The third major design decision is a decision about the type of institutions that should actually be entrusted with carrying out the field and policy studies. These are the organizations from which the Local Project Coordinators (LPCs) are drawn. The nature of this project strongly suggests that these should be reputable, well-qualified and established NGOs situated in the countries selected.

National NGOs are increasingly important as intermediaries between international development assistance agencies and local peoples. Many of them have experience of policy and advocacy work, research and implementation of development projects.

Participation and empowerment are two key themes of the project's process and outputs. The project should be capable of leading not only to policy reforms but should initiate or strengthen a process leading to sustainable livelihoods, and should be capable of entering a second phase where tangible benefits accrue to local populations in terms of sustainable livelihoods. In this, well-established national NGOs as implementing agencies are capable of setting up projects and establishing a participatory management structure and durable relations with communities, in a way that may be more difficult, for example, for individual consultants, government or university departments, research institutions or international agencies.

Such a process can also act as a capacity building exercise of the national NGOs themselves, enabling them to become more effective in-country institutional promoters of ideas and practices leading to sustainable development, and it is expected that such capacity building would be within the scope of operations of the sponsoring organization.

A short and useful guide to the selection of NGO partners is the World Bank's Working with NGOs (World Bank, 1995 37-42). This includes some useful general guidelines not specific to the Bank, such as gaining an overview of the NGO sector as a whole, establishing selection criteria, and the selection process. Experience in developing country NGO selection indicates much appropriate expertise is available, including some low-profile NGOs whose work is not well known to international development agencies. The natural tendency to concentrate on a few high-profile NGOs who have established reputations with international agencies can be corrected by the simple antidote of some preliminary research.