Beasts and Gods by Roslyn Fuller

Author:Roslyn Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

NGOs as foreign policy instruments: AstroTurfing into eastern Europe and Central Asia

In extreme cases, professionally funded NGOs staffed by privileged workers don’t just limit themselves to international institutions, but come to dominate the political conversation in developing countries as well. In this scenario, NGOs that receive the bulk of their funding from developed nation governments and institutions become the official ‘voice’ of that country as portrayed in the sponsoring nation’s media. It is a misleading state of affairs when these NGOs do not actually enjoy grassroots support on the ground. This style of public conversation-hijacking by pushing sympathetic NGOs to the foreground is most common in South America and former Eastern Bloc countries.

For example, in Georgia, Moldova and the Ukraine (three relatively impoverished and unstable former Eastern Bloc countries) only one fifth of NGOs agree that their strength comes from their membership base. Similarly, in Kyrgyzstan, between 70 and 100 per cent of the budget of a typical NGO is provided by foreign donors and ‘the overwhelming majority’ of NGO officials recognize ‘that the accountability of an NGO to the donor is a top priority’.2 A study into NGO activity in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine concluded that:

[t]he elitist nature of NGOs is largely attributable to the fact that their main sources of funding are foreign. Western money allows NGOs to attract talent, but their full-time employees are more comfortable networking with Western embassies and various state agencies than holding town hall consultations and engaging with citizens. For example, following the 2009 electoral revolution in Moldova, NGO leaders met with foreign embassies and donors to consult over priorities, but no major public forum or debate was launched to discuss a national reform agenda.3

These organizations may well be doing good work (and then again they may not be), but they are hardly grassroots enterprises, and there is no clear dividing line between them and their various donors, who are themselves already powerful actors on the international stage. When foreign governments fund NGOs in developing countries and then insist that developing-country governments acknowledge these NGOs as special stakeholders in the national dialogue, far from enhancing citizen participation, this actually serves to subvert national sovereignty. And once again, it isn’t because it is necessarily in the interests of developed nation citizens to do so. When government-funded agencies set up NGOs in foreign countries like Moldova or Ukraine, not only do they tend to pay scant regard to the wishes and needs of ordinary Moldovans or Ukrainians, they rarely act with the blessing of their own citizens, who are often paying for these NGOs to operate.

In fact, private citizens tend to fund different causes to those their governments prioritize. In Ireland, for example, 60 per cent of funding for domestic non-profit organizations was received from the government. Thirty per cent of these funds went to health-related organizations, while international development organizations received 7.7 per cent of state funding, arts, culture and heritage groups received 5.6 per cent and environmental groups 0.6 per cent. The pattern of private donations was, however, quite different.

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