Putting Nonprofits on the Policy Agenda of Post-Soviet Russia: A Story of Convergence

Abstract

This article seeks to explain how a dramatic new program of financial and technical assists to nonprofit organizations managed to surface on the active policy agenda of Russia’s government between 2009 and 2013 at precisely the same time the Russian government was suppressing foreign-funded nonprofit organizations as “foreign agents” and earning for itself a reputation as the perpetrators of a “global associational counter-revolution.” To answer this question, the article brings to bear the multiple streams framework (MSF) widely used to explain policy-agenda-formation in the United States and other countries and finds it sheds useful light on the agenda-setting dynamics recently at work in the evolution of government–nonprofit relations in Russia and, possibly, in other transitional societies.

Beyond the Partnership Paradigm: Toward an Extended Typology of Government/Nonprofit Relationship Patterns

“…After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian civil society emerged supported with considerable assistance from the West, while the “dominant attitude of the Russian government in the 1990s was one of well-wishing noninterference” (Salamon & Benevolenski, 2020, p. 216). The post-1991 relationship between the sectors was supplementary in nature.…”