Civic Engagement and Its Disparate Goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The Structural Context for Civic Engagement

Understanding how and why citizens participate in civic action requires understanding the broader structural conditions in which that action occurs. ¹² For citizens to civically engage, they need an independent space and resources, all of which international intervention into BiH shapes. This includes resources provided by CSOs.

BiH shares with most of the rest of CEE structural conditions considered challenging for civil society and civic engagement, including the lasting impact of few opportunities for independent participation under communism and high levels of inter-personal and institutional distrust. ¹³ On top of these, BiH citizens face the constraints of a democratic transition delayed by war, imposition of a political system that institutionalizes ethnicity and international oversight, and an economy de-industrialized and only partly reformed. Following the collapse of the Yugoslav Communist Party at its extraordinary Congress in January 1990, ¹⁴ the Bosnian Communist Party leadership allowed the formation of opposition parties. After multiparty elections held in spring 1990 in the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia and in September 1990 in Macedonia, Bosnia held multiparty elections in late November 1990. ¹⁵ However, BiH’s brief period of democratization was cut short in late 1991 by national extremists who violently contested BiH’s independence from Yugoslavia. BiH’s early post-communist experience of three and one half years of war, its late—in 1996—transition toward democracy, and political power-sharing rules among ethno-national groups imposed by the internationally brokered Dayton Peace Agreement create a tough environment for civic action. These rigid rules favor ethnic-based parties, invest power in the ethnic-based entities of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska (RS), and encourage patronage and political deadlock at the national level, which contribute to citizen disaffection. Ruling nationalist parties spread fear of compromise with “others” to demobilize citizens seeking improved governance ¹⁶ and to distract from corruption and from policy failures regarding citizens’ priority concerns—socio-economic opportunities. ¹⁷

The legal environment in BiH generally provides space for CSOs to act and speak freely. More than 25,000 CSOs and foundations are registered as active on BiH’s collective e-register. ¹⁸ While estimates of the robustness of civil society in BiH have remained relatively steady since 2010, ¹⁹ governmental authorities and nationalist parties, particularly in the RS and in the last few years, have threatened CSOs focused on corruption. ²⁰ Across BiH, the three ethnic-based nationalist parties, the Party of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), the Party of Democratic Action, and the Croatian Democratic Union, that have repeatedly won multiparty elections have been able to capture the public administration, allowing them to control economic resources and redistribute them to their loyal Serb, Bosniak, and Croatian supporters, respectively. ²¹ The more centralized structure of the RS and its more far reaching rules for ethnic self-governance, in comparison with the decentralized and high power-sharing rules in the federation, gives SNSD, which has led governments in the RS since 2006, more power to constrain civil society. ²² An international civilian official in BiH is endowed with executive power intended to create a secure environment until Bosnians can take over democratic state-building. Yet, heavy and long-term external intervention without domestic accountability and that supports the consociational system perpetuating ethnic oligarchies disempowers citizens. ²³

As part of their efforts to bolster democratization in post-communist CEE and post-war BiH, Western donors provided funding to local CSOs. ²⁴ Yet, citizens’ perceptions of formal CSOs grew more skeptical as they became aware of the negative consequences of Western aid to civil society. These include hierarchical, Western-oriented organizations, ²⁵ led by elites ²⁶ and focused more on donors’ than citizens’ needs. ²⁷ Although Gagnon persuasively argued in 2002 that the most effective strategies of international NGOs seeking to build civil society in BiH were those that integrated concrete projects and an inclusive decision-making process that allowed local actors, communities, and NGOs to determine priorities and projects, ²⁸ few international donors in BiH appeared to heed this advice. ²⁹ The plentiful international donor support for civil society in the immediate post-war period has declined, ³⁰ creating challenges to CSOs’ financial viability. While the EU provides support for democratic reforms and civil society in BiH, it seems to prioritize stability over the quality of democracy in the region, ³¹ a policy that fails to fully support civic engagement. In addition, the economy of BiH still reels from a violent and corrupt partial privatization, ³² which limits citizens’ resources for activism, particularly for class-based action.

Intermediate and Individual Level Factors Affecting Civic Engagement

Within these difficult structural conditions, the ways in which civil society activists frame contentious issues affect opportunities for citizen participation. ³³ Framing centers on the strategic efforts by groups to develop shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action. ³⁴ Frame alignment encourages attention to both citizen norms, interests, and grievances, as well as to CSOs and social movements’ work and outreach to citizens. Research in CEE suggests CSOs that effectively frame their work by discussing issues in ways that resonate among citizens are more successful. ³⁵ Sundstrom illustrates this in Russia, contrasting the success of women’s groups working on the locally accepted norm of “against bodily harm” to the struggles of those advocating feminism. ³⁶

Among individual-level factors that influence citizens’ participation, political culture, defined here as values, beliefs, and emotions that members of a society express about the political regime and their roles in it, ³⁷ affects how citizens participate. Citizens who prioritize the outputs, rather than the norms and processes, of democracy and expect others to solve their problems are unlikely to participate civically. ³⁸ In contrast, greater access to resources should boost citizen engagement. Greater financial resources, higher levels of education, ³⁹ psychological engagement, ⁴⁰ and opportunities to hone civic skills through civic groups encourage citizen participation. ⁴¹

