Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations

Extract

Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations, Sarah L. Henderson, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 229.

In this well-researched and provocative book, Sarah Henderson asks to what extent Western aid can facilitate the emergence of civil society in countries where civil society is domestically weak. Through an in-depth study of Western aid to Russian women's organizations, she argues that foreign assistance has dramatically affected NGO development in Russia, but not always in expected or positive ways. On the one hand, she finds that external funding “made a tremendous difference in improving and increasing the short-term financial viability, organizational capacity, and networking skills among recipient groups” (9). On the other, she argues that foreign aid contributed to at least four pathological developments within the NGO community. First, funded groups tended to copy the aid agencies' top-heavy and bureaucratic organizational structures. Second, funded groups lacked grassroots constituencies because they shifted their policy agendas to reflect aid agencies' preferences rather than objective domestic needs. Third, foreign aid encouraged the development of a “civic elite” among the domestic NGO community, exacerbating the differences between those groups that received funding and those that did not. Finally, the competition for foreign aid dollars encouraged uncooperative behaviour among funded Russian NGOs rather than bridge building and information sharing. She argues that these problematic unintended consequences were the result of avoidable mistakes in the foreign aid process, and states bluntly that “NGO development is not synonymous with civil society development, and the development of one does not necessarily imply the advancement of the other” (11).