With the territorial reconfiguration and the setting up of the Palestinian Authority following the Oslo Accords and the changes linked to the second Intifada, the policies and priorities of Palestinian NGOs have obviously evolved, particularly for those linked to the "return to the land" stake.
PARC, an agricultural development NGO created more than twenty years ago, is officially attached to the Palestinian People's Party (the former Palestine Communist Party), from which it is derived. It has been professionalized and has significantly expanded its coverage of the Palestinian population. It is recognized by international donors, and its budget exceeds by far that of the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture. Between complementarity and competition, how are its relations with the Palestinian Authority articulated? What are its strategies to maintain its legitimacy among the population, but also among donors? This book describes the interactions and the power relations and struggles between these various actors.
The Palestinian case is quite specific in terms of the defining what is governmental and what is non-governmental, but this specificity makes it a kind of laboratory of relationships between the voluntary sector and a State in the making. With the rise of NGOs in developing countries and the current valorization of the notion of civil society, NGOs have become a major research topic. This profusion of studies sometimes offers excellent theoretical tools, of which this book makes the most of, while other analyses do not stand the test of the Palestinian field…
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