The Stories They Tell: What INGO Mission Statements Reveal about their Authority

Wendy Wong co-authors an article in Global Society journal about how INGOs make authority claims to their audiences via their mission statements. Drawing on existing research on INGOs and global governance, the authors identify five dimensions of authority: accountability, representativeness, effectiveness, legality, and universal morality.

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) play an increasingly important role in global governance. Without coercive capacities, INGOs must build their authority to be heard, and ideally, influential in global governance. However, we know little about how INGOs build and defend their authority in practice. We argue that mission statements characterise how INGOs make authority claims to their audiences. Drawing on existing research on INGOs and global governance, we identify five dimensions of authority: accountability, representativeness, effectiveness, legality, and universal morality. We analyse the mission statements of 11 leading INGOs (high status) and 46 other INGOs (low status) from 2003 and 2013. We find that leading INGOs are more likely to emphasise accountability and legality while other INGOs are more likely to highlight representativeness. Our findings open up an exciting research agenda to study how authority relationships are constructed in global civil society.