The political economy of NGOs and information sharing

To a large extent, information sharing is what nongovernmental organizations (NGO) do, and the costs of sharing information are falling dramatically. Joining politics and economics, a paper builds an analytical framework to illuminate how these falling costs are affecting information-intensive NGOs in Latin America. Examples describe the various information-sharing outputs and inputs of nonprofit, NGO production. It is argued that the participatory activity of NGOs affects both political and economic realms, and that as the costs of sharing information fall, NGOs will be a more powerful link in the changing balance between states, markets, and civil society.