Transnational Policies of Emancipation or Colonization? Civil society promotion in post-communist Albania

Abstract

The thesis discusses whether the western aid policy of Civil Society Promotion (CSP) in postcommunist Albania constituted a policy of colonization with its direct penetration of the local public sphere or one of emancipation that pluralized the local and the international public spheres and created opportunities of transnational redistribution. It confronts the academic analysis of CSP with the debates emerged in the Albanian public sphere and looks at the reasons why the three different strands of denunciation of CSP as colonization identified (the problem of control, that of the technocracy and finally at the heuristic value of western categories) do not reflect the reception of the policy in the Albanian public sphere. The dissertation reconstructs the different phases of CSP’s policy making in Albania and discusses why, after the initial welcoming of the policy, its outcomes in terms of growth of local NGOs have been widely considered unsatisfactory. What emerged from my inquiry was that the main criticism towards CSP that was raised in the Albanian public sphere was that its real beneficiaries turned out to be local NGO representatives themselves while society at large did not really benefit from the foreign support in the field due to its standardized way of dealing with the recipient’s context. The thesis discusses the reformulation of the western policy making by local NGOs in connection to the post-communist troubled transformation. It confronts the different critiques to CSP with the efforts done by Albanian NGO to emerge and be recognized as civil society experts, civic innovators, and cultural mediators. The work concludes that CSP faces a circular problem: it requires a functioning local public sphere to be critically appropriated by the recipient public sphere but when it is mostly needed it is unlikely to work.