Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG8: Non-Governmental Organizations in CEE Author(s) Ana-Maria Grigore University of Bucharest Bucharest Romania Elbers Frank, Title From Local Service Delivery to Advocacy in the European Union: Are Romanian NGO’s Stretched Too Thin? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The "global associational revolution" (Salamon et al., 1999) of the late twentieth century has resulted in an expansion and change of the roles of non-profits in the landscape of global politics and governance. Our empirical and analytical research? will explore how this process has affected the civil society sector in Romania, based on an analysis of twenty national and international NGO’s operating in Romania. During the period January-March 2019, we will conduct structured interviews with the leadership of the selected NGO’s(based on the typology developed by Miles & Snow, 1978) and analyse reports to funders and other publicly available reports. We will also conduct (structured) interviews with a select number of international donors, journalists, policy makers and other area specialist about the perceived effectiveness and contribution to the public good of the NGO’s in question. While we expect that Miles & Snow’s hypothesis will be confirmed, and that in that respect non-profit and non-governmental organisations are no different from for-profit entities, we will emphasise the influence of the external environment and the impact of the global associational revolution: NGO’s increasing role in governance and increasing linkages to a (European) institutional constellation of policy bodies, government agencies and donors. This expanding role, however, puts a strain on capacity of NGO’s in Romania in the ever-increasing competition for limited funding and (human) resources. Being a mixed academic-NGO practitioner team we expect to add new insights to both the academic and public debate about the effectiveness of NGO’s and their role in contributing to the public good, public interest and services.
