Accounting for Transnational Cooperation in an Authoritarian Context: Swedish Funding for Promotion of Women’s and LGBTQI+ Rights in Russia 2012-2022

• In Event: Transnational Movements in Shrinking Spaces for Civic Society: Ideas, Resources, People

Abstract

Earlier studies have extensively explored NGO accountability looking at the complex and multilayered accountability pressures facing NGOs as they strive to be accountable both to their beneficiaries and donors (Cordery & Sim, 2018; Unerman & O'Dwyer, 2006). NGO accountabilities are usually framed as the dilemma between upward and downward accountability (Ebrahim, 2003; Najam, 1996), hierarchical or holistic accountability (O’Dwyer & Unerman, 2008), or as the difference between imposed and felt accountability (Keddie, 2021; O'Dwyer & Boomsma, 2015). There is, however, a lack of literature analyzing the multiple accountability processes taking place as donors demand accountability from NGOs they fund, and at the same time need to account for their own actions. More importantly, we lack an understanding of how such processes work in a transnational context involving an authoritarian regime.
Transnational support for gender justice, including both gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights, is often carried out in cooperation between foreign public (funding) agencies and (recipient) civil society organizations. Complex relationships of accounting and accountability are created in such organizational constellations. Over the years, transnational work for gender justice has been seen as (1) unable to advance its agenda and gain substantial results (having nothing to account for) and (2) not being rooted in domestic concerns (and unaccountable to local stakeholders). These challenges have been especially prevalent in authoritarian regimes, where gender justice work has often been framed as driving a foreign agenda, thus hostile to the local regime and subject to severe scrutiny and oppression.
The paper focuses on transnational cooperation projects between Swedish and Russian CSOS, funded by a Swedish public agency, which has promotion of gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights as one of their key policy areas (Jesierska & Towns, 2018). Russia is one of the countries where some of the projects within this area have been regularly funded, and where authoritarian and anti-(gender) justice policies have escalated over the past decade. The aim of this paper is to explore how do CSOs working for gender justice (gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights) create/manage/balance the accounts they provide to the funder. We therefore ask: How does accountability emerge in the relationship between the foreign funder and the local CSOs?
The empirical materials include various types of project documentation (applications, reports, correspondence with the funder, output, etc.) accumulated by the Swedish funder for all funded projects during the period since 2012. Our findings demonstrate that the Swedish funder based its program(s) on an idea (a vision) of how change in women’s and LGBTQI+ rights can be achieved that lacked a more nuanced understanding of the specificity of the authoritarian escalation in Russia during the selected period. Instead, much of the funder’s accountability pressures on the CSOs seem to be based on the funder’s own need to account for its activities in line with Swedish foreign policy. As a result, in their activities and reporting, CSOs had to develop different strategies that allowed them to navigate the pressures from the regime, on the one hand, and from the funder, on the other.

References
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Authors

• Emil Edenborg, Stockholm University

• Zhanna Kravchenko, Södertörn University

• Noomi Weinryb, Södertörn University