Civil Society Co-operation and ‘New Social Economies’ at the EU’s External Frontiers: The Finnish-Russian Case

Abstract

Organizations of the ’social economy’, such as cooperative style enterprises, mutual help societies and voluntary associations, have long played an important role in national and regional development in Western countries Since the dramatic political changes of 1989, their importance in Central and Eastern Europe has also steadily increased. As Charlie Walker reminds us: one of the defining features of the transition to a market economy in post-Soviet Russia has been the inability of market structures to fill the myriad gaps left by the withdrawal of the Soviet state (Walker 2010: 647). While as yet relatively inexperienced, civil society organizations (CSOs) in Russia can thus arguably be seen as contributing to the emergence of a ’post-socialist social economy’ primarily through partnerships in the delivery of public services. Research projects funded by the European Union and Finnish universities (known by their acronyms EUDIMENSIONS and HYRMY respectively) have investigated a very specific case of social economy development in the Finnish-Russian context, namely through the promotion of cross-border cooperation between CSOs. As these projects confirm, CSO networks have helped establish partnerships in different areas of social welfare, economic development, training and institutional capacity-building that have assumed an important regional development role (Scott/Buchner 2009).