Embedded Activism 2.0: Re-shaping the Space for Civil Society in Russia and China

Abstract

NGOs have been seen as an integral part of civil society and a necessary feature of democratic transition. It has been argued that depoliticised NGOs in China ‘embedded’ in existing political structures would eventually bring about democratic changes through incremental actions, as they did in post-Soviet Russia. Both countries, however, recently witnessed the shrinking of political and legal space for public participation, especially for foreign-funded civil society organisations. This article analyses the impact of the NGO laws on civil society in Russia and China to update the embedded activism hypothesis. It draws on empirical data to describe the strategies that the NGOs use to adapt and how the future of the sector is perceived by young people in both countries.     

‘The Foreign Within’: State–Civil Society Relations in Russia

Abstract

The development of Russian civil society is linked to authoritarian government, fear of ‘colour revolutions’ and the ‘sovereign democracy’ that legitimises state control of civil society. This article acknowledges the narrowing room for manoeuvre of contemporary Russian civil society and discusses NGOs’ practices in the context of government pressures, the politicisation of transnational connections and the increasing geopolitical tension surrounding Russia. It describes the localisation and depoliticisation of Russian NGOs as well as their disruptive practices, and explains how narrowing civil society identities inform the self-governing of NGOs. Finally, it argues that seeing Russian civil society in simple dichotomies further narrows these identities.     

Civic Environmental NGOs,Civil Society,and Democratisation in China

This paper examines the potential role of civic environmental NGOs in China's democratisation. Based on interviews with 31 NGO officials, the paper examines the origins, structures, and functions of civic environmental NGOs in China. It also examines how various political and resource constraints have shaped their development. While having made progress in organising educational campaigns and specific conservation projects, civic environmental NGOs have been less successful in influencing government decisions and official behaviours. Most recently, some NGOs have made limited progress on these fronts by maintaining a largely non-oppositional stance towards government and by utilising various formal and information channels for influencing government decisions. NGO leaders will have to negotiate with different party-state entities in defining their precise roles in the political process.     

Losers’ Consent or Non-Voter Consent? Satisfaction with Democracy in East Asia

In recent times non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangladesh have witnessed massive growth in size, budget and scale of operations. They enjoy growing support from international donors and operate outside the direct control of the government. Their handling of the massive funds aside, increasing involvement of NGOs in economic, social and at times political spheres has given rise to widespread concerns about their accountability including their relationships with the government, donors and the community. This article examines and analyses various dimensions of NGO accountability in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence from the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)—two of Bangladesh's largest and the most successful NGOs—the paper argues that NGO accountability in Bangladesh has been more rhetorical than real. It shows that while formal accountability measures are in place, they suffer from a range of inadequacies and shortcomings. Consequently NGO accountability has remained weak and ineffective in relation to major agents such as the government, donors and the clients. The article further shows that some of the recent developments, such as the proliferation of NGO operations, government organisation (GO)–NGO collaboration and the growing involvement of NGOs in commercial activities, have imposed further limitations on their accountability to key stakeholders.     

Varieties of Authoritarianism: The Organization of the Military State and its Effects on Federalism in Argentina and Brazil

While much has been written about democracy and democratization, far less attention has been paid to the institutional organization of authoritarian regimes. Scholars have focused on the causes, economic policies, societal support, intra-elite conflicts, or human-rights violations of authoritarian regimes. More recently, political scientists have also studied the role of elections and legislatures on the survival of authoritarian regimes. However, the very different ways in which authoritarian regimes, and military regimes in particular, organize the government, occupy the state apparatus, and modify the country’s political institutions have largely gone under-theorized. This essay contributes to fill in this void by analyzing how the last military regimes of Argentina (1976–1983) and Brazil (1964–1985) organized power within the state and the legacies of such organization on the institutions of federalism. The essay argues that variation in the organization of the state under the military regimes accounts for the divergent origins of post-developmental decentralization, which in turn explains the contrasting evolution of intergovernmental relations in each country. The article contributes to the recent literature on electoral authoritarian regimes by showing that elections and legislatures matter not only to regime survival but also to policy outcomes.     

The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China,Singapore and Australia

The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democracies in terms that the latter wanting to replicate some political practices or even norms in these non-democratic regimes? In this article, we engage recent works to examine this question in relation to how Australians perceive the political example offered by China and Singapore. Focusing our analysis on several prominent polls conducted recently by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, we suggest that at present there is little evidence of a causal impact of the rise of authoritarian powerhouses such as China and Singapore on how Australians view democracy at home. Through these case studies, this article sheds some light on the theoretical as well as practical questions about the inherent impediments of authoritarian diffusion in consolidated democracies.     

Trust in Government: A By-Product of NGO Intervention in Public Policy

This article develops a theoretical rationale for the role of the rising number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), acting as independent agents, in influencing the risk exposure of governments to the loss of trust. In this article, trust is based on government performance consistent with citizen expectations. This performance-expectation connection is a concept in theories of democracy, trust, responsive government, and good governance. A role of the NGO in influencing trust in government is proposed centered on bringing government performance and citizen expectations into alignment.     

