Advocacy NGOs in Poland: from democracy's playground to its battlefield

• In Event: The backlash of the civic space in populist regimes

Abstract

An authentic and autonomous civil society has proved indispensable for both democratization and development. Yet, there has been an ongoing divergence within the academia’s ‘parallel’ researches (Lewis 2015) of NGOs and non-profits, international and national contexts. These unhelpful silos may have inadvertently made vulnerable especially ‘democratising’ NGOs. Furthermore, the post 9/11 security-development nexus (Simpson 2007) was used as a pretext to introduce legal restrictions on foreign funding for local NGOs working in human rights and environmental issues in over 60 countries, thus constituting ‘backlash against the liberal international order’ (Bromley et al. 2020). On the other hand, cultural polarisation and the corresponding political phenomenon of populism contributed to the worldwide growth of an ‘illiberal pillar of civil society’ (Ekiert 2020, 9) also in Poland.
The recent theoretical concept of transcalar advocacy (Pallas and Bloodgood 2022) grasps the new constructive responses of advocacy NGOs to these domestic and international crises. Following Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine and the corresponding revamp of the Cold war international order, it becomes imperative to study how democratising NGOs function in the era of populism, authoritarianism and reignited imperialism. This paper seeks to address three pertinent questions: How has the enduring academic and praxic parallelism divorcing civil society research from its normative prerequisites interplayed with populism as evidenced by the functioning of advocacy NGOs in Poland under the rule of the PiS-led United Right coalition (2015-2023)? Secondly, how have different advocacy NGOs been affected by the populist political climate? Thirdly, how have the responses advocacy NGOs come up with challenged the analytic differentiation between ‘political’ NGOs and ‘aideological’ service-providing nonprofits?
After 8 years of being governed by a political coalition that undermined the rule of law and media freedom and supported loyal NGOs, Poland is now looking to overcome populism and restore the democratic order. This paper draws on an empirical qualitative study conducted in August-November 2022 in Poland. The variable-oriented technique that finds ‘themes that cut across cases’ (Huberman and Miles 1994, 436) was applied to analyse 25 IDIs with representatives of advocacy NGOs, 5 expert interviews and one FGI. Results indicate that the interplay of domestic and international, state and non-state polarizing actors has impacted negatively advocacy NGOs working in the fields of human rights, rule of law, and environmental protection. Affected NGOs responded to these challenges by diversifying their hitherto partnerships, which is in line with the transcalar advocacy hypothesis, though also by engaging in service-provision. This approach challenges the usefulness and relevance of the NGOs-nonprofits, international-domestic, democratising-development divides and indicates a way forward for civil societies experiencing closing (CIVICUS 2019) and shifting (Korolczuk 2022) civic spaces.
The case study of Poland has wider relevance. Mere 6 years after the populist government took power, Poland received the first place in the ranking of ‘autocratizing’ states (Alizada et al. 2021, 7, 9). The developments in Poland clearly correspond to the typology of NGOs in authoritarian and hybrid regimes (Toepler et al. 2020).

References

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Author

• Galia Chimiak, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences