Yet globalization had double-faced effect on the region

NON-GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN RUSSIA’S REGIONS:

A MISSING LINK OF POLITICAL NETWORKING?

Andrey S.Makarychev

Introduction

As seen from a Western perspective, the strengthening of non-governmental institutions is important for democratic development for several reasons. NGOs help to rationalize domestic politics where a large number of regional actors compete with each other and are also important means for assessing feedback and measuring the effectiveness of assisting Russia in its transition to democracy.

Globalization weakens the capacity of administrative institutions in the regions to supervise economic and social developments. It makes non-state institutions more internationally oriented.

Numerous NGOs are among the most significant institutions in those regions that are developing their long-term international strategies. This might be explained in terms of primordial importance of ecological, human rights and humanitarian matters for Russia’s globalization drive.

What is peculiar about NGOs networking?

Networking combines two different principles – competition and cooperation. Its effectiveness might be explained in terms of facilitating access to key resources and knowledge, lowering the risks, and speeding up innovations. Networking leads to growing integrity within specific social and economic segments, be it business community or the world of NGOs.

Networking strategies of NGOs include important social dimensions (information sharing, education, use of intellectual capital and know how, appearance of joint values and shared ethics, interlacing of responsibility, etc.). The networking relations are primarily about mutual agreements, including informal ones, and trust. In comparison to market operators, networking actors do refuse to apply strategies that would undermine the interests of their partners.

Which NGOs are most important for Russia’s integration with Europe?

Ecological NGOs

Environmental groups were quite instrumental in raising the issues of ecology, including clean water supply, forestry maintenance, safety of nuclear waste, etc. Russian “Greenpeace” activists monitor regularly the compliance of regional authorities with ecological standards and are quite successful in drawing public attention to ecological dangers.

Yet in the Kremlin many still believe that environmental agencies should be treated as tools of foreign intelligence. This makes the work of ecological, human rights and information-related NGOs risky and troublesome. The most widely publicized case was the involvement of the Norwegian Bellona organization into the public campaign to support the former Russian military officer, Alexander Nikitin, who helped to uncover data about the leakage of radioactivity and water contamination in naval bases located only a few dozen kilometres from the border of Norway.

Ethnic and religious NGOs

Ethnic, religious and cultural actors tend to develop their outward strategies regardless of administrative and territorial borders. Cultural exchanges are about networking by definition, they develop beyond state and administrative borders.

Ethnic and religious institutions are important actors linking Russia to the world. They were quick to develop their international ties, using a variety of informal channels. For example, the Komi Republic has established “special relations” with Hungary, since both belong to the Finno-Urgian culture.

Western religious institutions have a certain impact in many regions. “In the eastern regions, such as the Lower Volga, the Urals and Siberia, Catholicism is developing easily. Today practically all the clergy are foreigners”[i]. The Lutheran “Church’s missionaries have achieved success working among the Finnish-speaking peoples of the Volga Region and the north-eastern European part of Russia who have never been Lutherans – the Mordvinians, Udmurts, Mari and Komi”[ii]. Yet the expansion of the foreign missionaries into Russia’s heartland provokes harsh criticism by the Russian Orthodox church which appeals to the federal government to roll back the influence of overseas religions.

Non-governmental think tanks

Academic and other professional exchanges have become an organic part of the daily functioning of regional NGOs. Soros Foundation, British Council, IREX, Peace Corps, Unesco and other institutions are represented in the most advanced Russian regions, contributing to the creation of transnational “epistemic communities” of experts, scholars, consultants, teachers and journalists. The social activities of non-governmental community groups often challenges the governing elites and intellectually changes old assumptions and practices.

Academic actors possess their own resources for becoming global actors. First, many of them are islands of free political discourse and liberal thinking. These organizations often wish to become actively involved in policy prescription and in program implementation and evaluation.

Second, information resources are important. Academic NGOs are gateways to the cyberworld.

Third, cooperation with foreign partners makes Russian provincial NGOs more independent financially owing to grants and technical resources. This is an important measure to prevent brain drain and form a new generation of Russian regional leaders.

All these efforts are undoubtedly geared towards integration of public policy research into the international milieu.

NGOs and Globalization

Plugging into the global world has to start with domestic changes within regional milieu. Russia’s road to Europe should not be paved exclusively by administrative structures. Living in the global world presupposes greater weight of horizontal, networking relations in all spheres of regional life. The more influential and resourceful are NGOs, the media, business associations, professional communities, the faster and more effective the integration with Europe ought to proceed.

