V.K. Sudersan
NGOs are seen to have a central role in development practice, but the question that remains unanswered, and probably never can be answered, is: what role or roles should this be? This is not a new question; ever since NGOs as institutional forms came to have a role in social development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governements have seen them as service providers, while the NGOs' supporters have been them as advocates for social change.