Public perceptions of non-governmental organisations in Serbia,Bosnia & Herzegovina,and Macedonia

The article examines the relationship between NGOs and the general public in Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Macedonia. This relationship is often perceived as troubled. Focus group findings, however, suggest that ordinary people's attitudes towards local NGOs are rather more nuanced and that quite a few people would like to join an NGO themselves, if given an opportunity. NGOs should therefore make more effort to tap into this potential, by providing more and better information about their activities available to the general public and by being more inclusive, thus enhancing both NGO legitimacy and future sustainability in the region.     

Hegemony,Politics and Ideology: the Role of Legislation in NGO–Government Relations in Asia

In the wake of debate on the ‘New Policy Agenda’ of good governance and the increasing prominence of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in public service delivery, serious questions are being asked about the role of NGOs in development, their accountability, their relationships with donors, with the state and with their beneficiaries. As southern NGOs receive increasing amounts of funding from donors and northern NGOs, their profile is being raised, prompting government response. The nature of legislative responses of governments to increasingly high profile NGO communities range from open hostility and suspicion, to indifference. National legislative frameworks are neglected in the literature, yet they may profoundly influence the accountability, legitimacy, organisation and vision of local NGOs as well as the way northern NGOs can operate in a country. The article illustrates the potential for conflict over legislation on NGOs but also important opportunities and benefits, maintaining that legislation is necessary, because it can act as a catalyst to spark and focus debate on the role of NGOs, the extent to which they legitimately represent civil society, to whom they are accountable and how they can be protected. Open, balanced negotiation between stakeholders is necessary to avoid conflict and focus discourse on NGO and government roles and accountability. Governments, donors and NGOs each have a role to play in shaping NGO legitimacy, ensuring their upwards and downwards accountability.     

Beyond Authoritarianism: The Conceptualization of Hybrid Regimes

This paper appraises the state of the field on hybrid regimes by depicting the tensions and blurred boundaries of democracy and authoritarianism “with adjectives.” An alternative conceptualization and ordering of regimes are subsequently introduced using a configurative approach. Rather than place regimes on a linear continuum from authoritarianism to democracy, it highlights the multi-dimensional arrangements possible for the construction of regime types. The configurative approach also provides an analytically useful way to measure and integrate hybrid regimes into our classificatory schemes. As a result, it helps alleviate the conceptual confusion in the literature and contributes to a discussion of hybrid regimes beyond the framework of authoritarianism. The paper concludes by presenting a list of all hybrid regimes in the world between 1990 and 2009 identified with this method.     

The post-cold war predicament: A conclusion

The 1997 Asian economic crisis discredited the international discussion about ‘Asian values’ in Pacific Asia, replacing it with a globalised ‘good governance’ discourse. The financial breakdown undermined claims by Asian autocrats that government should be based on authoritarian ‘Asian values’, not ‘Western democracy’. Yet, seven years later, authoritarian regimes in the region are flourishing while the new democracies flounder. Why have dictatorships, not democracies, prospered politically since the Asian financial crisis? Pacific Asia began as an ‘imagined community’ of developmental dictatorships, making authoritarian development the ‘original position’ against which democratic governance is judged. While the demise of ‘Asian values’ contributed to the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, it did less harm to authoritarian regimes in more economically developed Malaysia and Singapore. The US‐led anti‐terror coalition provided several authoritarian rulers in Pacific Asia with welcome support from the West, while allowing them to weaken internal opposition. The new democracies, by contrast, faced international pressures to combat terrorism, often arousing local protest. Finally, middle class‐based reformist movements have risked destabilising the region's new democracies in the name of good governance.     

A client-community assessment of the NGO sector in Uganda

Using original data from client-community assessments, we examine motivations in the Ugandan NGO sector. In general, client-community satisfaction with NGO interventions is high, even though some NGO staff are viewed as unresponsive, underskilled, or self-serving. We find evidence that NGOs endeavour to redress the balance between rich and poor, although more remote communities suffer neglect, possibly for cost reasons. NGOs are less inclined to maintain a permanent presence in more remote and poorer client-communities, which impacts negatively on their assessment scores. We also find evidence that NGOs too often operate in the same location, resulting in some duplication of effort. Finally, results indicate that community participation enhances satisfaction.     

Institutionalizing from the Middle: the Impacts of Provincial Legislation on Rural Grassroots Democracy in China

Nominal democratic institutions under non-democratic regimes vary across countries. This study intends to advance our understanding of such institutions by exploring the relevance of one aspect of the authoritarian regimes, government hierarchy. Focusing on village-level democratization in China, we investigate the intermediary role of the provincial level governments in shaping the variant outcomes of grassroots democracy across the country. Through an analysis of a national sample, we find that divergent provincial legislative interpretation of central policies is a key determinant of public access to power and democratic governance of village-level governments. Our finding suggests that authoritarian states can employ various institutions to gather information, accommodate local variations, and thus contain potential intra-government disagreement.     

