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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY 81

NGOs as part of new forms of organization aims of specific social movements? These
that are widely mentioned, whether these be are vivid theoretical and practical disputes
good or bad, about which we still need to that the effort to map out the NGO universe
learn much more. clearly revealed.
At this stage, my main purpose is to inves- Given such huge disparities in current def-
tigate how these new organizations, labeled initions, plus the practical difficulties in
NGOs, structure themselves, how they inter- operating a survey, we made crucial choices:
act with the state, how they operate. There first, we selected just Brazil-based non-gov-
are innumerable case studies of particular ernmental organizations that are explicitly
NGOs, but there is little systematic analysis involved with activities in the following
of the collective phenomena of their creation areas: health, education, gender, minority
and consolidation. Thus, I set myself the task rights, human rights, children and youth, and
of obtaining not a close-up picture, but rather environment. Therefore, we excluded sports,
some sort of panorama photograph of a class leisure, and other activity areas that tradition-
of Brazilian NGOs. ally counted on voluntary organizations,
I am well aware that the risks of simplifi- often religion-based ones, and that signifi-
cation in such a broad approach are cantly differ from the typical discourse of
immense. Moreover, there are specific diffi- NGOs. Our choice here was to concentrate
culties in mapping out NGOs in Brazil that on NGOs that supply services traditionally
make generalization even more problematic. provided by the state (authority) and/or by
How to select a reliable sample? It was not an the market sector. The decision to include
easy task to consolidate a list of NGOs active just Brazil-based NGOs was coherent with
in Brazil. There were many problems to sort the idea of focusing mainly on the changing
out before confronting the decision between interaction of the nation-state with its nation-
the too inclusive or too exclusive definition als, though the importance of international
criteria one encounters. The data bases con- and global actors for domestic NGOs is
sulted varied from around 600 listed in the explicitly contemplated in the survey. 2
neatly organized archives of the Brazilian Second, we limited our study to organiza-
Association of Non-Governmental Agencies tions active in six urban centers: Sao Paulo,
(ABONG) to the over 200,000 registered by Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Belo Horizonte,
the official Brazilian Institute of Geography Porto Alegre, and Salvador. Three of the cities
and Statistics (IBGE). were selected to account for the largest
Seeking to consolidate the database to absolute concentration of NGOs in the coun-
extract a sample, it became evident that the try (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia);
very disputes over the definition of what a two others have the largest relative concen-
NGO is should constitute an investigation tration of civic organizations in the country
issue. Debates about the ‘right’ definition according to official statistics (Porto Alegre
already express a relevant political competi- and Belo Horizonte). Finally, we decided to
tion between distinctive interests. From the include Salvador, the capital city of Bahia
vast range of definitions for NGOs, we have State, because it is the urban center that has
chosen the one based on three characteristics: the largest number of NGOs acting in the
non-profit orientation, no representative Northeast region, where poverty and social
basis, and independence from government. exclusion are particularly acute.
However, doubts persisted: Should the term I contend that, even if not explicitly random,
be applied to describe any non-profit organi- the sample, comprising 301 cases, is somehow
zation? Should it include traditional religious representative of the universe of Brazilian non-
and sports associations? Should it apply to governmental organizations. In addition, I main-
professional organizations that seek to tain that, discounting spatial and functional bias,
advance particular social causes? Should it the survey results do provide relevant informa-
be restricted to associations that embody the tion on the struc-ture and functioning of NGOs