Government-NGO Partnerships for International Development Cooperation
Sohn & Kim
At the HLF-3 in Accra in 2008, developed and developing countries recognized civil
society as an independent development actor in its own right, and they agreed to
create a legal and institutional environment enabling CSO contributions to development.
The Korean government also announced the Plan for the Advancement of ODA in 2010, which committed it to an unprecedented increase in the volume of NGO assistance and called for methods of multidimensional
cooperation with NGOs. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to analyze the
government-NGO partnership for development cooperation in Korea. After reviewing the mechanisms of OECD DAC members' partnerships with their NGOs and then Korean government-NGO partnerships in a
comparative perspective, we conclude that both the Korean government and development NGOs
are still facing many challenges for better partnership. For NGOs, these are accountability
and sustainability issues, a tendency toward service delivery, proselytizing activities of Christian
faith-based organizations, and a lack of capacity. For the government, it is uncertainty
about its public commitment, an unclear vision and philosophy regarding ODA, an insufficient civil
society partnership program, and a need for clear policy objectives for NGO support programs.