Welfare Governance, NGOs and Policy Entrepreneurship in Contemporary Russia

This Paper explores the issue of policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Russia as it is experienced by NGOs in the sphere of child protection. NGOs have long been seen as partners to the state in terms of introducing innovation and new ideas into public practice, and consequently into social policy. Yet in the contemporary Russian context of a hybrid political regime, NGOs are forced to act in ambiguous conditions. The sphere of child protection is highly politicized and strongly controlled by the State, which causes close, unavoidable and complicated interactions between NGOs and state agencies. In addition, recent attempts by the State to encourage the activities of NGOs operating in the social sphere and increasingly to involve them as direct providers of social services offer both opportunities and risks for socially-oriented’ NGOs operating at the regional level, where social policy in Russia is implemented. The paper explores the extent to which NGOs working in the field of child protection are able to influence the development and implementation of social policy in this area at the regional level, based on empirical data gathered from interviews with NGOs and local officials in Nizhniy Novgorod and Kazan in 2016. It examines whether relationships between NGOs and state agencies/representatives and local discussion fora such as the regional Public Chambers offer some opportunity for NGOs to act as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in influencing how particular policy problems are framed and presenting potential solutions to these problems which may then be taken up by local policymakers. The findings indicate that socially-oriented NGOs face serious constraints in terms of funding and project implementation and are forced to follow state social policy and compensate for the weakness of official institutions. Yet close and frequent contacts with the authorities, and the perception of these NGOs as being in some sense ‘loyal’ to the state but also experts in their field in fact appears to provide a certain space for the promotion of independent projects and alternative policy solutions.