Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 25th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview X. Non-Governmental Organizations in CEE Author(s) Barbara Lehmbruch University of Uppsala Uppsala Sweden Title “Real” Agents of Change or Aid Parasites? Womens’ NGOs and Gender Policy Networks in Georgia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Barbara Lehmbruch Abstract The development literature, in particular its “critical” incarnations, has long looked at NGOs in an ambiguous way, in common with its approach to the “local ownership” discussion in general. That development should be determined by host countries is a consensual view both of scholars and policy workers. Where it becomes controversial is once “host countries” are disaggregated. Effective local ownership arguably needs strong coordination at the host country cabinet level, yet this is exactly what “critical” scholars have opposed as cementing national power relations. NGOs in this view occupy a peculiar in-between position. On the one hand, they can embody the ideal of participatory development. On the other hand, they are a step away from bottom-up social activism and in the worst case, are artificial creations due solely to donor funding. This fundamental ambiguity is also present in the literature on women’s NGOs in transition. That there is such a sizable body of literature is because, quite simply, women’s NGOs play an outsize role in gender politics in many post-socialist countries: There are many of them in comparison to other policy areas, and they play a significant role vis-à-vis other actors within the policy area. There are several reasons for this: - Gender politics have occupied a fairly insignificant place in local governments’ policy agendas, thus promoting the rise of NGOs. - At the same time, on the supply side womens’ NGOs filled a vacuum that had developed in the course of transition given a) the underemployment of women in general and b) the dismantling of earlier state-sponsored quota systems, in particular womens’ representation in party and legislative bodies. Coverage of women’s NGOs and their role has often been quite critical yet by no means uniform. There are two principal but somewhat different lines of criticism. a) Women’s NGOs sell out movement feminism; they are too pragmatic, too much oriented towards practical policy work and too hierarchical b) Women’s NGOs are artificial creations. They do not reflect bottom-up demands but – largely to do with the practicalities of funding – take their priorities from external donors. This can be seen, it is argued, in the outside importance of policy goals such as anti-trafficking (an item regularly considered as unimportant in local opinion surveys) on NGOs’ agendas. Given the weakness of bottom-up feminist movements in the region at large, it is the second point of criticism that arguably is of the greater importance for studying gender regimes in the post-Soviet area and the Caucasus more specifically. The networks of relations between local societies, NGOs and donors thus become particularly vital. This paper, and the underlying qualitative case study, focuses on selected policy areas – from domestic violence legislation and counseling to more narrowly institution-building endeavors such as gender budgeting and the battle for parliamentary womens’ quotas. It goes beyond existing studies (typically restricted to interviews with NGO activists themselves) to examine the web of relationships between local administrations, local NGOs, as well as donors and international NGOs. This includes looking not just at vectors of funding and of discourse, but also at career patterns (many gender activists at least in Georgia fluidly transition between NGO, donor and, for example, legislative positions) and the position of NGOs in local policy-making and service delivery.
