摘要：In recent years nongovernmental organizations or NGOs have become increasingly visible and active in various sectors of social life, including education. As Edwards and Hulme (1996) report, there has been a "[r]apid growth in NGO numbers (…) accompanied in some countries (…) by a trend toward expansion in the size of individual NGOs and NGO programs" (p. 962). At the same time, NGOs have received greater attention in government and international organization reports and policy documents, as well as in scholarly literature. In this burgeoning literature, NGOs are characterized and evaluated in quite different ways. Sometimes the acronym, "NGO," seems to serve as shorthand for "New Great Organization" and other times it appears to refer to "Never Good Organization." [2]One might summarize the case for and against NGOs by way of a parody of Shakespeare's statement about roses: an NGO by any other name would smell as sweet -or as rancid
