Project Governance beyond Foreign Aid: Mediating Neoliberalism in Lithuania

Abstract

AbstractScholars have shown that foreign aid projects reconfigure social relations and political institutions, but projects are a novel form of governance that has significant social and political effects in other national and transnational contexts. My argument is based on seventeen months of ethnographic research at nonprofit organizations that work with youth in Lithuania. These organizations operate primarily through projects, which are publicly or privately financed initiatives open to competition. Individuals who are part of the project system get recruited into social roles and adopt terminology linked to European Union and transnational discourses. The project system transforms institutional relations, as organizations orient toward multiple sources of financing at different national and international levels, and prompts individuals to reconceptualize their activities as apolitical project work. Project governance, which is based on competition and short‐term initiatives, aligns with and reinforces some features of neoliberalism. However, individuals have complex and sometimes contradictory orientations to neoliberalism in that they also critique the state and the transnational project system. Projects not only highlight transformations of the political economy but also provide new resources to resist state withdrawal and aspects of neoliberalism.