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Funding Empowerment: Lessons from the Balkans Jill A. Irvine

University of Oklahoma

Paper prepared for the European Conference on Politics and Gender,

Barcelona, 22-25 March, 2013

When all else fails, turn to the women. This appears to be the core of the Obama

administration’s latest peace-building effort in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East.

In the past two years, the Obama administration has promised well over $350 million for

women in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as it prepares to draw down resources in the area.

While this is a small proportion of overall aid, it represents an increasingly important trend in

foreign aid discourse. At the same time, the administration is searching for ways to support

women’s organizing as part of the Arab Spring. Increased funding specifically for women

reflects this administration’s attention to gender equality worldwide. It also recognizes that

women are integral to democratic transformations and post-conflict reconstruction. Secretary

of State Hillary Clinton and Ambassador at Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanie Veveer

have repeatedly stressed that women’s empowerment and inclusion are central to democracy,

peace, and stability. This is a sea change in American foreign policy and strategy.

Only two decades ago, policy-makers were largely oblivious to gender dynamics in

civil conflict. Ethnic violence and mass rapes in the Balkans changed that. Human and

women’s rights activism converged around efforts to foster peace. A solid case developed that

investments in women were investments in peace and democratic transformations. In the

second half of the 1990s, Western governments and international organizations made Balkan

countries a laboratory to test the idea that engaging women supports war-to-democracy

transitions. Women’s organizations, funded by USAID, were key players in the electoral

breakthroughs in Serbia and Croatia. The State Department’s Bosnian Women’s Initiative

became a model for women’s projects in other conflict zones. At one point, there were almost

150 local and international groups working on women’s issues in Bosnia and Kosovo.

But the outcomes were not all positive. Experience in the Balkans and elsewhere

suggests that just targeting women and providing piecemeal funding for local organizations

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and American and international NGOs will not accomplish the goals of creating a democratic

civil society or promoting women’s empowerment. Efforts were atomized and women’s

groups were beholden to the priorities of foreign donors. Local groups often failed to forge

alliances with each other or engage in the political process. Perhaps the most important take

home lesson: money alone cannot buy either change or equality. In fact, international

investments in women’s groups may have had the unintended effect of weakening local

efforts to promote change.

This paper, drawing upon over a decade of fieldwork, offers lessons from the

Balkans for funding women’s empowerment. Under what conditions, I ask, are

international assistance programs for women’s empowerment likely to succeed? After

almost two decades of research, this question remains highly contested in the literature on

gender and democratic transformations. Some studies point to the largely negative

impact of international assistance on women’s organizations, highlighting both problems

of implementation and conceptualization. According to these authors, such assistance

can weaken or discredit women’s groups in the eyes of the general public and cause a

fracturing of civil society as groups compete with one another for funds (Bagic ́ 2003;

Mendelson and Glenn, 2002; Ottoway and Chung 2002; Richter 2002; Hemment 2009;

McMahon 2003). Assistance is often tied instrumentally to larger political goals that can

distract from the task of women’s empowerment or tie women’s organizations to the

project of rolling back state services, a position most of their members oppose. Others

point to the support many activists express for donor funding and an appreciation of their

potentially positive as well as negative effects. Numerous studies highlight international

actors’ important role in providing financial and moral support in the struggle for

women’s equality (Corrin 2001; Fitzduff 2004; Jaquette 2001; Seidman 1999;

MacMahon 2003; Slapsak 2001). This view rejects the necessarily negative effects of

tying empowerment aid to larger political goals, arguing that in some cases what serves

donor interests can also benefit “the region and women in it” (Funk). Most agree,

however, that international assistance programs have resulted in numerous challenges and

unintended consequences. Given this mixed picture, at best, is it possible to conceive of

a more effective way to fund women’s empowerment? This is the question I tackle in

this article.

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The post-Yugoslav countries provide excellent cases for addressing this question

for at least three reasons. First, the violence in the Balkans defined important trends in

conflicts fueled by ethno-nationalist ideologies and characterized by ethnic cleansing,

high civilian impact, and violence against women. Second, the period coincided with an

explosion of NGOs, which structured women’s activism in important ways. Finally, the

war-to-democracy transitions in the Balkans defined intervention and assistance efforts

with an increased focus on women' empowerment and civil society development. The

funding models and programs developed there have been applied across a broad array of

circumstances in numerous countries around the world. They thus provide insight into

the conceptual framework in which these programs and models are embedded.

