Janine Wedel - Collision and Collusion - The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe

Given such institutional arrangements, then, it is not surprising that Central and Eastern E uropean NGOs often distributed Western perks to themselves and their peers on the basis of favoritism rather than merit. Those charged by the West with public outreach were often not equipped for that role.

Another important variance between Western NGO models and Eastern realities was the difference in attitudes and practices concerning trust in the workplace, especially in the early days of “transition.” Central and Eastern European groups often were unwilling to share information or otherwise cooperate with anyone who had not reached the status of personal friend. Sampson observes that “Westerners seem to be able to cooperate successfully even when they do not know each other at all, and in spite of having diverse political opinions, lifestyles and tastes. Put another way, work colleagues in the West can work well together on the job without ever becoming friends.” This ability to cooperate contrasted with the Eastern European NGOs he has observed, in which deep-rooted trust was a prerequisite to being able to work together. Along these lines, anthropologist Marta Bruno has observed the following:

The practice of bringing together in a workshop different groups of recipients who do not know each other can also have a boomerang effect. Individuals in post-socialist societies still tend to privilege those social relations determined exclusively through personal connections. Strangers are to be trusted only if they are linked by a common acquaintance who is also trustworthy. This system operates as much in the public and work spheres as it does in the private one. Unless western project workers have good and close personal relations with the recipients and therefore can serve as a guarantee of trustworthiness, it can be counterproductive to bring together previously unacquainted recipients. Given the usually limited amount of resources of aid projects, other recipients are seen as undesirable competition and the dominant attitude is one of suspicion. Furthermore, intricate cultural attitudes stemming from ethnic, social and gender stratification may also come into play and reinforce negative reciprocal feelings. These frameworks of social relations usually escape Westerners’ sensibilities, unless they are project workers with extensive knowledge of local cultures.83

Sampson adds that, to be successful in the new environment, NGOs had “to start realizing that the essence of democracy is not cultivating friends but ‘doing business’ with allies. This doing business is part of civil society in the market sense. Even market competitors who hate each other—mafia gangs, for example—can often find a common interest to do business together.”84

In the absence of sophisticated, well-conceived incentives on the part of donors to help build bridges among recipient groups, funding frequently inspired competition among groups, rather than cooperation, and served to reinforce existing hierarchies. Bruno has written that “Russians have accepted the ‘given’ of international aid and co-operation projects (whether wanted or not) and are weaving them into the complex system of patronage, social relations and survival strategies which are taking shape in post-socialist Russian reality.… Presumably involuntarily, donor agencies are offering, through development projects, new sources for reinforcing the elitist, feudal-type system of social stratification.”85

Anthropologist Hann has likewise concluded: “The focus [on NGOs] has tended to restrict funding to fairly narrow groups, typically intellectual elites concentrated in capital cities. Those who succeed in establishing good relations with a western organisation manoeuvre to retain the tremendous advantage this gives them. The effect of many foreign interventions is therefore to accentuate previous hierarchies, where almost everything depends on patronage and personal connections.”86

Another effect arises from dependence on foreign funding. With the outside donor as chief constituent, local NGOs are sometimes more firmly rooted in transnational networks than in their own societies. The Carnegie Endowment-sponsored study cited earlier noted that the dependence of local NGOs on Western assistance “often forces them to be more responsive to outside donors than to their internal constituencies.… Their dependence has the unintended consequence of removing incentives to mobilize new members and of fostering inter-organizational competition for grants that breeds mistrust, bitterness, and secrecy within and between organizations.”87

And so, while neglecting groups with laudatory goals and indigenous support, donors sometimes funded organizations that were not operating in the public interest, especially in the initial period of East-West contact.

THE GREEN JET SET

A case in point was the Regional Environmental Center. In 1989-90, Western donors targeted the environment as a top funding priority, not only for the well-being of Central and Eastern Europe but also for the benefit of Western Europe, which was near enough to be damaged by its neighbors’ nuclear power plants, acid rain, or polluted waterways. So Western funders, especially foundations and bilateral donors, supported the environmental movement, largely by funding NGOs both directly and indirectly.

The antecedents of the environmental movement were Hungary’s Danube Circle, Czechoslovakia’s Green Circle, and other groups in the region that had challenged communism as they fought for environmental causes. Strongest from 1986 to 1989, the “environmental movement” included many people who used it as a means to engage in activities against or outside the state.

Given the movement’s multipurpose nature, it was natural that, once communism fell, many of those previously involved in the movement, who now could pursue other endeavors unconstrained, abandoned it to do just that. A wave of environmentalists—leaders of the region’s environmental organizations—stepped into key government posts in Central Europe. There, many abandoned environmental concerns in the name of budget cuts and helped to institute the shock therapy and other austerity measures of the day.

Meanwhile, the Western environmental and aid communities underwrote the region’s elite environmentalists. In 1990, Austria, Canada, Denmark, the EU, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States donated some $20 million to the Regional Environmental Center, housed in a charming old silk mill in Budapest. Created as a result of the SEED legislation, the center had been conceived as a catalyst for activity throughout the entire region and attracted considerable donor resources. Its mandate was to develop institutional capabilities and outreach programs and to promote public awareness and participation.

Under the leadership of Executive Director Peter Hardi, a former communist, the center had weak links to the Hungarian government as well as to the region’s governmental bodies and environmental ministries. “An institution to give out money,” the Center awarded grants in ways that “divided the NGO community,” as István Tökés, an official in the Hungarian Ministry of the Environment, explained.88 Having virtually no agenda of its own, the Center disbursed money to favored environmental groups throughout the region, which were supposed to conduct studies and public outreach activities. Elena Petkova, a former board member of the Center, confirms that Hardi “failed to support any kind of mechanism to make grants competitive. He didn’t try to build capacity and there was no transparency. People got grants if they knew him or someone on the board.”89 Consequently, the Center fulfilled little of its public outreach mission, especially in its initial years.