"Despite such strong ideological rationale for civil society's political work, we have moved to a space where our aspirations and rhetoric are political, but praxis and practice are apolitical," Amitabh Behar, the interim executive director of Oxfam International, writes in an article from 2020 for India Development Review. Behar attributes this depoliticisation to the advent of funded organisations, particularly internationally funded, working in the framework of a heavily restrictive regulatory system coupled with a gradual shift towards a more corporate way of functioning and a lack of commitment of organisations to the "systems approach" where "change in one aspect of society cannot be achieved in isolation of the larger social, economic, and political system in which it operates." This essentially means that organisations are only providing transient response and relief rather than being conduits of transformational change that overturn entrenched systems of inequalities.
Aiman Haque, ‘Charitable Charade’, Caravan