I focus, in my analysis, on US assistance programs, since the US was the single

largest donor to women’s organizations during the period I investigate, and because

funding women’s empowerment has continued to be a key element of US democracy

assistance efforts elsewhere in the world. I begin by arguing that international assistance

to women’s groups in the post-Cold War era grew out of a civil society development

approach. This essentially meant banking on NGOs for change. Historically, however,

social movements are the mechanisms through which disenfranchised groups have

obtained a voice and transformed societies. Sustainable peace and genuine improvements

for women require funding a women’s movement, rather than individual NGOs, and

international assistance should be focused on this task. But what elements of movement-

building are key?

Drawing upon social movement literature, I identify three areas of movement

building. Resource mobilization theories point to the importance of creating capacity,

cultural theories to the need for finding voice; and political process theories to the

necessity of building alliances. All three stress the necessity of acting politically to

promote fundamental political change. I then turn to scholarship on women’s movements

to posit strategic dilemmas associated with building capacity, finding voice, building

alliances and acting politically. Paying attention to how women’s mobilizing responds to

these dilemmas across cases will provide a framework for cross-case comparisons and

theory building. It will also provide a framework for devising better approaches to

international assistance programs for gender equality.

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Funding Priorities

When the conflict in Yugoslavia broke out in 1991, USAID and other American aid

agencies had already acquired decades of experience funding women’s programs around

the world through the development aid stream (Lancaster 2007). These programs had

emerged as a result of shifts in development frameworks, which were based on the

realization, promoted by gender women’s rights advocates and policy makers, that

economic development could not succeed without including women and that women’s

needs and priorities were often different from men’s (Antrobus 2005; Sen and Grown

1988), Nevertheless, these concerns and attention to women and gender more generally

had not crossed over into the humanitarian aid and disaster relief funding that the US

increasingly funneled to conflict zones around the world. Thus, when US humanitarian

assistance began to flow into the Balkans after the outbreak of war in 1992, a strategy of

funding women’s empowerment was not on the aid horizon. Rather, the office primarily

responsible for dispensing this humanitarian aid, the Office of Foreign Disaster

Assistance, directed relief at an undifferentiated category of vulnerable civilians

(Halterman & Irvine 2012).

All this began to change with the growing body of evidence that rape was being

employed as a wide scale and deliberate strategy for terrorizing the population and a tool

of ethnic cleansing. In a more explicit acknowledgement of the gendered dynamic of

wartime violence, USAID began to target aid to local women’s organizations, which

were responding to victims of gendered violence and dislocation. In 1993 it award a

$9,492,000 contract to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to disperse aid to local

groups attending to the needs of “women, children and other vulnerable groups”

(Database of Projects 1993-2007). Nevertheless, this aid remained a relatively minor

share of the overall disaster relief dispersed by the OFDA, which remained focused on

providing basic “humanitarian and returning/reintegration” assistance (Database of

Projects 1993-2007).

With the end of direct conflict, and the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in

1995, assistance priorities shifted. Aid was increasingly directed toward the task of

promoting war-to-democracy transitions in the ex-Yugoslav countries, particularly

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Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and after the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, of

Kosovo (Carothers 2005). As the OFDA wound down its central role, the primarily

agencies of USAID responsible for dispersing this aid were the Office of Transition

Initiatives (OTI), established in 1994, and the missions in the newly established

countries. The OTI, under its democracy and governance programs, focused on creating

the conditions for building stable democratic institutions, a responsible media and

judiciary, and a robust civil society (Carothers 2005). It was as part of this latter effort to

build civil society, that funding women’s organizations and women’s equality came to

play an increasingly important role.

Strengthening civil society through funding women’s empowerment became an

attractive proposition for a number of reasons. First, as one of the strongest forces in

civil society, particularly in areas of civil conflict where women’s organizations provided

crucial humanitarian aid, women’s organizations made good partners. As we have seen,

in Croatia and Bosnia, women’s organizations had already received US aid as a result of

their work with refuges and other victims of war. In 1994, OTI awarded an American-

based NGO, Delphi International, a $1,195,800 grant to foster women’s participation in

the development of civil society in the Yugoslav successor states” (Database of Projects

