The Politics of Sub-National Authoritarianism in Russia by Vladimir Gel'man & Cameron Ross

Author:Vladimir Gel'man & Cameron Ross [Gel'man, Vladimir & Ross, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, History, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780754678885
Google: Hieo-nBzPc0C
Goodreads: 9758614
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-15T12:38:12+00:00

NGOs and the Policy Implementation in the Regions

Another form of NGO participation in regional political processes is their involvement in the implementation of regional and local social policies. Traditional NGOs are more active in this field, and some of them originated in the Soviet period. They include such organisations as veteran councils, societies of the disabled people, youth and women’s councils, and the like. They served as representatives of target groups of social policies and play the role of distributional coalitions of recipients of material and non-material benefits of these policies. Since the regional and local authorities should communicate with their clients in the implementation of social policies, interest in cooperation between these NGOs and authorities is reciprocal. Their participation in social policy implementation ‘at the outputs’ is achieved through regional and municipal grants to NGOs and the involvement of NGOs in the implementation of social policy programmes, including their serving as contractors of regional and local authorities.5

Participation of NGOs in the implementation of social policies in a city or a region is usually carried out by a fairly stable set of NGOs that operate within the relevant sectoral policy networks,6 or more or less stable advocacy coalitions. These networks differ from region to region in terms of their constituent organisations. Apart from the traditional NGOs that continue to operate from the Soviet era, coalitions may include new grassroots NGOs which deal with social issues or the representatives of target groups themselves (for instance, organisations of single mothers or parents of disabled children). Sometimes, these networks are driven by social problems (for instance, provision of shelter-care facilities for homeless children) or they are established top-down by authorities who are interested in finding alternative methods of implementing social policies. The number of NGOs involved in social policy networks, and the quality and scope of their involvement may vary in different regions and municipalities.

The inclusion of NGOs in the implementation of social policy at the regional and local levels is not mandatory in Russia. Since Soviet times, regional and municipal authorities have implemented these policies on their own and initially they did not intend to deal with NGOs. The active involvement of a broader range of NGOs, especially of those new organisations that arose up in the 1990s and the 2000s, is a new and relatively uncommon phenomenon.

Why have regional and local authorities changed their approach and encouraged a more active involvement of NGOs at the ‘output side’ of the political system? A number of case studies have shown this will depend to a large extent upon how receptive regional or local authorities are to developing new and more efficient methods of implementing social policies. For example, in Perm, the inclusion of NGOs in the implementation of social policy began in the 1990s when businessmen took control over the city’s governance. Entrepreneurs occupied a majority of seats in the city Duma, and Yurii Trutnev, a local business leader, won the mayoral election in 1996. Compared to the previous administration they were more

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