Learning from the past, looking to the future: external resources and civil society in Azerbaijan and Georgia

As global turmoil unfolds, civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world are exposed to multiple major crises at the same time. Two of these challenges are particularly existential. Firstly, the last few decades of autocratization – well-documented by scholars and international human rights monitors alike – have resulted in 72 percent of the world population living under authoritarian regimes that constrain freedom of association. Correspondingly, over 90 states have unleashed obstructive policies against non-governmental actors since the 1990s, most commonly through impeding their access to external resources. Because of their legal status and embeddedness in the bureaucratic system, formal non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been more vulnerable to regulatory attacks. Yet, this is not the only means of targeting civil society – an even greater number of countries combine it with hard repression of activists, such as arrests and physical assaults, according to research. 

Secondly, significant cuts in Western development aid, especially the halt to the United States (US) democracy assistance, have expedited the transition to the “post-aid world.” It will not be possible to fill the aid void left by the US, because many EU countries are reducing their international development budgets, too. The aid reduction is wreaking havoc on the financial lifeline of a large majority of NGOs in the developing world engaged in the critical work of checking government power, providing services to vulnerable communities, and transferring critical-thinking skills to young people. Studies suggest that aid reductions inevitably diminish local NGO sector size. Under mounting authoritarian pressures, the global field of civil society is expected to change significantly in the coming years: many actors will disappear, others may become dominated by the state, and those that adapt into more resilient organizational models are likely to endure.

Despite their distinctive characteristics of political and economic development over the past decades, two countries of the South Caucasus region, Azerbaijan and Georgia, are illustrative cases of both of the cited crises facing civil society. Between the years 2013-2015, the Azerbaijani authorities implemented a series of legislative amendments, a repressive crackdown, and stigmatization campaigns that have ever since made it impossible for formal NGOs to exist or access external resources without state consent. Informally organized civic groups started to bloom afterwards, but many of them were also either prosecuted or forced into exile after an unprecedented assault on independent media and remnants of civil society that started in 2023. 

In Georgia, NGOs operated with broader freedoms earlier, but since 2023, the ruling party Georgian Dream has adopted laws legally compelling Western-funded NGOs to register as “foreign agents” or as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” – a move described as part of the “descent into hegemonic authoritarianism.” Despite large public protests, the laws have been enforced over the past months, pressuring NGOs to either cease operations or comply with restrictive provisions, including sharing sensitive information of beneficiaries with the authorities. Thus far, a majority of organizations have refused to register as such. However, following Azerbaijan’s example, the Georgian Dream has also recently amended the grants law, prescribing that NGOs must receive formal government approval before receiving each foreign grant. In the meantime, early reports indicate that NGOs in Georgia have suffered the loss of 40 to 90 percent of their yearly budgets due to the Western aid cuts.

In both countries, civil society organizations have played positive roles, such as serving as a breeding ground for experts in various policy domains, running successful human rights campaigns, providing legal aid and other services to vulnerable segments of the population, promulgating political rights, advocating for budget transparency, and, crucially, resisting autocratization. Yet, the above-discussed developments warrant asking the question: What comes next for Azerbaijani and Georgian civil society?

In this essay, I engage in critical reflection based on years of practical experience in civil society and research exploring the organizational behaviors therein, particularly from the aspects of resource dependency, pathways of professionalization, self-regulation, and strategic responses to regulative pressures. I argue that looking to the future of civil society organizations requires learning from the past – especially in terms of organizational imperatives intrinsic to the development aid to CSOs, which, arguably, rendered them vulnerable actors in the face of the discussed challenges. 

Aid through civil society – and its discontents

Western development aid and reactive state regulations have profoundly shaped the way contemporary civil society is perceived, formed, and practiced. With the onset of the post-Cold War era, a greater portion of the development aid was channeled to civil societies around the world, based on the – now contested  – assumption of a linkage between civil society and democratization. These aid flows benefited Azerbaijan and Georgia from the early years of independence, marked by destructive wars and difficult economic and social transitions. With the end of the wars, international funding agencies shifted from humanitarian aid to governance and reforms, but government institutions in these countries remained fragile and corrupt; consequently, empowering societal actors became essential for addressing the institutional deficiencies of the emerging state and ensuring smooth democratic and market economy transitions. Yet, there were not many organizations that could speak the language of donors – both literally and administratively – in the recipient countries. Thus, the aid agencies practiced ‘institutional modeling’  to shape the environment in which civil society would be formed, through funding, training, exchange programs, and using international human rights mechanisms to push for conducive legislation.