1993-2007). Delphi International continued to work on women’s empowerment through

its local affiliate, STAR, over the next several years. Second, US and other foreign

donors needed local partners with which to work, and women’s groups shared, for the

most part, their political agenda. In the Balkans, both the US government and women’s

organizations wished to see the repressive governments of Serbia and Croatia removed

from power and more diverse, democratically-oriented representatives elected to

parliament (Irvine 2007, 2012). Third, women were seen as natural “bridge builders”

across communities and likely to bolster the peaceful tendencies of civil society (Beloni

2008; Gagnon 2002). Based on this assumption, the Bosnian Women’s Initiative,

established in 1998, was directed increasingly toward facilitating refugee return since

women were viewed as most likely to foster reconciliation (Baines 2004). Funding

women would further provide a bulwark against the reemergence of “uncivil” society

(Belloni 2008) Finally, empowering women economically was viewed as a necessary

underpinning of the long-term development of civil society and democracy. As

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women’s organizations became increasingly linked to the project of strengthening civil

society, and thereby building democracy, funding for this purpose increased. Embedding

women’s programs in the civil society framework, however, resulted in a number of

negative consequences.

Funding Frameworks: Civil Society vs. Social Movements

The importance of civil society as a conceptual and practical framework for USAID

democracy assistance cannot be overstated (Belloni 2008, Corothers 2004, Bunce and

Wolchik 2010; Finkel 2007). Indeed, as democracy assistance programs took hold as a

response to the post-communist and post-conflict transformations, civil society

experienced a kind of renaissance in democratic theory and aid practice (Diamond 1994;

Lancaster 2007; Carothers 2004; Bunce and Wolchik 2010). For the purposes of this

discussion, I will draw upon existing definitions of civil society in order to examine the

ways in which it has structured aid and thus the activities of women’s organizations.

Civil society concepts, as they relate to this question, roughly fall into two categories,

what Foley and Edwards have called civil society one and civil society two. (Foley and

Edwards 1996). While civil society one originated in Eastern Europe as a kind of politics

of anti-politics based on Havelian notions of parallel structures, it is civil society two that

has formed the basis of assistance programs in Eastern Europe and elsewhere around the

world.

Civil society two is the neo-Toquevillian idea that a healthy democracy requires a

robust civil society, referring to myriad autonomous organizations and associations

between the household and the state. Most of these organizations are not explicitly

political; nevertheless they provide the setting for the proper socialization of citizens,

creating the values and practices necessary for a tolerant, engaged citizenry (Diamond,

1994). Civil society’s popularity in democratic theory and practice, and as a basis for

democracy assistance programs, increased when it was joined with Robert Putnam’s

notion of social capital. Social capital, Putnam argued, was germinated and multiplied

with the robustness of civil society, generating the conditions necessary for a healthy

democracy (Putnam 1995). Critics of this notion of civil society and its attendant notion

of social capital have pointed out that they posit an understanding of the political process

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that takes disagreement and contention out of politics (Foley and Edwards 1996; Kasfir

1998). Perhaps even more importantly, this understanding of civil society ignored the

role of social movements historically in expanding citizenship rights and pushing the

boundaries of inclusion (Foley and Edwards 1996; Minkoff 1997). Theorists who have

harnessed civil society to democratization aid have often conflated civil society and

social movements or simply assumed that that civil society promotion creates efficacious

social movements (Elshtain 2007; Kasfir, 1998).

Leaving aside the difficulties in defining civil society and determining what kinds

of civil society are necessary for a healthy democracy, democratic theorists are not

mistaken in their attention to creating the conditions for civil society to flourish.

Nevertheless, civil society itself has not theoretically or historically been the mechanism

through which disenfranchised or marginalized groups have obtained a voice. This has

been accomplished through social movements, what Tilly and Tarrow describe as

contentious politics, which through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have

progressively expanded citizenship rights and inclusion in the polity (2007). The

inclusion of women, effected through women’s movements and contentious politics, has

been no exception.

There are significant differences between what I call a civil society perspective

and a social movement perspective on democracy funding, although these differences and

their implications have not been explored adequately in the theoretical literature. The

discourse of civil society is one of stasis, of what the relationship between state and

society should be in order to maintain healthy democracies. Civil society actors are

usually understood as NGOs, which have the limited social and political aims of

recreation, service provision, education and advocacy. Most are not political in their

aims and serve narrowly defined constituencies. In the East European context, these

NGOs are funded by donors, who are in a position to set the priorities of the

organizations. In democracy assistance programs, strengthening civil society is usually

reduced to funding NGOs for short-term projects based on western models. The outlook

is one of policy effectiveness and operational efficiency. Rather than grassroots support

or constituents, these programs speak in terms of capacity and stakeholders.

