Roy, A. (2016). “The NGO-ization of Resistance.” In The End of Imagination. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Roy’s essay names the mechanism sharply: NGOs’ “real contribution is that they defuse political anger… They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance… In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among.” The essay is a primary reference on NGOization as a failure mode of contemporary patronage, applied to the specific case of Indian civil society under foundation funding. For the Three-Feature Test, it is one of the anchor sources for the failure-mode classification of NGO capture.