NGO Legitimacy: Four Models

The aim of this paper is to examine NGOs’ legitimacy in the context of global politics. In order to yield a better understanding of NGOs’ legitimacy at the international level it is important to examine how their legitimacy claims are evaluated. This paper proposes dividing the literature into four models based on the theoretical and analytical approaches to their legitimacy claims: the market model, social change model, new institutionalism model and the critical model. The legitimacy criteria generated by the models are significantly different in their analytical scope of how one is to assess the role of NGOs operating as political actors contributing to democracy. The paper argues that the models present incomplete, and sometimes conflicting, views of NGOs’ legitimacy and that this poses a legitimacy dilemma for those assessing the political agency of NGOs in world politics. The paper concludes that only by approaching their legitimacy holistically can the democratic role of NGOs be explored and analysed in the context of world politics

Ensuring the right to education for Roma children : an Anglo-Swedish perspective

Access to public education systems has tended to be below normative levels where Roma children are concerned. Various long-standing social, cultural, and institutional factors lie behind the lower levels of engagement and achievement of Roma children in education, relative to many others, which is reflective of the general lack of integration of their families in mainstream society. The risks to Roma children’s educational interests are well recognized internationally, particularly at the European level. They have prompted a range of policy initiatives and legal instruments to protect rights and promote equality and inclusion, on top of the framework of international human rights and minority protections. Nevertheless, states’ autonomy in tailoring educational arrangements to their budgets and national policy agendas has contributed to considerable international variation in specific provision for Roma children. As this article discusses, even between two socially liberal countries, the UK and Sweden, with their well-advanced welfare states and public systems of social support, there is a divergence in protection, one which underlines the need for a more consistent and positive approach to upholding the education rights and interests of children in this most marginalized and often discriminated against minority group