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A social movement perspective, in contrast, focuses on the myriad organizations,

from small local groups to social movement organizations (SMOs) at the commanding

heights, to networks and coalitions with other actors inside and outside the government.

These actors are concerned with achieving fundamental social and political change and

embrace the language and values of transformational politics. Their modes of action are

as varied as their forms, from protests in the streets to interest groups at the capital. But

their means usually involve grassroots organizing and mass mobilization. Social

movements overlap with civil society, but they involve substantially different orientations

toward the role of women’s groups and other social groups during periods of political

transformation. Thus, “NGOs are neither movements nor surrogates for them” (Basu

2010). Merely funding women’s NGOs does not necessarily strengthen women’s

movements as vehicles of change. In fact, it may undermine them.

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Civil Society Funding Model and NGOization

The rise of the civil society perspective on foreign assistance, coinciding with an

explosion of NGOs on the international scene, resulted in many donors and activists alike

viewing NGOs as a “magic bullet” for achieving almost every goal (Hemment 2009, 52).

Indeed, in the Balkans as elsewhere, NGOs shaped important aspects of American policy

leading to military intervention, often in unacknowledged ways (De Mars 2005; Stoddard

2006). After the fighting ended, NGOs were seen as essential vehicles of education,

advocacy, and service provision. Assistance programs targeted women’s NGOs as a

vehicle to perform all three of these functions, tying them to the larger goals of

democratization and women’s empowerment (Walsh 2000). These programs, which have

mirrored assistance programs elsewhere in the world, particularly in post-conflict and

nation-building zones, have been criticized on both practical and conceptual grounds.

Critics highlight the negative consequences of relying almost exclusively on NGOs as the

recipients of funds and as the vehicles for change.

Sonja Alvarez first raised the alarm in the context of Latin America in the 1990s

about the negative impact of international assistance on women’s NGOs (Alvarez 1998).

A growing body of evidence since then, much of it linked to US assistance programs,

which have tended to focus heavily on strengthening civil society, points to a host of

problems related to what she called the “NGOization” of women’s movements. This

NGOization is reinforced by the civil society funding model, which is based on providing

grants to women’s NGOs for discrete, short-term projects. The shortcomings of the

current model of funding empowerment are by now well known.

The first set of problems has to do with the incentive structure, which creates

competition for scarce resources among women’s NGOs, thereby fracturing women’s

organizing. Numerous studies have documented the ways in which cooperation has been

undermined among women activists and organizations as a result of an influx of project-

based funds (Bagic ́ 2003; Mendelson and Glenn, 2002; Ottoway and Chung 2002;

Richter 2002; Hemment 2009; McMahon 2003). Moreover, organizations become

beholden to the wishes of their donors instead of their constituents. Current funding

practices often overlook efforts already underway by local groups and exhaust local

recipients who must spend a great deal of their time writing reports and preparing new

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proposals. The demanding and onerous reporting requirements along with time-

consuming and frequent grant applications sap activists’ energies, leaving them with little

time or energy to think strategically about women’s empowerment. Donors tend to favor

elite, urban women, who are not encouraged to maintain links with their rural

counterparts or even develop any grassroots support at all. At the same time, they often

fail to forge alliances with other political actors. Finally, donors often instrumentally link

NGO funding to larger political purposes such as refugee return, demobilization of

militias, or combating human trafficking, causing women’s organizations to shift

priorities suddenly or invest in projects outside their mission.

Conceptual criticisms of what I have called the civil society funding model point

to the neo-liberal and imperialist political projects to which it is tied. NGOization is

reinforced by this dominant model of funding, but it is driven by the larger neoliberal

project of restructuring the state and economy. In other words, NGOization is not an

unintended outcome but an essential tool for achieving larger political and economic

goals. By providing social services, women’s NGOs are implicated in the neo-liberal

project of trimming the state and cutting welfare services. In this manner, they become

tightly bound to a roll back of the very social safety network to which women’s equality

advocates are committed (Hemment 2007). Through its emphasis on volunteer work, this

model of funding NGOs has the further effect of removing women’s labor from the

formal market and rendering it invisible. Finally, in its emphasis on service delivery, neo-

liberal focus on empowering NGOs removes politics from the picture resulting,

ultimately, in the creation of “professionalized technical experts, in a contractual

relationship to the state, rather than autonomous organizations advocating political

change” (Squires 2007, 131).

