Exhibiting nongovernmental organizations: Reifying the performance discourse through framing power

• Investigates how funders may exert power on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through the collection and arrangement of information required in grant applications.
• “Poetics and politics of exhibiting” are used to analyze one of the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA) grant application forms and surrounding documents.
• Analysis allows for an understanding of how the prescriptive arrangement of information constrains personalization possibilities and shifts the power of framing NGO representations into funders’ hands.
• From the study emerges a representation of NGOs as “financially inclined performers”, which aim to deliver results as defined by funders.
• Study illustrates how meaning creation, an “unobtrusive device”, is a constituent of funders’ disciplinary arsenal, which allows for reification of a political discourse that conceives of NGOs’ role as performers that deliver aid in a technical and narrow way – certainly not in an organic and adaptive way.

This article investigates the power of representation through a study of how funders may exert framing influence on NGOs through the collection and arrangement of information required in grant applications. We examine the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA) grant application process, especially the detailed blank forms it imposes on grant seekers and the extensive guidelines provided. Our focus is how the prescriptive arrangement of information constrains personalization possibilities and shifts, partially but significantly, the power of framing NGO representations into funders’ hands. Out of this process emerges a representation of NGOs as “financially inclined performers”, which aim to deliver results as defined by funders. CIDA is found to diffuse normative views on what NGOs ought to be and do, thereby constructing a sense of reality that privileges (economic) performance over social imperatives. Our study illustrates how meaning creation, an “unobtrusive device”, is a constituent of funders’ disciplinary arsenal, which reifies a political discourse that conceives of NGOs’ role as performers that deliver aid technically and narrowly – certainly not in an adaptive way. Although forms and guidelines do not constitute unequivocal manifestations of power, they are positioned to exert subtle and indirect influence, in our case in the name of neoliberalism.