The Academic Debate on What Makes an Organization Non-governmental

Whether non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) exist in Vietnam's political system, how they earned their names and what is their positionality, have been thoroughly debated among Vietnam studies scholars. This section contributes to this debate by providing recent data on the self-identification of NGOs, their roles and their positioning in networks. It shows that although none of the organizations are 100 per cent non-governmental, they still perceive themselves and are perceived as separated from the state and build their networks accordingly. These organizations may vary in their goals, but they nevertheless show similarities in their approaches and networks due to the limited opportunities in Vietnam's political context and the donor landscape. The restrictive authoritarian and “responsive-repressive” system forms the background for actors in the wider Vietnamese political sphere and casts doubts as to whether NGOs and civil society (CS) exist in Vietnam. The definition of an NGO in this research is broader than the literal meaning of “non-governmental organization”. The terms NGOs, CS and CSOs can overlap, complement or contradict each other. To reach a common understanding of these terms, I start with deconstructing the term NGO before turning to the concept of CS and discuss what these concepts mean for Vietnam.

The term NGO was first used in the UN Charter of 1945, when NGOs were accepted as unofficial consultants and were explicitly named as such. This established a dichotomy between the official government actors and the unofficial non-government ones that were characterized by some form of organizational structure and closed identity. Since then, an academic debate has unfolded on what constitutes an NGO, besides being non-governmental. Vasavakul (2003, p. 25) notes that the Vietnamese political sphere refers to NGOs at the end of the 1990s as “popular organizations that were loosely connected to the party-state structure, financially self-sufficient and involved in development work once considered as falling under the jurisdiction of the party-state”. Vietnamese NGOs (VNGOs) used the methodology of fencebreaking (phá rào), which meant that policy positions were not directly expressed, but indirectly through breaking rules and regulations, which is still happening today.