This gave rise to professionalized organizations, which came to be equated with the concept of civil society. Organizations were burdened with inflated expectations: to lead electoral reforms, resolve violent conflicts, champion gender equality, protect human rights, preserve the environment, and more. Community-based organizations and activists also had to adopt the NGO model as a strategic means to access resources, gain legitimacy, increase impact, and enhance their capacity for change. Yet, this policy led to the homogenization of civic space, reflected in organizational professionalization – which could be described as the transformation of CSOs’ organizational behaviors, characterized by the adoption of hierarchical structure, specialized knowledge, project-based operations, and bureaucratic reporting procedures. 

In Azerbaijan and Georgia, the NGOs were born into a context characterized by the persistence of low public trust, broader unawareness, and minimal citizen participation. Membership-based organizations were nearly nonexistent, and volunteering remained limited. Instead, kinship and patronage networks, inherited from the Soviet past and reinforced by socio-economic insecurities of the transition period, continued to function as substitutes for civic participation. Rather than collectively counteracting low-capacity, non-responsive states through civic activism, citizens relied on informal networks of family and friends to survive, leaving professional NGOs distanced from the broader public. Despite the donor push for professionalization, informal practices remained persistent within NGOs in both countries too, raising questions of ethical conduct. Generational changes after independence did not alter the context positively either.

Organizational behaviors within NGOs further entrenched this distance. Professionalization rendered organizations dependent on sustained access to Western funding for survival. Aid dependence incentivized a project-to-project logic, where organizational agendas were tailored to shifting donor priorities and short-term funding cycles. It has appeared more and more that transformative civil society development was contradicted by the results-based managerial logic. The projectization fostered toxic competition between organizations, encouraged the recruitment of specialists, and transformed activists into project managers. Metrics, rather than actual transformative goals, became key drivers of activities. Membership models were largely dismissed as complicated or risky, while volunteer involvement was instrumentalized for project delivery (e.g., commonly for election observation) rather than long-term mobilization. Hierarchization produced “one-man show” organizations centered on leaders rather than issue areas and inhibited internal deliberation and democracy within organizations. Bureaucratization compelled NGOs to devote substantial energy to donor reporting and upward accountability, often at the expense of community outreach and public accountability. These organizational features, however, were far from the basic tenets of the theory that connected citizen associations to healthy democracy and served as a foundation of Western democracy assistance. 

Moreover, in Azerbaijan, the personalist autocratic regime in making had never left a window of opportunity for NGOs to influence policies, despite international development actors, like the EU, regarding NGOs as crucial “policy actors”. In Georgia, due to the previously pro-Western course of the country, the non-governmental sector benefited from much greater development assistance, translated into a more successful policy influence, yet contingent on proximity to the incumbents. Shifted calculus in the Azerbaijani and Georgian governments’ relationship with the Western donor states, inter alia, has triggered repressive NGO policies in 2014 and 2024, respectively, instrumentalizing agency, legitimacy, and transparency pretexts. Despite resource differences and regime types, the overall dynamics of organizational behaviors were similar both in Azerbaijan and Georgia until the restrictive NGO laws were adopted. Inadvertently, the external resource dependence, centralized governance, project logic, lack of a social base, and resulting feeble bonds to societal issues have turned NGOs into vulnerable actors. Following the government attacks, the institutional field of NGOs has been decimated in Azerbaijan over the past decade, with the number of political prisoners reaching 400. Despite staging successful strategic communication campaigns against the repression, Georgian NGOs may face a similar gloomy fate. 

Nevertheless, there is a space for optimism. Civil society always possesses a capacity to transform and survive even in the harshest circumstances. For this, self-reflection is a good starting point.

