How to Translate ‘Good Governance’ into Tajik? An American Good Governance Fund and Norm Localisation in Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how international norms are transferred to aid-receiving countries and with what outcomes, when tensions exist between these norms and local realities. By taking a case study of an American-funded good governance project in Tajikistan, it investigates a multi-level and multi-actor process of norm localisation, looking at why and how different development agencies re-appropriate international norms. The article proposes to see a failed localisation from the point of view of donors, in a way that outcomes differ from their initial intentions, as a successful localisation from the point of view of local actors. The distortion of international norms indicates that local actors re-appropriated them in accordance with their biographies, personal views, and political opportunities and constraints of organisations which they represent.

KEYWORDS:

• Tajikistan
• USAID
• foreign aid
• good governance
• NGO
• norm localisation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rick Fawn, Anna Cieślewska, as well as three anonymous reviewers for very useful comments and suggestions how to improve this article. I am particularly grateful to the NGO Future for supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Karolina Kluczewska is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at CERAL, Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences, University of Paris 13 (Paris, France); and an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Social Anthropological Research (LSAR), Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russia). She is also completing her PhD degree on interactions between international organisations and local actors in Tajikistan within the western development aid system, at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews (St Andrews, United Kingdom).

ORCID

Karolina Kluczewska http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0349-4443

Notes

1. Interview 7: employee of the NGO Future, 5 January 2017.

2. Apart from Tajikistan, post-Soviet Central Asia includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

3. 85 Western development agencies are present in the country. In 2016, net official development assistance (ODA) to Tajikistan amounted to 334 million USD (with the pick of 433 million USD in 2010). See the World Bank data: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ALLD.CD

4. The names of all local NGOs mentioned in this article are pseudonyms.

5. For instance, the World Governance Index (WGI), released by the World Bank since 1996, pays attention to six dimensions of good governance: Voice and accountability; political stability and absence of violence, governance effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption. Thus, the WGI officially refrains from taking an ideological position with regard to the regime type and focuses on technical aspects of governance. See the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#home. In turn, for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) good governance is a synonym of democratic governance, with political participation at the centre. See Remarks by Helen Clark
Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, 11 May 2011, http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/presscenter/speeches/2011/05/11/undp-chief-poorest-countries-must-have-a-say-in-shaping-their-future.html

6. Interview 12: employee of USAID in Tajikistan, 21 July 2017.

7. Interview 12.

8. This view was stated clearly in the USAID Regional Development Cooperation Strategy for Central Asia 2015-2019 (USAID 2014), published later that year, in October 2014.

9. Interview 12.

10. Interview 12.

11. Interview 12.

12. Interview 2: former employee of Future, 10 December 2016.

13. Interview 2; Interview 3: former employee of the NGO Future, 17 November 2016.

14. Interview 2.

15. Interview 12.

16. Interview 1: former employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tajikistan, 9 July 2014; Interview 10: member of the Tajik Association of NGOs, 16 and 22 July 2017.

17. Interview 2; 3; 7; Interview 6: employee of the NGO Future, 5 January 2017; Interview 8: employee of Future, 3 April 2017.

18. Interview 2.

19. Interview 6

20. Interview 2; 3; 8.

21. Interview 3.

22. Interview 13: employee of the NGO Youth, 13 September 2017.

23. Although other employees of these NGOs might be younger, the decision-makers are usually individuals in their fifties and sixties, who were former Soviet activists.

24. Interview 5.

25. Interview 11: employee of the NGO Reform, 9 July 2017.

26. Interview 13.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was carried out within the project ‘Around the Caspian’ (European Commission, Horizon 2020) [grant number SEP-210161673]. It was finalised in the framework of the following projects: ‘Contested Global Governance, Transformed Global Governors? International Organisations and ‘Weak’ States’ (GLOBALCONTEST) funded by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche; ANR) [grant number ANR-16-ACHN-0034] and ‘The Tomsk State University Competitiveness Improvement Programme’ (Mendeleev Fund) [grant number 8.1.27.2018].