The NGO movement in the Netherlands exhibits a fairly high degree of organisational structure. It is a dynamic movement because NGOs initiate and lobby for changes in society and adapt to society's ever changing demands. NGOs create new and adaptable ‘survival’ strategies such as mergers with other NGOs. The following chapter deals with the institutional and private NGOs involved in the sustainable development debate in the Netherlands.

In the 1960s fundamental changes took place in western industrialised societies. In the Netherlands major non-governmental movements came to play an important role in the sustainable development debate, like the environmental movement, the development movement and, to a lesser extent, the peace and the human rights movement. Other social movements that arose from the sixties are the women's movement and the anti-nuclear movement.

In those years these movements were part of a countervailing culture that opposed the government and its traditional values. Nowadays, Dutch NGOs cooperate with the government and aim to participate in power. Their ideas have gradually been accepted by the government and are now on a substantial level implemented in governmental policies. The number of subsidies assigned to NGOs by the Dutch government shows that government policy and NGO-opposition are now inextricably linked in a typically Dutch consensus model. The fact that the Ministry of VROM is a significant funder of the environmental movement as well as the fact that the development movement receives major financial support from DGIS (see Chapter 1) and from the National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (NCDO, see Chapter 5), underlines the above mentioned.

As a result of the government subsidies several Dutch NGOs have become professional and highly institutionalised organisations with a lot of influence. Yet they are financially dependent on the government. Therefore some NGOs prefer to rely on private fundraising. In the old Dutch consensus-tradition however, the institutionalised NGOs maintain a great deal of their independence, which enables them to observe government policies critically and undertake action according to their own insights. Both kinds of NGOs can thus be regarded as highly autonomous.

It was the Brundtland-report in 1987 that made the term sustainable development popular. This report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland, weaves together social, economic, cultural- and environmental issues and global solutions. Its recommendation for “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” became the starting point for a worldwide change in thinking about development.

Nowadays, most development organisations agree on the principles described in the Brundtland-report, but the implementation of all the different aspects of the report into workable sustainable development-projects is still a matter of extensive debate. Therefore, different NGOs follow different strategies. Whether an NGO starts its activities from an environmental- or from a development point of view is quite often a practical decision. The classification in this chapter into environmental organisations on one-hand and development organisations on the other, is for this reason somehow arbitrary.

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