The negative effects of the civil society model of funding women’s

empowerment appear well supported by evidence from the Balkans. This is perhaps best

exemplified by the Bosnian Women’s Initiative (BWI), which was launched by the

Clinton Administration to great fanfare in 1996 as the first assistance program for

women’s empowerment. It was exported elsewhere in the ensuing years. Administered

by the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the Bosnian Women’s Initiative

received $5 million dollars of initial funding, followed by matching funds from ADD.

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According to Clinton, the purpose of the fund was to provide a “training program” for

Bosnian women, since with so many men killed or disabled, the future of Bosnia “may

depend more than ever on women” (Baines 2004). From the outset, however, the BWI

was plagued with problems, not just of implementation but stemming from the funding

framework in which it was conceived.

First, the dispersal of funds to NGOs, beginning in the fall of 1996, created fierce

competition among women’s groups that undermined the emerging cooperation among

them. This cooperation was evident at the conference of women’s organizations held in

Sarajevo in June 1996 at which the BWI was announced, but it quickly eroded. (Baines

2004; Helms 2003) Second, although strengthening civil society was a major goal of the

BWI, the funding criteria were focused largely on small income-generating projects that

proved economically unviable and unsustainable (Benderly 2012). Indeed, women

themselves were often not the beneficiaries of these projects, which in any case provided

far too little funding to have any significant impact. Third, the BWI was used

instrumentally by the implementing agency of the UN to promote refugee return, on the

assumption that women were naturally peacemakers and could best be harnessed to this

task. Thus, the BWI was based on homogenizing and essentializing views of victimized

Bosnian women who were, as peacemakers, best suited to carrying out the pressing

political task of promoting reconciliation among the warring parties and a reversal of the

ethnic cleansing that had taken place through war (Helms 2003). In short, in the

assessment of several scholars, the BWI did little to contribute to the social, political, and

economic empowerment of women or the strengthening of their ability to promote

enduring change in women’s status (Baines 2004; McMahon 2003; Helms 2003). The

Rwandan Women’s Initiative and the Kosovo Women’s Initiative launched shortly

thereafter, based on the BWI model, similarly fell short of promoting real change.

This is not the end of the story, however. Despite the shortcomings of the BWI

and the civil society development framework, most women’s equality activists have

expressed support for funding from USAID and other donors and an appreciation of its

potentially positive as well as negative effects (Hemment 2007, Bagic, 2006).

Moreover, as we shall see, US assistance has not been uniformly unsuccessful. What is

needed, however, unless we are to give up altogether on the possibility of aid that can

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create an effective women’s movement, it is to reconceptualize our current models for

funding empowerment. We need, as one report on the impact of funding on women’s

NGOs in Bosnia concluded, ”a new strategic framework for conceptualizing international

assistance.” The social movement approach to funding offers an alternative.

Funding Women’s Movements

The extensive research on social movements can provide guideposts for structuring US

and other assistance programs. Three main approaches map the activities that are

necessary for creating and sustaining effective social movements. Resource mobilization

theory points to the process of creating capacity. This involves the resource

aggregation—material, social-organizational, and human—necessary to produce

collective action. Cultural theories of social movements stress identity formation and

issue framing, creating a voice that resonates with participants and populace alike.

Political process theories emphasize the importance of political opportunities and allies,

and the dynamics of coalitional politics.

I propose that creating capacity, finding voice, forging alliances, and acting

politically should be the central tasks of assisting women’s movements and funding

empowerment (See Diagram 2). But can this be done? Yes, although it requires an

important shift in thinking and priorities. And there are important pitfall to be avoided.

Movement-building raises strategic dilemmas for activists, to which assistance programs

must be attuned in order to support effective organizing for gender equality. Experience

from the Balkans also can tell us something about what works in this respect. Although

helping to build social movements is fraught with challenges, it is possible, and the US

government did in Croatia and Serbia.

