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Scholars and practitioners of international development often note the use of ‘development buzzwords’: terms that represent hot topics in the field. Buzzwords characterise a development issue and imply elements of possible solutions. This article analyses the prevalence of these words in development discourse, asking who among donors, major nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), or academics adopts buzzwords earliest and uses them the most. We also analyse how these actors use buzzwords–whether buzzwords represent new ideas or essentially repackage old concepts. The article compares the prevalence of buzzwords among three bodies of text published since 1990: social science journal articles on NGOs; World Bank annual reports; and the annual reports of BRAC, Save the Children, and World Vision. Using topic modelling and keyword searches, we trace how the terms ‘reproductive health,’ ‘gender,’ ‘participatory development,’ and ‘accountability’ ebbed and flowed over these literatures. We find suggestive evidence against ‘donor-driven development’: buzzwords appear first in academic literature and the annual reports of NGOs, followed by the World Bank. We also find evidence that international conferences and emergent health crises influence buzzword use. We conclude that buzzwords’ function and fates vary, with some losing priority, others losing substance, and yet others persisting as multivalent concepts.

A growing number of researchers study the laws that regulate the third sector and caution the legal expansion is a global crackdown on civil society. This article asks two questions of a thoroughly researched form of legal repression: restrictions on foreign aid to CSOs. First, do institutional differences affect the adoption of these laws? Second, do laws that appear different in content also have different causes? A two-stage analysis addresses these questions using data from 138 countries from 1993 to 2012. The first analysis studies the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and constitution-level differences regarding international treaties’ status. The study then uses competing risk models to assess whether the factors that predict adoption vary across law types. The study finds that given ICCPR ratification, constitutions that privilege treaties above ordinary legislation create an institutional context that makes adoption less likely. Competing risk models suggest different laws have different risk factors, which implies these laws are more conceptually distinct than equivalent. Incorporating these findings in future work will strengthen the theory, methods, and concepts used to understand the legal approaches that regulate civil society.

Scholarship and practitioners interested in civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world have drawn attention to the growing set of laws—both restrictive and permissive—governing CSO activities. To date, however, there have been limited efforts to typologize these regulations which hinders the ability to analyze their emergence and effects. This article seeks to move scholarship toward a coherent framework by first, introducing a broad typology of governance, formation, operations, and resources provisions that allows for a systematic study of CSO laws and policies across contexts; and second, proposing four ideal-types of regulatory regimes, rigid-conservatism, bureaucratic-illiberalism, permissionless-association, and legitimized-pluralism. These regulatory regimes are political institutions that consist of multiple laws and constitutional protections that govern and protect civil society. The article theorizes the effect of each ideal-type regulatory regime on CSOs’ organizational ecology. To provide a concrete example, I apply the typology to the case of Kenya to show how its regulatory regime has changed incrementally over time. Methodologically, the article uses an iterative, inductive review and analysis of academic articles, book chapters, and practitioner reports contributing to our understanding of the laws and policies that regulate CSOs, or what I call CSO regulatory regimes.