The outsized role that foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in Georgia’s politics, policy-making, and public services has led the country into a chronic democratic crisis, writes Jacobin.

“This is a massive problem — and goes back a quarter of a century, predating the 2003 Rose Revolution. The late president Edvard Shevardnadze had given foreign aid agencies great leeway, so toward the end of his feckless and corrupt rule, NGOs were already a vocal presence in the country’s political discourse and maintained confident relationships with international donors. After years of turmoil and state collapse, Georgians with ideas and convictions seized the moment to shape their society.

It felt fresh and energetic, albeit driven more by “social entrepreneurs” than broad-based grassroots movements. After Shevardnadze’s former justice minister, Mikheil Saakashvili, deposed him in the Rose Revolution, NGO professionals quickly filled senior government posts. The country’s policy space was thrown wide open to any and all foreign-led aid and reform experiments. The calculation was that the geopolitical and material benefits would far outweigh any drawbacks.

Consistently high foreign aid flows followed, and bilateral aid programs, the World Bank, United Nations agencies, international development aid groups small and large, and even private Western philanthropies opened well-staffed offices in the capital, Tbilisi. To spend all their money, implement their projects, and tick the box saying “consultation and collaboration with the community,” they all needed local NGOs. Demand creates supply: and today, more than twenty-five thousand NGOs are registered in Georgia. According to Georgian authorities, 90 percent of their funding comes from abroad, but this average conceals the fact that the vast majority of Georgian NGOs have no local funding at all. They would probably find the very notion of asking locals for money absurd, and if they gave it a try, in their current form, they could hardly win fellow Georgians’ support.

Foreign aid agencies and their local NGO contractors have long colonized most areas of public policy and services, from education and health care to court reform, rural development, infrastructure, and so on.

In practice, this plays out something like this: a major development aid agency or international lender — for example, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Commission, or World Bank, has come up with a new model for education reform, which it now plans to roll out not just in Georgia, but typically in a whole host of countries.

To give it a veneer of community participation, the aid agency contracts Georgian NGOs to do the everyday footwork: introduce this or that new way of doing things to officials, schools, and teachers and train them in the new skills they supposedly need. No one at this or any other point asks teachers, parents, students, or, for that matter, the electorate at large, what they need and want and how they would improve things. People are left feeling unheard, ignored, patronized — and also inadequate when they fail to reach the benchmarks all this training was supposed to achieve.

The Georgian NGOs who are given grants to do this work may be local, but they hold considerable power over the Georgian population. This power comes from their access to Western embassies and resources and the legitimacy this conveys rather than from grassroots support. In a functional democracy, the people elect lawmakers and the executive to serve them and represent their interests. In Georgia, unelected NGOs get their mandate from international bodies, which draw up and pay for to-do lists of policy reforms for Georgia. Local NGOs lack an incentive to consider the impact of the projects they implement because they are not accountable to the citizens in whose lives they play such an intrusive role.

This constellation has eroded Georgian citizens’ agency and the country’s sovereignty and democracy.

However, the draft law on “foreign influence transparency” tabled by the Georgian government for the second year in a row will not address this massive problem at the heart of Georgia’s political economy. In fact, it is not even intended to address it. The Georgian government doesn’t really care about Georgia’s sovereignty. Neither do the foreign donors and aid agencies — nor do the Georgian NGO elite”, - writes the author.