Useful information |
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A PDF version of this section is available for download from here.
The support of civil society in Eastern Europe is dependent upon having access to the appropriate information:
Maybe the most difficult to obtain is the information upon generally accepted priorities. This information is needed in order to estimate if a new project proposal has chances to be perceived as useful and sensible by the local public. On the other side, some innovative ideas might not seem so to locals in the beginning. You'll need enough information to assess whether after completion of the project the new idea might catch or not. This is pertaining also to ideas which may seem normal common sense in the West, and it might be difficult to understand why in another cultural context it simply isn't „tasty“.
Another aspect is the evaluation of NGOs. At AREDA we know quite a couple of NGOs and we don't believe that EVERY member of the civil society has realistic, understandable and useful goals. Detailed information about the NGOs' activity and resources needs to be gathered and evaluated by a country-specific standard. This is not information available on the Internet in international languages. It has to be researched in places sometimes far away from the capital and usually is open only to people knowing the local language and culture.
Governments tend to be sometimes hostile towards support for civil society. Aid providers have to know what is tolerated in a particular region to avoid exposing themselves and their local partners to sometimes violent repression. Western citizen usually are under a certain protection by their governments, but their local partners and their families are not. Hostility by the government doesn't mean the same thing as lack of understanding by the population: two different problems with different solutions.
More often than not, work with civil society groups in Eastern Europe is political. Knowledge about government activity and statements and of those of important, well known individuals and groups, is useful. Some projects have attempted to translate this information and put it on the Internet, but few were successful. Often, information in international languages on the Internet is distorted by linguistic problems (terms missing in occidental languages) and political preference. Information available from international news media are even more prone to distortion. Western journalists tend to communicate in common western concepts like „left“, „right“, „conservative“, „social-democratic“, „trade unions“. Reality can be completely different. E.g. trade unions can sometimes be quite conservative i.e. hostile to any change, social-democratic parties can be the club of extremely wealthy entrepreneurs and social-liberal parties can promote in fact a very ugly chauvinism.
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