Beyond metrics: thoughts on the future of associations in Azerbaijan and Georgia

In Azerbaijan, over the past thirty years, civil society has undergone two consequent transformations – donor-driven professionalization between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, and informalization afterwards due to state pressures. With the protest movement evolving with a loosely organized and non-hierarchical style, similar tendencies are observed in Georgia too, especially in the wake of many NGOs closing their offices due to the “foreign agents law.” Civil society should therefore be considered a constantly transforming field. Citizen associations formed around shared grievances and interests will always be there, even under authoritarian regimes; it is an imperative to change the lens to see them. Attempts to contain civil society in formal institutional and formal organizational domains (both by states and donors) inhibit its broader transformative capacity. 

Arguably, the next transformation of civil society will come with the changing resource considerations. Domestic resource mobilization has emerged as a promising trend in the face of the above-discussed crises. According to recent research, “mobilizing local resources from individual community members helps in strengthening ties, deepening local accountability, and prioritizing the needs of beneficiaries.” Yet, a one-size-fits-all approach can’t achieve such resource generation in every context. Previous regime legacies, political systems, socio-economic transitions, welfare system type, and cultural factors are important variables. As noted earlier, South Caucasus societies’ civic philanthropy and public donations for CSOs have traditionally been virtually non-existent (except for humanitarian causes) because of low income levels and institutional trust, lacking incentive structures, and more. As most organizations were born memberless, membership fees were not a revenue channel either. But what are the other prospects?

Civic associations need resources to thrive and sustain activities. The resources, however, do not have to be external funding – either from the state or foreign donors – which creates upward dependencies. Time is a resource too. Thus, first, it is high time to bring the voluntary nature of civil society back by utilizing the power of volunteerism. Some initiatives, both in Azerbaijan and Georgia, have already switched to involving significantly more volunteers than project staff in their activities. As 2023 survey results suggest, 9 percent of young Azerbaijani respondents and 24 percent of young Georgians did some form of volunteering over the past one-year period. However, in Georgia, only 7 percent of the young respondents said they had volunteered to contribute to the work of an NGO, while in Azerbaijan, the largest share of the volunteer force is absorbed by public agencies, indicating that civil society in both countries can do more to attract people willing to volunteer. 

Second, diaspora philanthropy and donations may serve as another cure. Both Azerbaijan and Georgia have seen significant brain drain over the past decades, especially to Western countries, where many diasporans are financially stable and politically free, which might translate into increased giving to civic initiatives. The potential is already tapped through platforms such as Patreon, but it can expand. Indeed, diaspora communities often distrust formal NGOs in their origin countries and prefer direct giving to kin, but successful communication and demonstration of local impact might encourage changing the norms. Moreover, since many initiatives from Baku and Tbilisi are moving into exile due to the restrictions, diasporans might feel safer donating to them, instead of transferring money to the country with a risk of being tracked. 

Thirdly, and relatedly, civic tech can help civil society not only to survive, but also to innovate in multiple aspects. Locally-driven crowdfunding platforms can encourage more donations, especially from the diaspora or to form community foundations online; secure communication tools can help bypass state surveillance through encrypted communication when needed; community engagement platforms can build offline-to-online bridges and allow civic initiatives to show responsiveness to local needs and concerns. Georgia’s recent protest movement, for instance, benefited markedly from a Facebook group, “Daitove,” which was initially created to support protesters (to find accommodation, if they come from the regions, or to distribute water and food), but then turned into a platform for sharing protest information. 

Indeed, not all of the alternative resourcing models, including creating social enterprises, might succeed and replace the volumes of development aid. They will hardly be sufficient to sustain organizations. But the ability to diversify financial sources and reduce the dependency on now-contested external resources will determine the transformations into resilient structures, altering the power relations in favor of CSOs. It is also true that many people will migrate from civil society to other fields, such as business and academia, due to the associated risks and unstable income – but healthier civil societies gain greatly from professionals in the other fields who dedicate part of their time and resources to civic initiatives. 

Nevertheless, the urgency of domestic resourcing for civil society does not release Western development actors from their responsibilities to their partners currently under repression, both in Azerbaijan and Georgia. It is known that donors and implementing international organizations are more inclined to withdraw when the recipient country contexts become hostile. However, it remains crucial to create much-needed physical spaces for local activists to envision the future. Development partners should also mobilize resources and activate international mechanisms to defend those who have become victims of repression for their civil society work. In the eyes of many frustrated civic actors in the South Caucasus, to regain credibility, Western actors should be more consistent in aligning their foreign policy and democracy assistance practices when it comes to supporting civil society groups under pressure.