Tracing the Impact of EU Policy on the Ground

Abstract

This final empirical chapter explains how NGOs navigate through the conflicting interests that arise from the incongruence between policy conceptualization and how NGOs operate in practice. The chapter begins with a discussion of the project approach to development, its benefits and shortcomings, and places the actor-oriented perspective (Long, 2001) against the model of rational decision-making that dominates the project-based approach. The actor-oriented perspective has explanatory power because it highlights the complex social processes that inform NGO behaviour in the project environment. Next, to illustrate the agency of Turkish NGOs in the EU project funding context, the chapter draws on the work of Lewis and Mosse (2006) who describe NGOs as ‘brokers’ and ‘translators’. In order to account for the types of roles NGOs have assumed in the Turkish context, two additional roles are conceptualized: ‘navigators’ and ‘antagonists’. Once this framework for thinking about NGO roles from an actor-oriented perspective has been established, the chapter moves on to describe these roles in more detail. Firstly, the role of the CFCU as the representative and executor of EU project policy is explored. The aim here is to illustrate the rational decision-making model that governs the technical management of EU-funded civil society projects.KeywordsCivil SocietyForeign FundingSocial InterfaceTurkish ContextComplex Social ProcessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.