KYRGYZSTAN TODAY Policy briefs on - Department of Geography

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Medet Tiulegenov, Assistant Professor, AUCA Social Capital or Whether NGOs Are the Place for Collective Action? Summary The NGO sector in Kyrgyzstan has grown significantly in numbers, reaching more than eight thousand organizations in 2006. The rise in numbers has come with better quality through more focused work and better and more capacities acquired; however the social side of NGOs is experiencing problems because of the inadequate quality of relationships between them and others. NGOs’ social capital has not yet developed sufficiently for them to become a place for collective action, which is viewed in this work as a main function of civil society. The issue at stake As one the most modern sectors of civil society, NGOs in Kyrgyzstan have deve loped in a number of ways to serve society’s needs but the NGO sector lacks sufficient social capital to enabling it to be an effective place for collective action. To be a collective action institution assumes empowering and enabling its members and partners to engage easily with each other for a common purpose. Currently NGOs in Kyrgyzstan are experien cing problems with common purposes, but most importantly they have difficulty coming together in a more innovative way – building more and newer internal and external links. Most NGOs tend to meet, talk and work almost all the time with the same people. Parochial networks tend to serve the self-comfort of their members rather than serving the needs of society. This is not a call to abandon “old friends”, but rather a suggestion to build new relations, which would be the basis for new ways to confront old problems. Background Numbers and links Kyrgyzstan, with its population of more than 5 million people, has more than 14 thousand civil society organizations which reflects the significant level of initiative of its citizens, probability of support (largely from donors) and quite lax government regulations to register a non-profit organization. Of this number, more than 8,000 are non-governmental organizations, which (excluding trade unions, political parties, etc.) are a relatively new phenomenon for independent Kyrgyzstan. Many people, mostly women, during the last few years have decided to embark on new ways of working – beyond a too familiar state, yet not in an unfamiliar market. 12
For a country where the main active population (aged between 15 and 65) constitute around 60 percent of society, this comes to one NGO per 400 people or one civil society organization (by broader definition) per 230 people. That ratio would be even smaller taking into account increasing external migration and, thus, decreasing population. It’s possible to imagine with such estimates that NGOs can reach out quite easily to other members of Kyrgyz society with less than 6 degrees of separation 1 , but the number of organizations actually working constitute only a fraction of those registered. However, besides sheer numbers, the most important dimension of Kyrgyzstan’s NGO sector is the quality of its internal relationships. An effective sector could function properly even in smaller numbers, if relationships between organizations within and outside the sector were better and more intense. It could function better if we view it the same way as the human brain when it’s measured not by the number of cells, but by the synapses among them (a billion cells can potentially produce a number of connections measured by more than eight hundred digit figure). And this is only about links between NGOs themselves, not mentioning the way they connect with other non-profit, private or state partners, and most importantly with citizenship (e.g. volunteers). That side of the story is more important than internal relations in the sector. NGOs serve the needs of larger society in various ways of direct interactions with that society. The strength of these links is, eventually, the power of the NGO sector – whether NGOs are affecting policies in relation to central and local governments or by building advocacy coalitions engaging a large numbers of citizens. NGOs in Kyrgyzstan had, by the late 1990s, started to form coalitions and networks focused on common issues: election monitoring, children’s welfare or environmental issues. Some of them were long-term which, led to the creation of formal associations such as the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society and some were short-term, aimed at campaigning on certain legislative changes, like a group of NGOs which worked in 2007 on the Election Code reform. State and counter-movements Assertive statehood promoted by the current country leaders, a vision of statehood where the role of civil society is bleak, at the moment puts the NGO sector in a vulnerable position. At worst the government is intentionally indifferent to NGOs and, at best, it does not have a coherent vision on the sector. On the one hand there is a laudable recent law on social order introduced by the government and adopted by parliament and yet, at the same time, there is the current draft tax code, which puts NGOs almost on a par with commercial enterprises. The government should be one of the most interested players (even if this government evidently does not support liberal views) in developing the social capital of NGOs from pragmatic, not to mention value-oriented, perspectives alone, to have, for instance, the means to mobilize human resources for government programmes. Liberal values, subscribed to in the 1990s by many rhetorically and in considerable numbers genuinely, are now experiencing problems not only from the state, but from society at large where traditional and religious sentiments are on the rise. Islamic, patriarchic, conservative societies are gaining and regaining their positions and for many liberally oriented NGOs this presents a challenge, which requires new ways of confronting them and requires innovative ways of working with their constituencies. 1 There were calculations that each person on the planet is separated from anyone else on the earth through no more than 6 consecutive links of relationship. 13
Page 1 and 2: Social Research Center American Uni
Page 3 and 4: The Social Research Center (SRC) at
Page 5 and 6: What needs to be studied is whether
Page 7 and 8: policy, but on the politics of loya
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Page 25 and 26: Galina Plakhotnikova, Aida Kurbanov
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Page 31 and 32: Sheradil Baktygulov, Independent Ex
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Page 35 and 36: In this context, the Kyrgyz state v
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Page 41 and 42: 200. This means that about USD 20 m
Page 43 and 44: New Middle Classes Classes are anta
Page 45 and 46: References and Sources 1. Bates R.
Page 47 and 48: There were attempts to build the pa
Page 49 and 50: Kyrgyzstan, they did not have a cle
Page 51 and 52: impossible. Even though the Moldova
Page 53 and 54: Summing up, it should be emphasized
Page 55 and 56: 24. Romedi Arkvint’s Speech//Kiev
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and its regional programs, to devel
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development in both urban and rural
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the participants of public hearings
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Social Development as the spokesper
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Nookatbek Idrisov, Director of the
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membership fees, donations, grants)
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and (2) the Law on Charity doesn’
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6. To change numbering of items in
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its founders, members, participants
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and property at its balance-sheet v
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Kanykey Jailobaeva, PhD Candidate a
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NGOs to involve the government and
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over the implementation of its init
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His advice on the legislative basis
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presence of those major elements of
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arises; this problem is now apparen
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not a decision-maker, but rather
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Some believe and argue that Kyrgyz
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Central and Eastern European and Ba
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the vocational-education system sho
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force and its profile, since all th
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is employed in jobs that do not req
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educational institutions elaborate
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naturally expect to return to their
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emittances for granted at the backb
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Global Donor Platform for Rural Dev
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marginalized communities, do not li
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Simplifying the process of getting
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Nurdin Tynaev, Director of the Publ
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Federation”, which requires migra
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Recommendations • Improve the imm
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In Kyrgyzstan, there are the Spirit
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Following are some examples of mode
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Timur Kozukulov, Senior lecturer, r
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2. These problems are also typical
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Shakhnoza Madaeva, Candidate of phi
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women). About 50 percent of student
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3. International institutions and i
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present this image of woman as an i
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you from a single person created of
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standpoint of such an approach, one
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Types and scale of judicial corrupt
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The evidence demonstrates that the
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other indirect features of judicial
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albeit very unlikely. However, many
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Many factors contribute to this cor
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also collapsed, and the academic co
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To university students: 1. To chang
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protectionism, unfair competition,
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authority to levy tax backlogs with
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Kubanychbek Omuraliev, Independent
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On the subject of barriers, it is a
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and other similar is ten times grea
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participation in economic activitie
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• adopt laws that recognize and p
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Emil Nasritdinov. Discrimination of
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