Book chapter
Проблемы эффективности и пути развития социально-ориентированных НКО в Пермском крае
The nonprofit sector weakness in Russia is no doubt. The most frequently cited reasons - immaturity of still young civil society structures and the lack of public funding in the third sector. Meanwhile, the process of becoming a non-profit sector can hardly be accelerated. The growth of the federal and regional subsidies, will not provide significant improvements. The main problem lies in the structural characteristics and low efficiency of voluntary sector. In this case, if some structure of the nonprofit sector, such as condominiums, generally demonstrate some progress in recent years, the socially-oriented NGOs are still in stagnation. Public policy can only partly correct the current state and trends.
In book
Human rights advocacy has evolved into a legitimate foreign policy priority of the contemporary United States. The values and beliefs behind this concern are endorsed by a variety of American NGOs. The paper looks at American human rights advocacy and its impact on foreign policy decision-making. Human rights groups constitute a powerful independent lobby sector, whose success must be attributed to the unique nature of the American political culture. The article analyses the industrys specific characteristics and offers a classification of NGOs based on their mission, activities and lobbying profile.
In many Russian regions, new institutions have been created that are meant to enable the partnership between the legislative, the regional administration and civil society actors. These forms of institutionalized cooperation include permanent roundtables, consultative councils, regional or local grant competitions for social projects and the institutionalized cooperation in externally funded social projects. In addressing social problems, nonprofit organizations have often played a pioneer role and are today more and more accepted as partners of the state, while at the same time facing multiple barriers in terms of their institutional context, organizational development and participation in policy formation. Although regional and local administrations and civil society actors share many concerns about social policy issues, the level of real involvement of NGOs in policy formation in present-day Russia is often described as ineffective and insufficient. The underlying motivation of this paper is to identify the forms and degree of cooperation between governmental and non-governmental actors in addressing social problems and the participation of non-profit actors in shaping policy formation in Russia’s regions. The focus is on the sub-national level, as regional authorities bear the main responsibility for financing and implementing welfare policies. The paper thereby addresses the following question: What are the incentives, barriers and outcomes of nonprofit participation in service delivery and policy formation?
As NGOs are emerging into prominent actors in international politics, the issue of measuring their political capability and efficiency draws particular interest. The paper offers a critical overview of core theoretical approaches to evaluating NGOs as politically accountable actors of global civil society.
The paper gives the results of an empirical study evaluating the social efficiency of the international voluntary project dance4life in Russia, the objective of which is to prevent HIV infection and AIDS and to form healthy lifestyle among young people. Analyzing the implementation of the project has shown that the participation of young people in the project has a noticeable positive impact on their level of awareness, frustrates myths about HIV/AIDS, and develops their social and healthy lifestyle skills, on the one hand. On the other, their project involvement favors the increased voluntary activity and self-organization of young people participating in the project.