automatic, nor readily apparent. It is seldom clear whether policy, advocacy, or service are means to a larger transformative end, or are ends in themselves; the classification here does not intend to make this judgement. For example, San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition is explicitly an actor in a larger social movement—the environmental justice movement—which seeks to remedy "environmental racism," or the disproportionate shifting of environmental hazards onto communities of color (see Bullard 1993; Hofrichter 1993). While the EHC is classified here as an advocacy group, it is clear that a larger social movement mission is inherent in its work.

⁵ Another demonstration of the critical importance of resources can be seen in the relative paucity of data for the Mexican side of this NGO directory itself. While (sometimes with prompting) virtually all U.S. NGOs filled out and returned their surveys to us, the Mexican response rate was very low. Subsequent efforts to follow through with telephone calls and facsimiles revealed a pattern of organizations so starved for resources, time, and personnel, that even the small number of person-hours required for this survey was out of reach. In many more cases, telephones and facsimile machines had themselves been sacrificed in the current climate of austerity.

⁶ This reluctance to get entangled in potentially co-optive relationships with the state is the legacy of both the repression of the 1968 student movement, and the subsequent strategies of the Echeverría administration to demobilize new social movements (see Hellman 1983; Castañeda 1993).

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