These are basically networking actors that foster liberal agenda and pluralism in Russian western provinces. Many of them are in the vanguard of region’s global moves, since their experiences correlate with the “global networking” concepts widely implemented in the West.

To avoid oversimplification, we should not treat absolutely all NGOs as strong promoters of globalization. For example, in media and academic communities we can easily find nationalistic and protectionist attitudes. A significant part of regional business associations is ostensibly critical to joining WTO because of the fear to loose competition with strong international contenders.

Yet despite these reservations and fears, the very nature of non-governmental actors operations makes them a part of global networking. They are pioneers of community based development initiatives (including education, project support, technical assistance, and institution building) that promote open society agenda and democracy in their regions. The networking actors are in most cases the leaders of public opinion. Most of networking actors are more efficient and resourceful in comparison to their administrative counterpart.

Obstacles for NGOs

Several basic obstacles might slow down the NGOs operations. First, they are not always applauded in official policymaking circles, and frequently receive negative administrative feedback. In many regions NGOs are sharp opponents of regional or municipal institutions, especially in such spheres as human rights protection, ecology, media. Lots of regulations are being imposed by regional public authorities in response to the perception that the NGOs are in violation of the public good.

Each time state actors and NGOs have to interact, multiple conflicts arise, because administrative structures are very reluctant to share their powers. Thus, the interaction between the official authorities and the nascent “third sector” is minimal. This is a disturbing point, since a better quality of the international activities of Russia’s border regions might be reached only with a deeper involvement of NGOs, public groups, parties and other non-state actors.

Second, the communication infrastructure is weak. Internet access is complicated by policies of local authorities to charge customers for local calls, which has a negative effect for students, scholars, NGO volunteers and other information consumers with modest incomes.

Implications for the West

There is a significant impact from abroad in the so-called “third sector”. International and global institutions promote three types of domestic change in Russia: near-term policy (incentives for specific political actions); medium term (empowering special social and political groups), and long-term (attitudinal) change[iii].

Till now international NGOs have not encouraged their Russian counterparts to engage in the political process[iv]. Yet there is growing understanding that assistance programs should not remain of purely “technical” nature, they have to tackle political issues as well. Civic organizations supported by the West might become “important resources for alternative local politicians and tools for creating more effective constituencies in the future”[v].

The problem of finding the right balance between collaborating with NGOs and official institutions is increasingly important. On the one hand, the rise of civil society institutions is a prerequisite for the steady integration of Russian Western regions into the European milieu. On the other hand, the Western countries face the necessity of having levers to influence regional administrations and incite their ambitions as autonomous international actors.

To find a compromise between these two strategies, the Western institutions declare that they are interested in close cooperation between Russian official authorities and grassroot NGOs. Western foundations usually tend to integrate resources of regional or municipal administrations and civil society institutions. For example, US Eurasia foundation has sponsored several projects of this kind aimed at raising public participation of private business organizations in the North-West regions of Russia.

The problem is that many foreign donors seem to have “more money than ideas”[vi]. Some experts claim that in many fields of technical assistance there is no serious and comprehensive analysis of the work done by foreign institutions and its effectiveness. No comprehensive account of failures was accomplished so far, mainly because of the fear that such a report might provoke harsh criticism in the West and question the basic political assumptions of Western engagement.

There is also a lack of coordination between Western institutions. “Without that, the array of presently available intergovernmental venues will only aggravate the lack of clarity as to Western means and objectives”[vii].

More specific recommendations might be made as well.

1. Foreign institutions should not treat regions as unitary actors. What is needed is more profound look at different “agents of globalization” such as NGOs, media, professional unions. Each of them pursue individual strategies of switching to the global world and therefore should be tackled differently.

2. Foreign actors have to be more explicit about their possibilities, explaining their methods and resources as applicable to the region. They ought to think about integrating their social and professional interests in various fields of regional life (education, environment, volunteering, gender issues, fundraising, campaigning, etc.). Potential of local alumni of numerous international exchange programs need to be recalled for the sake of bringing new expertise in regional reforms. Activists of foreign NGOs could more frequently come to the regions and publicly discuss the issues of globalization in wider audiences (educators artists, writers, parties activists, social workers, etc.).

3. To activate the involvement of wider social and professional layers in international exchanges, European governments might insist on including different NGOs in regional delegations coming to various international forums (presentations, seminars, exhibitions, etc.). This will contribute to the opening of new international perspectives for local NGOs. Such issues as spatial development, subnational integration, inter-ethnic relations, borders and security, and others might be debated and tackled together by ad-hoc task forces of both local and international specialists.