Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations, Sarah L. Henderson, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 229. In this well-researched and provocative book, Sarah Henderson asks to what extent Western aid can facilitate the emergence of civil society in countries where civil society is domestically weak. Through an in-depth study of Western aid to Russian women's organizations, she argues that foreign assistance has dramatically affected NGO development in Russia, but not always in expected or positive ways. On the one hand, she finds that external funding “made a tremendous difference in improving and increasing the short-term financial viability, organizational capacity, and networking skills among recipient groups” (9). On the other, she argues that foreign aid contributed to at least four pathological developments within the NGO community. First, funded groups tended to copy the aid agencies' top-heavy and bureaucratic organizational structures. Second, funded groups lacked grassroots constituencies because they shifted their policy agendas to reflect aid agencies' preferences rather than objective domestic needs. Third, foreign aid encouraged the development of a “civic elite” among the domestic NGO community, exacerbating the differences between those groups that received funding and those that did not. Finally, the competition for foreign aid dollars encouraged uncooperative behaviour among funded Russian NGOs rather than bridge building and information sharing. She argues that these problematic unintended consequences were the result of avoidable mistakes in the foreign aid process, and states bluntly that “NGO development is not synonymous with civil society development, and the development of one does not necessarily imply the advancement of the other” (11).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".