After the initial boom of the first few postwar years, NGO leaders began to worry about the survival of their organizations. There were constant troubling rumors that donors were leaving BiH and funds were drying up. Some of this was true, as humanitarian aid agencies and others, including Medica Mondiale, turned their attention to the next crisis zones, first in Kosovo and then Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. However, the major intervention agencies did not close their offices in BiH, though their representatives began to argue that the number of NGOs in the country—which they had done so much to create was too high for the size of the population. Only the fittest organizations would survive, and the struggle favored those with the right connections and skills, including knowledge of English, to produce fundable project proposals
Medica Zenica enjoyed full funding from its German founders for years, a time that allowed the group’s members to build up their expertise and work out their political and professional stances. When German funding dwindled, the Bosnians were forced to hone their proposal-writing skills so as to garner funds from other sources. As mentioned above, they were not always fully successful, and the NGO has struggled to stay in existence. Its members saw a need to reach out to government institutions if they were to succeed in realizing their goals.
This cooperation improved their powers of advocacy and their public visi- bility in ways that had a direct positive impact on the lives of women sur- vivors of violence, many of whom did not belong to the educated elite.
At the same time that women’s NGOs have turned to the state in their quest for sustainability, donors have also shifted their attention and funds to the state, as they look for exit strategies or seek to uphold standards of the European Union that make the state responsible for providing certain social services, such as those addressing gender-based violence.
First, as I have discussed in this essay, what was treated by major intervention agencies as one category the NGO was actually a variety of organizational forms with very different modes of activity and visions of the groups’ roles in society. Whereas intervention agencies expected all NGOs, and especially women’s NGOs, to act as agents of social transformation, many women’s NGOs were focused nominally on such issues only because they either had or hoped to attract funding to work in those areas. Women did not necessarily see their groups as political actors or agents of social change; rather, as in the case of those operating along the aktiv žena model, they saw the organizations as apolitical social outlets for their members, mutual aid societies, or service providers for the more vulnerable members of society that is, as mitigators of the effects of postwar and postsocialist hardships.
Second, precisely because of this diversity of forms, it is too much of a generalization to condemn NGOs altogether. Certainly, many women’s NGOs were ineffective, short lived, coopted by state interests, or turned into professionalized service providers with little or no involvement in social or political debates. But being an NGO did not necessarily mean an organization could not have a political edge or take a cautious stance toward involvement with the state, as the handful of Bosnian NGOs like Medica/Infoteka show.
Furthermore, we cannot assume that either the intentions or the effects of all donor policies were neoliberal or even upheld the interests of West- ern governments. Furthermore, if we con- sider the European Union as a major Western donor and policy maker, we see in the case of women’s shelters that it shifted its focus from NGOs to the state: even though women’s NGOs had begun the only existing shelters, EU standards now dictated that this was the responsibility of state institutions and channeled funds for such projects away from NGOs. In the case of BiH, it must therefore be acknowledged that most of these NGO women would not have become activists at all had it not been for foreign intervention.2