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Creating Capacity:

Creating capacity as part of building a women’s movement involves paying attention to

material, human and organizational resources. Rather than simply funding project-based

NGOs, material resources should be directed toward long-term building of infrastructure

that is divorced from project outcomes. Sustainability is important, but it cannot come at

the expense of meaningful political activity. Rather than funding individual NGOs for

discrete, short-term projects, US assistance could more productively focus on building

networks and alliances. Individual NGOs competing for limited funds are not prone to

movement-building behavior. And as we have seen, this funding model creates a

dilemma for women’s rights activists and leaders, who must often choose between

pleasing donors and building their grassroots base. The organizational mechanism most

suited to collective action is a network structure, which builds linkages across the often-

cavernous urban-rural divide. Moreover, networks are better suited to coalitional politics,

an essential task of effective women’s movements. USAID’s funding of the Croatian

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Women’s Network and the Ad Hoc Coalition is a good example of this approach. The

Network and the Coalition, comprised over one hundred women’s organizations from all

over the country, acted effectively to promote political liberalization and significantly

increased women’s political representation (Irvine 2007).

Creating capacity also means supporting good leaders. While a civil society

funding model concentrates on cultivating urban, English-speaking contacts, a social

movement approach will support effective, popular leaders who can both inspire and

reflect the desires of their grassroots base. Too often genuine, local women activists have

been passed over for funding because they were not conveniently placed for donors to

work with. According to one activist in Kosovo, ‘When UNMIK came and employed

women, employment was never based on a gender perspective but based only on whether

she was beautiful [and] knows a little bit of English […]We have many women

professionals. We have many educated generations [of women], but UNMIK was never

based on this’ (‘KWN Monitoring Implementation’ 2009: 46). Equally problematic has

been the tendency to equate leadership-training programs with actual leadership skills.

While it is important to provide such programs, they cannot substitute for the skills

acquired through actual political organizing and struggle. Indeed, many women feel that

the skills they are required to learn in such programs simply involve more effective ways

to fill out forms for donors (Bagic 2006). Capacity should never be confused with

compliance.

Finding Voice

A second priority of movement-based funding must be to support local efforts at finding

voice. Building collective identities and framing issues that can shape and inspire action

are essential to effective women’s movements but often challenging in war to democracy

transitions and other conflictual settings (Luciak 2001; Okeke- Ihejirika and Franceschet

2002; Razavi 2001; Vincent 2001). In the Balkans, as in many other regions, the

effectiveness of women’s organizations was hampered by ethno-religious cleavages that

often eclipsed their ability to forge a collective identity (Bunce 2000; Einhorn and Sever

2003; Irvine 2003; Okeke-Ihejirika and Franceschet 2002). A main point of tension was

whether and how to express the intersection of ethnic and gender identities. This

resulted, for example, in fierce disagreements over the understanding of rape during the

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violence in Croatia and Bosnia as primarily an outgrowth of ethno-nationalist ideologies

and practices or a reflection of patriarchal ideologies and practices (Benderly 1997,

Korac 1998). Overcoming this challenge was crucial to the subsequent tasks of

identifying interests and framing issues.

US assistance can encourage women’s organization to find their voice by funding

conversation. Assistance could be directed productively to conferences and meetings that

bring women together to find their own common interests and formulate their own issues.

For example, USAID, through STAR, funded numerous regional conferences where

women from across the region could come together to grapple with the complexities of

gender and national identities and identify the issues most important to them, including

one conference in Belgrade in 1994 to which westerners and international donors were

explicitly barred (Benderly 2012). Funding should also be provided to activists traveling

to international conferences such as the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status

of Women, where “meta” framing issues—such as women’s rights as human rights—are

debated. Conversation is essential to the process of finding voice, and it should be a

funding priority.

In funding women’s movements, the social movement perspective alerts us that

US donors and assistance should avoid the twin pitfall of what Judith Squires calls

assimilationism and essentialism (Squires 2007). Women’s activists are likely to use the

framing devices their donors employ, and these too often focus on assimilationist and/or

essential messages. Assimilationist frames are often employed instrumentally as a useful

tool to sell funding empowerment to potentially unsympathetic publics. These frames

focus on the economic rational for integrating women into the workforce and the public

sphere, arguing that they are no different from men in their skills and aspirations and will

therefore benefit economic development. Essentialist messages, in contrast, focus on

women’s essential difference and, especially, their unique abilities as bridge builders and

peace-makers. While the first approach renders women invisible and undermines the

basis of collective identity, the second renders them vulnerable to conservative,

fundamentalist, and nationalist discourses that focus on women’s victimization.

Assistance programs should be directed toward providing opportunities for women to

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negotiate and articulate collective identities and issues, free from donor frames of

irreducible sameness or difference.

