From Training to Bypassing

Why do international aid organizations pursue varying interventions in recipient states? Prior scholarship points to donor demands and recipient-state politics as drivers of variation. This article introduces a complementary explanation: competition among aid organizations in a field produces distinct organizational visions about how to improve recipient-state agencies. Drawing on 41 in-depth interviews with employees of NGOs operating in Cambodia, we show how field dynamics generate three divergent interventions into the Cambodian criminal justice system: state intervention, in which NGOs work in close partnership with the recipient state, in some cases paying police directly to work for their organization; state bypassing, in which NGOs conduct service provision, investigations, and legal processes independently; and state advocacy, in which NGOs pursue grassroots mobilization to hold policing and justice institutions accountable. By comparing these differing interventions, we show that internal field dynamics are a constitutive force in shaping NGO–state relationships and their evolution over time.