The Scarcity Mindset
Why NGOs Struggle to Share What They Know, and What to Do About It
In a crowded funding landscape, information is power. Methodologies developed over years, contact networks built through painstaking relationship work, intelligence products that took months to produce: these are the assets that differentiate one NGO from another. They represent competitive advantage in a sector where competition is not metaphorical but existential. Organisations that fail to win the next grant do not just lose a project. They lose the capacity to exist.
Understanding that context is the starting point for any honest conversation about why NGOs in the conservation and counter-trafficking space are often so reluctant to collaborate, and why the scarcity mindset that drives that reluctance is both rational and corrosive
The Self-Perpetuating Cycle
The logic of the scarcity mindset is internally consistent. When survival depends on winning the next grant, protecting your methods, your contacts, and your data is not paranoia. It is prudence. The instinct to guard what you have built is understandable.
The problem is that this instinct actively perpetuates the conditions that created it. When organisations refuse to collaborate on joint funding proposals because they fear the other partner will receive the credit, or the funding, or the recognition, the result is a fragmented ecosystem of small, underpowered individual projects competing for the same limited pool of money. Meanwhile, the collaborative consortiums that could access exponentially larger multilateral funding, the kind of envelope that no single organisation could reach alone, are never formed.
“That mindset actually feeds the conditions that create it. We have a fragmented system of small individual projects competing for a really limited pool of money, rather than a collaborative consortium that could be winning orders-of-magnitude larger multilateral funding.”
– Christian Plowman, Senior Advisor, Counter-Trafficking and Environmental Crime, NGO Intel
The scarcity mindset does not protect organisations from scarcity. It entrenches it.
The Free-Rider Problem
Collaboration that does form is not automatically productive. One of the most damaging patterns in coalition and consortium settings is the emergence of free-riding: organisations that benefit from shared intelligence products, analytical work, and collective reputation while contributing little or nothing to their creation.
This dynamic is familiar to anyone who has worked in law enforcement, where rivalry between agencies, between different units within the same force, between national and international bodies, is a persistent operational reality. In the NGO world it is equally common and equally destructive. Free-riding breeds resentment. Resentment kills the collaboration. And when the collaboration dies, everyone loses access to the collective intelligence it was generating.
Demonstrating Vulnerability First
Breaking the cycle requires someone to move first. The strategy that has proved most effective in practice is demonstrating openness and transparency before asking for it in return.
This means sharing data and methodology openly. It means giving credit visibly and publicly, including credit that might otherwise have accrued to your own organisation. It means proving, through consistent behaviour over time, that your approach to shared intelligence is not extractive: that the information others contribute will be used to produce shared value, not to advance a single organisation’s position.
“If you want organisations to trust you with their intelligence in particular, you have to prove that what you’re doing with their data is not extractive. There has to be an impact or result coming out of it, and it’s not for selfish reasons.”
– Christian Plowman
Reciprocity tends to follow demonstrated trust. It rarely precedes it.
Finding Non-Competitive Ground
A complementary strategy is identifying the areas of collaboration where competition is structurally absent. Events, workshops, shared training programmes: these are spaces where no individual organisation has a funding claim over the output, and where the benefit of collaboration is obvious and broadly shared.
Large multi-institutional funding streams serve a similar function. When the total envelope is large enough, and the requirement for genuine partnership is built into the funding criteria, the competitive dynamic shifts. The incentive to collaborate becomes stronger than the incentive to compete, because the funding is not accessible any other way.
A Cultural Challenge as Much as a Strategic One
The scarcity mindset is not just a strategic problem. It is a cultural one, and cultural change is slower than strategic change. There are deeply embedded attitudes towards collaboration and information sharing in many parts of the conservation and counter-trafficking sector that reflect years of operating in an environment where trust was costly and competition was constant.
Shifting those attitudes requires sustained demonstration that collaboration produces better outcomes, that the risks of sharing are manageable when the frameworks governing that sharing are clear and transparent, and that the funding landscape rewards cooperation rather than punishing it. That shift is underway in parts of the sector. It is not yet universal. And the organisations investing in it now are building the credibility and the relationships that will define the most effective counter-trafficking work of the next decade.
NGO Intel is backed by Futurum Risk and delivers open-source intelligence, screening, and monitoring services to NGOs operating in South East Asia and Africa. Learn more at ngointelligence.com