Forging Alliances

Forging alliances is the third critical component of building an effective women’s

movement capable of creating sustained and fundamental change. The civil society

funding model has historically neglected this aspect of funding empowerment, both

theoretically and practically, preferring instead to focus on individual, autonomous

organizations. Political process theories of social movements, in contrast, stress the

necessity of finding allies among other social movements, political parties, transnational

networks, media, and state actors. Thus funding should be directed at promoting

engagement with and by women’s organizations on terms that do not compromise their

fundamental issues and interests.

The issue of autonomy versus engagement is one that has long vexed women’s

movements and organizations. Historically, women’s movements have tended to emerge

out of other social movements—abolitionist, civil rights, national liberation, peace, etc.—

as women have experienced discrimination within them. Women’s movements have,

however, also frequently cooperated very closely with other social movements, and have

been subjected to their goals and leadership (Beckwith 2000). A similar tension has also

been present in their relationships with political parties, as they have struggled with the

potential irrelevancy of exclusion and the potential risk of subordination to the political

goals and strategies of party leaders (Dandavati 2005; Friedman 2000; Beckwith 2000;

Kunovich 2003; Razavi 2001; Waylen 2003; Baldez 2003). Relations with state actors

have also been fraught with tension as women’s movements attempt to avoid being

“contaminated” in their dealings with the state at the same time that they attempt to

engage the state on behalf of their issues and priorities (Jaquette and Wolchik 1996; Basu

2010).

Funding women’s movements means funding productive alliances, but can this be

done? The answer to this question is yes, but it rarely has been. Still, the cases of

Croatia and Serbia in the run up to the 2000 elections are instructive. In both cases, the

US government was seeking to build opposition movements that could topple through

elections the semi-authoritarian governments of Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan

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Milosevic. It was, therefore, mindful of the need to create viable alliances across sectors.

Women’s organizations were encouraged to engage with labor unions, human rights

organizations, election monitoring organizations, political parties, and state actors, all

with the goal of building an effective opposition movement. These actors were, in turn,

encouraged to incorporate women’s organizations, through the Croatian Women’s

Network and Ad Hoc Coalition [of women’s organizations] in their work. More

concretely, USAID-funded organizations such as National Democratic Institute,

International Republican Institute, American Center for International Labor Solidarity,

and STAR supported the work of women’s sections in the labor unions, women’s

sections in political parties and their cooperation with the Croatian Women’s Network

and the Ad Hoc Coalition (Irvine 2007). These alliances proved key to effective political

action on behalf of gender equality. The attention to building an oppositional movement

in both cases resulted in coalitions and alliances that connected women’s activism

centrally to all other important political actors. This is a funding strategy that could be

usefully employed elsewhere.

Acting Politically

According to the social movement model of funding, the purpose of assistance is to

empower women to effect fundamental political change. It assumes that such change will

likely involve extensive mobilization, transformational goals, and demands on the state.

Yet frequently, this is neither the intent nor the outcome of USAID funding, despite the

rhetoric of empowerment. The US government must be willing to risk the possibility of

contentious politics if it really wishes to support gender equality more than rhetorically.

The main issue here is the extent to which the US supports the state structures and

political leadership in the country to which assistance is being delivered. Where the US

supports the state or acts as the state, as in cases of intervention such as Kosovo and

Bosnia, a depoliticizing model of civil society funding serves the purpose of mitigating

potentially destabilizing political challenges. Where it is opposed to the state, it may be

more likely to pursue funding approaches that resemble what I have called the social

movement model. The women’s empowerment funding models pursued in Croatia and

Serbia, on the one hand, and Bosnia and Kosovo, on the other hand, illustrate the logic of

these two different approaches.

  18  

In Serbia and Croatia, in the lead-up to the 2000 elections, the US government

adopted an approach to funding women’s empowerment that illustrates the main features

of the social movement model. The reasons for adopting this approach were primarily

instrumental in that it formed part of a larger strategy to remove the ruling regimes

through an “electoral revolution” (Carothers 2004; Bunce and Wolchik 2010). Women’s

organizations were seen as an important part of this oppositional movement and they

were funded with this in mind. Aid was directed at increasing organizational capacity

through networks and coalitions such as the Croatian Women’s Network and the

Women’s Network in Serbia. These networks linked activists in urban areas with citizens

in rural areas and united them around the common goal of promoting political

liberalization and gender quality. The Ad Hoc Coalition’s electoral platform, endorsed

by the main opposition political parties, the Coalition’s election slogan demanded that

men “share responsibility in the home and power in the state (Belić and Bijelić, 2001).

