Promoting Democracy in Postcommunist Ukraine

The Contradictory Outcomes of US Aid to Women’s NGOs

Bibliographic Data

ID19945845
AuthorsKateryna Pishchikova (0000-0002-3648-8736, corresponding author)
Year2010
Publication date2010-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenuePromoting Democracy in Postcommunist Ukraine (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherLynne Rienner Publishers (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9781935049821
OpenAlexW2564690972
ISBN9781935049821
LanguageEN
Citations received7

1 seemed evident but, surprisingly, had not been raised before: Why do these organizations have to register as "public organizations;" what are those "grants" they receive; how are they different from salaries or profit; who grants them and for what?Knowledge of English vocabulary was important for understanding the answers I received.However, those answers raised new questions.It turned out that the correct name of "public organizations" was "non-governmental organizations" or NGOs, that they had to be supported in the name of "civil society," and that "grants" were a part of the "assistance" that Ukraine was receiving to an unprecedented extent from various "donors" after it became officially independent in 1991.I was discovering a whole new world, in which the enchantment with the concept of "civil society" was as striking as the skepticism towards "public organizations" that I encountered in Ukraine.The "projects" and "grants" given to Ukrainian organizations were described by the donors as the most effective means to facilitate democracy in Ukraine, to ensure that the democratic change would be truly encompassing and long-lasting, and to make Ukrainian people more democratically minded.In Ukraine, however, these initiatives were mostly perceived as a peculiar money flow that was going to a small group of people on obscure terms.These initiatives were believed to be short-term, insufficient, and ineffective.The two sides of the story clearly did not match, and yet both foreign donors and "public organizations"/NGOs were speaking about the same "projects" and accountable for the same money.The discrepancy was so obvious that both sides must have been aware of it as well.This has brought me to the main puzzle of the book: Are the donors blind or do they just not care?Are the locals wicked or just plain stupid?How is it that both sides continue to do what they are doing?What are the mechanisms that enable the meaningful functioning of a civil society assistance discourse in Ukraine despite negative outcomes and wide-spread criticisms?This book takes seriously the theoretical assumptions of interpretative-constructivist approach.It holds that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between discursive and material realities or, to put it differently, between words and deeds.This book shows that the way Ukrainians and foreign donors talk about foreign assistance to civil society has an impact on what form foreign assistance as well as civil society supported by foreign donors take.Therefore, by looking at the language in use or discourse 2 as it is usually called in the constructivist literature, one can elicit a number of significant social and political processes and understand their nature.I tackle these questions by making a detailed inquiry into foreign assistance to women's NGOs in Ukraine by the United States Agency Notes 1 Samizdat is a Russian word for "self-published;" it is commonly used to refer to informal home-made publications of writers and essayists who were banned from being published in official state controlled publishing houses during socialism.2 Following Hajer, I define discourse as "an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices." 2 See Maarten Hajer

Democracy · Gender equality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Economic Issues in Ukraine · European Politics and Security · Gender Studies · Law

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