CHALLENGES FOR CSOS LINKED TO FINANCIAL DEPENDENCY ON FOREIGN D0NORS. A case study of anti-corruption CSOs in Ukraine

Abstract

Over the last 25 years anti-corruption policies have become inherent to the goal of building good governance within the field of development aid. Local anti-corruption civil society organisations (CSOs) in the countries of the former Soviet Union are important actors for demanding social accountability and legal reforms from their respective governments. They are predominantly financed by foreign state authorities and private foundations which creates external dependency relations and institutional weakness for these organisations. This thesis evaluates how the challenges linked to foreign funding in Ukraine relate to the theories and identified problems of foreign funding to local civil society actors via interviews and survey report analysis of anti-corruption CSOs in Ukraine. The results show a large gap in terms of expertise, management, networking and attraction of donor money between the ’professionalised’ capital-based Ukrainian anti-corruption CSOs and the CSOs in smaller countryside cities mostly run by volunteers. In contrast to this discrepancy, the dependency on foreign funding remains the same for all CSO actors in Ukraine. In other words, financial resource diversification continues to be the main challenge for civil society actors.