USAID funders paid particular attention to creating strong alliances among women’s

organizations and activists and political parties, trade unions, election monitoring

organizations, citizens, and human rights groups. A similar movement-building, funding

model was executed in Serbia, where women’s organizations and activists were funded to

strengthen capacity, voice, and alliances. This is not to say that the women’s movements

in these two countries decided on the same political strategy; they did not largely due to

the different political opportunities they encountered. While Croatian women’s

organizations opted for a strategy of inclusion in the political process, Serbian activists

took to the streets (Irvine 2012). Nevertheless, in both cases substantial US funding

bolstered the women’s organizing that was already underway and ensured that it would

be directed toward building women’s movements capable of achieving fundamental

political change.

Contrast this social movement model with the civil society funding model the US

government adopted in Bosnia and Kosovo. In both these cases, the US government was

centrally involved in military intervention and the subsequent process of war to

democracy transitions. Along with other international actors, the US government exerted

a substantial measure of control over the newly emerging states. Perhaps for this reason,

it was less inclined to support significant opposition to the state from societal actors,

  19  

including women’s organizations. In any case, the civil society model of funding

women’s empowerment, with its strong NGOizing effect, served to discourage

mobilization against the state and demands for fundamental political change. This was

particularly true in Bosnia, where women’s organizations were often created by

international and US funders. Moreover, as we have seen, the major funding initiative

for women’s empowerment, the Bosnian Women’s Initiative, was used for the larger

political purpose of promoting refugee return, ultimately subverting its purported goal. In

the UN administered province of Kosovo, existing women’s organizations and networks

were ignored in favor of newly created NGOs, which initially received the lion’s share of

funding from the Kosovo Women’s Initiative (Baker and Haug 2002).

In short, women’s activists often face serious strategic dilemmas about whether

they will act in the streets, in the government or both. Myriad strategies exist for

achieving fundamental change and they will occur on multiple levels. But only one of

these two models of funding I have discussed here supports meaningful political action

and fundamental political change to bring about gender equality. US assistance must be

directed at creating capacity, finding voice and forging alliances that will make such

action possible, and allow local groups to choose their own strategies for achieving

change.

Applications and Conclusions

In her speech to the Women in the World Conference in March 2011, Secretary of State

Hilary Clinton reiterated a strong message of the Obama administration. “I believe

women’s roles and rights are at the forefront of everything we should care about and need

to be doing,” she stated. Indeed, funding women’s empowerment has been an increasing

funding priority of every administration since George H.W. Bush and is likely to

continue in the near future. Yet, a growing body of evidence from the Balkans and

elsewhere suggests that the impact of these funding programs have been mixed at best. It

is time, therefore, to reexamine the assumption on which this aid has been based.

In this paper, I have argued that the dominant model of funding women’s

empowerment, what I have called the civil society model, is deeply flawed in its

conceptualization and implementation. It has often resulted in the NGOization and

  20  

fragmentation of women’s activism, potentially weakening women’s efforts to organize

on behalf of gender equality. Major funding initiatives, like the Bosnian Women’s

Initiative, were harnessed to other political goals that ultimately diverted attention from

their initial purpose of promoting women’s empowerment. The tendency under the civil

society funding model to fund NGOs for short term projects, often for the purpose of

providing services the government cannot or will not provide, has proved inadequate as

an approach for supporting women’s empowerment.

A social movement model provides a possible alternative. Movement building

alerts us to the need to build capacity through networks and grassroots mobilizing across

urban-rural divides. It draws our attention to the importance of issue framing, which can

only occur through a process of conversation and debate involving multiple actors across

local, regional, and international spaces. Funding conversation free from donor advice or

direction is essential to the necessary element of finding voice. Perhaps the most

important task of building women’s movements is creating alliances with a multitude of

social and political actors. Alliances are necessary for effective politics, but they cannot

come at the price of subordinating women’s essential goals. Funding women’s

movements involves creating conditions for such alliances to be forged, and the way in

which women’s organizing was funded in the lead up to the 2000 breakthrough elections

in Croatia and Serbia provide a good starting point for how to do this. That USAID and

other donors should take their cues from local activists should by now be obvious, but

how to do this is not always clear. Thinking in terms of funding movements provides a

good place to begin.

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