Bankrolling the Belgrade Bandits? Civil Society, NGOs, and Foreign Aid Localization in Serbia

ABSTRACT

This article examines how foreign aid professionalized Serbia's civil society sector and analyzes how Serbian NGOs navigate upward accountability to donors and downward accountability to grassroots communities. Drawing upon 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia, I demonstrate how the administrative bureaucracies of foreign aid constructed a sector of managerial NGOs that are relatively removed from local communities. Nonetheless, I suggest that the staff members of NGOs are mission‐driven and mission‐oriented, and I unveil the strategies they use to support social change at grassroots levels. Arguing that NGOs are neither the schools of democracy envisioned by neo‐Tocquevillian theories of civil society, nor the lucrative industries portrayed by critical theories of civil society, I suggest that NGOs are best understood as bridges between foreign donors and grassroots communities. I reflect on the implications of these arguments for donors' aid localization strategies.