Patterns of international organizations’ engagement in reform and policy making in the post-Soviet space

East European Politics. 2024. Vol. 40. No. 2. P. 299–321.

Dekalchuk A., Grigoriev I., Starodubtsev A.

The paper explains how states and international organisations interact in policy making by focusing on five countries of the post-Soviet space. Based on in-depth interviews conducted in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, we explore different patterns of state-IO interactions and explain the determinants of these patterns’ formation. We demonstrate that these patterns arise from a combination of two country-level factors: political openness of the system and national regulation of international actors’ involvement into the policy process. However, the patterns of state-IOs relations prove strongly mitigated by the intervening variable of the national reform ecosystem’s configuration and resource endowment.

Keywords: постсоветское пространство, реформы, international organizations, reforms, международные организации, политический процесс, post-Soviet space, policy process