Authoritarian legality and informal practices: Judges, lawyers and the state in Russia and China

To participate in the global economy authoritarian states are pressed to offer international business a legal order that protects the interests of investors, customers, and sellers, but the creation of a modern legal order threatens to undermine the leaders’ control of public life. An increasingly common way to resolve this dilemma, I argue, is developing formal legal institutions that appear to meet world standards, while using informal practices to maintain control over the administration of justice when needed. In this paper I show how the governments of post-Soviet Russia (with its hybrid or competitive authoritarian regime) and the fully authoritarian People’s Republic of China as well, have used this approach in their relations with judges and defense lawyers in their respective countries. The analysis underscores the utility of investigating informal practices along with the reform of formal legal institutions, especially in the context of transition.     

Classifying Political Regimes in Latin

This article is about how political regimes should generally be classified, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945–99 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes. This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine-grained measure would require.     

The Strategic Choices of NGOs: Location Decisions in Rural Bangladesh1

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play an increasingly important role in the delivery of public services in developing countries, but little systematic evidence is available about their strategic choices. We develop two stylised accounts of NGO strategies: one in which pragmatic and organisational concerns determine location decisions, and another in which charitable motivations are the principal determinants. We then use data from the 1995 and 2000 rounds of the Bangladesh Household and Income and Expenditure Survey to analyse location decisions of NGO programmes established between those two sample years. Whether disaggregated by sector of work or mother organisation, the data show that the net change in NGO programmes in a community was not related to indicators of community need, that NGOs established new programmes where they themselves had no programmes previously, and that they did not avoid duplicating the efforts of other NGOs. Overall, the analysis is consistent with an account of NGO choices in which a concern for broad coverage significantly affects NGO choices.     

Economic policy elites and democratization

Is the authoritarian potential of policy elites a mortal threat to the consolidation of democracy in Latin America? This article suggests that in the context of democratic transitions, significant variations may exist in the performance of technocratic roles. In most countries in the region, elected governments faced the crisis of the 1980s by retaining markedly technocratic and exclusionary styles of policy-making. In Chile, a highly technocratic form of authoritarianism was succeeded by a novel pattern of pragmatic cooperation between technical and political elites. Democratic institutions were reestablished while a strong economic team enforced coherence and continuity in economic policy. Historical and institutional factors are used to show that Chile may now be nearer the democratic pole than other “hybrid” democratic-authoritarian regimes in the region.     

Receive Grants or Perish? The Survival Prospects of Ugandan Non-Governmental Organisations

This study examines survival patterns in a large, representative panel of Ugandan non-governmental organisations (NGOs) between 2002 and 2008. It finds no evidence that more effective or more altruistic NGOs have a greater likelihood of survival. The main determinant of survival appears to be access to grants, and NGOs without grants struggle to survive. An investigation of the grant allocation mechanism suggests that effectiveness does not increase an NGO's likelihood of receiving a grant. Grant allocation appears to be neither fair nor effective, but rather to be awarded on the basis of habit rather than merit: once a grant has been allocated there is a strong tendency for it to persist. The odds are stacked against small NGOs that have not previously received grants. A picture emerges of two parallel NGO worlds: one where revenues are small, variable and hard to come by and survival is not very likely, and the other where revenues are high, more stable and more accessible and survival is more likely. The study suggests it may be difficult for an NGO to move from the former to the latter.     

Unpacking the unequal representation of Northern and Southern NGOs in international climate change politics

Limited research has been done on non-governmental organisation (NGO) heterogeneity and its representation in global governance. Using the example of international climate change politics, we demonstrate that Northern and Southern NGOs tend to pursue different perspectives which are very unevenly represented in international climate change negotiations as NGOs from the Global North still constitute the large majority of NGOs taking part in these negotiations. In contrast to more hopeful outlooks, NGOs, hence, do not automatically contribute to a more democratic and legitimate global governance.     

Dissecting the Attitudes of Political Science Students Towards Democracy and the 2004 Elections in Indonesia

Students’ attitudes towards Indonesia's transition from an authoritarian era to democracy varied from strong support for the democratic transition to nostalgia for the authoritarian era's strong leadership and economic prosperity. A sample of 317 students from three Indonesian universities was asked to rate the importance of political, economic, legal and social democratic principles. In addition to concerns about corruption, economic decline and security, students differed significantly centring on the importance of legitimate elections, representation, tolerance, accountability, human rights and gender equality. The majority of students were pessimistic about the elections; paradoxically some students optimistic about the general elections rated democratic principles the least important. After discussing the implications, political attitudes about democracy and elections were related to cognitive consistency and dissonance theory.