The Belgian NGO landscape and the challenges of the New Aid Approach: dealing with fragmentation and emerging complexities

Belgium's Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO)-sector embodies some of the country's most distinctive characteristics. Two of its main features are the affiliation of many organisations to one of the societal pillars and the divergence of the NGO-landscape on the different sides of the language border. A high degree of fragmentation is the result of these traits, which manifests itself internally in a scattering of small organisations and externally in a dispersion of NGOs' aid in the south. Past attempts of the bilateral aid agency to alleviate this ineffective situation have only been partially succesful. Currently however the aid effectiveness debate is increasingly putting pressure on official and private aid actors to rethink the current practices of the non-governmental channel. Conflicting tendencies influence this debate, and in this chapter we aim to identify the elements that push the advance for a more effective Belgian NGO-sector, and those that possess the potential to obstruct it.