The Centre for European Transformation has prepared a working paper on civil society’s role and place in the system of external assistance to Belarus in 2006-2012.

There is a need to monitor external development aid to Belarus in order to make this process more open and to broaden the possibilities of public control over the distribution of donor assistance. In recent years, many Belarusan experts, government officials, and politicians quite often speculate on the topic of donor assistance rendered to Belarus. The governmental authorities and top-level officials try to present the situation in such a manner that all external assistance from foreign countries and international structures is rendered exclusively to support Belarus’ civil society and democratization (or, in their terminology, to support the “fifth column” and to “overthrow the current political regime”). In the political opposition environment, there are recriminations that external assistance is used inappropriately and the allotted means should be monitored. Representatives of the “third sector” pay attention to the low transparency of large-scale projects of cooperation with the state and, as a whole, the low involvement of civil society in the implementation of programs of donor assistance to Belarus. The politically active part of Internet users in social media and forums criticizes public and political forces for they senselessly “guzzle” grants away. As a rule, all these allegations are not based on any real facts and, at best, reflect one’s personal experience of dealing with some aspects of the implementation of grant projects or activity of public and political organizations. In order to be able to form a well-founded judgement, it is necessary to lean on concrete facts and real data, and this research is carried out to present such information.

This research presents an overall picture of external assistance to Belarus from 2006 to 2012 and underlines the questions of financial support to civil society’s activity, as well as the place of the EU and its member states in the general system of donor assistance. This work is a continuation of the research carried out by the Center for European Transformation in 2013 and inherits its general logic. The analysis of the total amount of external assistance, basic donors’ assistance rendering models, the use of distribution channels, and shares of assistance in separate sectors is supplemented by the data for 2012, as well as a number of new generalizations concerning the structure of assistance from separate countries and the share of Belarus in the structure of assistance to the Eastern Partnership countries.

The data on assistance is taken from open sources, in particular — OECD, EuropeAid, national development agencies (Sida, Polska pomoc, BMZ, etc.).

The use of open sources imposes certain restrictions on the possibilities of analysis in connection with the incompleteness of their data. On open access, there is data on the annual volume of the assistance of all EU countries; however, the data on the distribution of donors’ assistance as for channels and directions is limited — there is no full data on Sweden’s assistance in 2012; there is no detailed data on the assistance of Poland and some other EU countries. For this reason, in our research, we analyze the distribution of assistance as for channels and sectors rendered by 15 EU countries: Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, France, and the Czech Republic. The annual volume of assistance from the other EU countries (except for Poland and Sweden) is so insignificant that the schemes received during the analysis of the available data can be extended to the structure of assistance from all EU countries put together. The absence of the data on Poland’s and Sweden’s assistance, in its turn, can strongly deform the general schemes. For this reason, the aggregated data on 2006-2012 and on 2012 include the data on the assistance from the above mentioned 15 EU countries. Also, when necessary, we underline that Poland and/or Sweden are excluded from the analysis.

In view of the periodicity of receiving the statistical reports on the volumes and structure of assistance to separate countries, an adequate analysis can be presented only for 2012; the full volume of data on 2013 will be available only in the beginning of 2015.

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See also:

• Civil society’s role and place in the system of the EU’s donor assistance for Belarus

• Civil society’s role and place in the system of donor assistance to Belarus (2006-2014)

About authors:

Alena Zuikova is an analyst of the Center for European Transformation, master of political science. She graduated from European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) with her bachelor’s degree in political science and European studies. She also graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Lille (Institute of Political Science, Lille, France) with her master’s degree in European affairs. Her research interests include the European neighborhood policy, the Eastern Partnership, the European policy concerning Belarus, the European policy of development; civil society, CSOs’ role in Belarus democratization processes, and the Eurasian Economic Union.

Andrei Yahorau is the director of the Center for European Transformation, master of political science. He graduated from the Politology Department of Belarusan State University and received his master’s degree in political science at the same university. Since 2001, he has been working in the field of political research. His research interests include post-Soviet territory transformation, civil society, political transformations in Belarus and the Eastern Partnership region, and European studies.