Small donors in world politics: The role of trust funds in the foreign aid policies of Central and Eastern European donors

The Central and Eastern European (CEE) EU member states have emerged as new donors of international development assistance since the turn of the millennium. The literature has tended to focus on the bilateral components of these policies, and neglected CEE multilateral aid. This paper contributes to filling this gap by examining how and why CEE donors contribute to trust funds operated by multilateral donors. The aim of the paper is twofold: First, it provides a descriptive account of how CEE countries use trust funds in the allocation of their foreign aid. Second, it explains this allocation using data from qualitative interviews with CEE officials. CEE countries make much less use of trust funds than might be expected. This is due not only to the loss of visibility and control over their resources, but also to how CEE companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) rarely achieve funding successes at multilateral organisations

Is Transition Experience Enough? The Donor-side Effectiveness of Czech and Polish Democracy Aid to Georgia

The paper examines the democracy aid practices of the Czech Republic and Poland in Georgia. These two countries have recently emerged as promoters of democracy, and have argued that their own transition experience puts them in a unique position to support democratization and the consolidation of democracy in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood. The paper evaluates how these two countries provide democracy aid to Georgia along three criteria, derived from the aid effectiveness literature: supporting locally driven change, learning from results and coordination. The results indicate that both countries have plenty of space to improve the way their democracy aid is delivered. Neither country has formal systems in place to ensure that they actually support Georgian priorities; evaluations are ad hoc and feedback loops missing; and there is significant scope to improve coordination with other donors. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general perception among stakeholders that the democracy aid provided by the Czech Republic and Poland is relevant to Georgia’s needs

Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe. An index for measuring a country’s potential to benefit from technology spillovers

In the paper, we construct a composite indicator to estimate the potential of four Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to benefit from productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector. Such transfers of technology are one of the main benefits of FDI for the host country, and should also be one of the main determinants of FDI incentives offered to investing multinationals by governments, but they are difficult to assess ex ante. For our composite index, we use six components to proxy the main channels and determinants of these spillovers. We have tried several weighting and aggregation methods, and we consider our results robust. According to the analysis of our results, between 2003 and 2007 all four countries were able to increase their potential to benefit from such spillovers, although there are large differences between them. The Czech Republic clearly has the most potential to benefit from productivity spillovers, while Poland has the least. The relative positions of Hungary and Slovakia depend to some extent on the exact weighting and aggregation method of the individual components of the index, but the differences are not large. These conclusions have important implication both the investment strategies of multinationals and government FDI policies

Hungarian International Development Cooperation: Context, Stakeholders and Performance

This paper explores the domestic and international context of Hungary's emerging international development policy. Specifically, it looks at three factors that may influence how this policy operates: membership in the European Union (EU) and potential ‘Europeanization’, Hungary's wider foreign policy strategy, and the influence of domestic stakeholders. In order to uncover how these factors affect the country's international development policy, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the main stakeholders. The main conclusions are: (1) While accession to the EU did play a crucial role in restarting Hungary's international development policy, the integration has had little effect since then; (2) international development policy seems to serve mainly Hungary's regional strategic foreign policy and economic interests, and not its global development goals; and (3) although all the domestic development stakeholders are rather weak, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) still seems to play a dominating role. Convergence with European requirements and best practices is, therefore, clearly hindered by foreign policy interests and also by the weakness of non- governmental stakeholders

Mesmerized by enlargement: The EU’s Eastern neighborhood policy and new member state transition experience

The accession of the East-Central European (ECE) countries carried a promise of enhancing and enriching the EU’s Eastern policy. The new member states had the strongest interests among EU member states to ensure that countries in the East are prosperous, stable, and democratic. Yet, the EU’s Eastern policy has been largely criticised for its ineffectiveness. So why have they not been able to address the shortcomings in the EU’s Eastern policies? The article argues that the ECE countries supported the way the EU’s Eastern policies were conceived and implemented because they saw it as a potent vehicle to promote their own transition experience not only in the region but also within the EU. We argue that the ECE states have experienced three types of challenges when promoting their transition experience. First, uploading to the EU level remained largely at a rhetorical level. Second, there are conceptual and practical difficulties in defining what constitutes transition experience and harnessing it, as well as coordinating its transfer between the ECE states. Finally, while using transition experience as the basis for their development assistance strategies, the ECE countries actually insufficiently conceptualised the "development" aspect in these policies. Being so driven by their own experience, they have not drawn the lessons from enlargement to use in a non-accession context, especially by incorporating the broader lessons with regard to development

Determinants of civil society influence:the case of international development and humanitarian NGOs in the Czech Republic and Hungary

Accession to the EU has had ambiguous effects on civil society organizations (CSOs) in the East Central European countries. A general observation is that accession has not led to the systematic empowerment of CSOs in terms of growing influence on national policy making. This article investigates the determinants of successful CSO advocacy by looking at international development and humanitarian NGOs (NGDOs) in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Reforms in the past decade in the Czech Republic have created an international development policy largely in line with NGDO interests, while Hungary’s ministry of foreign affairs seems to have been unresponsive to reform demands from civil society. The article argues that there is clear evidence of NGDO influence in the Czech Republic on international development policy, which is because of the fact that Czech NGDOs have been able solve problems of collective actions, while the Hungarian NGDO sector remains fragmented. They also have relatively stronger capacities, can rely on greater public support and can thus present more legitimate demands towards their government

Conclusion: The Relevance of Normative Power in a Changing Europe

The concluding chapter provides an answer to the central question of the book, whether the European Union’s democracy promotion in South Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia can be understood through the prism of Normative Power Europe and, subsequently, what insights the answer to this question offers for reconceptualizing NPE itself. The chapter does so in two steps. In the first step, it summarizes the empirical conclusions established throughout the book regarding the process and effects of the EU’s democratization policy in the studied regions. In the second step, it draws from these conclusions to rethink Normative Power Europe from both a conceptual (what it is) and operational (how it should be studied) point of view