The Evolution of Civic Engagement

The structural context of post-war BiH adversely affects how civil society groups interact with citizens, as well as citizens’ access to resources and belief that their participation can make a difference. It was not until 2014 that mass protests and plenums contested what Kurtović argues were “previously dominant descriptions of Bosnian citizens as passive and apathetic.” ⁴² Driven by indignation about precarity resulting from Dayton-structured neoliberal reforms, ⁴³ these protests and plenums launched in ten cities forced socio-economic issues onto the political agenda and featured calls for social justice and class-based solidarity. ⁴⁴ The social and socio-economic appeals, which included demands for audits of the salaries and benefits of local and regional public officials and of privatization, were designed to resonate across ethnic lines and to withstand ruling elites’ efforts to deflect socio-economic problems onto ethnic “others.” These appeals avoided divisive political issues like constitutional change. ⁴⁵ Notably, this participatory activism was organized by non-institutionalized actors. ⁴⁶ They excluded local NGOs who were perceived as supporting the status quo ethnopolitical class ⁴⁷ and as donor driven. Echoing a student participant’s view that the plenums represented “the first time that the real civil society expressed itself,” ⁴⁸ Eminagić argues plenums gave citizens the chance to talk freely about their experiences with post-war political and economic dispossession. ⁴⁹ Indeed, frustration with formal civic organizations’ lack of attention to citizens’ needs and the mobilizing capacity of social media have facilitated horizontal mobilizations. This form of activism is similar to recent citizen mobilization in CEE and globally using less hierarchical and more loosely networked ways ⁵⁰ through protests, sit-ins, boycotts, and plenums on issues of shared concern. ⁵¹

Arsenijević contends that plenums allowed people who had as a result of war withdrawn from public life to have a say about the matters that concern them in everyday life. ⁵² These demands diverge from the liberal democratic values advocated by Western-supported local NGOs and appear consistent with a 2018 global assessment, ⁵³ which found much civil society activism related to basic, everyday issues. Sundstrom, Henry, and Sperling in this special section describe everyday activism as tending to focus on practical problems citizens encounter in their daily lives, attracting participation by regular citizens rather than full-time activists, and lacking formal organizational structure. For example, citizens in northern Russia have mobilized against the creation of a new landfill in their community out of fear it would contaminate their water and air. ⁵⁴ Several scholars argue everyday activism is an approach intentionally chosen by activists in Serbia in the hope that it is more effective than activism aimed at national politics. ⁵⁵

Have citizens’ grievances about socio-economic issues continued after 2014 to displace either liberal democratic or ethno-national frames of concern? ⁵⁶ Or have ethno-national grievances reemerged to animate citizen action as conservative issues have recently done in neighboring Croatia, Poland, and Hungary? ⁵⁷ Youngs describes conservative CSOs as those that promote “conservative social values, religious values, strong national identities, exclusionary ethnic identities, traditional or customary identities and institutional forms, illiberal political ideology, [and/]or a curtailment of liberal personal rights.” ⁵⁸

In sum, literature suggests civic engagement in BiH and across CEE is better described as multi-dimensional, varied in content and form, ⁵⁹ and dynamic than as weak and narrow. ⁶⁰ Building on this literature featuring qualitative research, this article investigates through a nationally representative survey in BiH the proposition that citizens are most likely to participate in civic action when it concerns everyday social problems: concrete material, especially local concerns that affect them directly, rather than more abstract, explicitly political issues perceived to only indirectly concern them. It also probes through interviews whether civic activists frame their work to address the norms and priorities of citizens in ways that empower citizen engagement.

Data

In the challenging context of BiH, this study analyzes different kinds of data on civic participation since bursts of activism in 2014 to describe and explain civic engagement. It highlights analysis of data from original, nationally representative surveys conducted in 2019 in BiH and four other countries in CEE: Poland, Czechia, Russia, and Ukraine. ⁶¹ It also integrates findings from other nationally representative surveys of youth and adults in BiH. Media and secondary analysis depict large mobilizations.

To supplement data from surveys and media, and to probe the approaches and frames that civil society leaders use to engage citizens, this article analyzes semi-structured interviews conducted in June 2019 with ten civil society activists in four towns in BiH. ⁶² Interviews were conducted with civic leaders working in different communities and for organizations that varied according to aspects theorized to affect their capacity to engage citizens: issues of focus, level of formality, and approach to change. Open-ended response options allow individuals to describe and explain their own views of and experiences with civic activism.

Levels of Participation

Analysis of original survey data from 2019 on BiH indicates modest participation by citizens in civic activities in the past year—22.9 percent of respondents engaged. Respondents in BiH reported engagement at a level consistent with respondents in other countries in our cross-national study, including in Poland, but at a level lower than respondents in Czechia, where 47.8 percent of respondents reported participation. The most cited type of participation was donating money to a CSO, followed by volunteering and signing a petition (Table 1).

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Table 1

Type of Participation in Civic Activities in BiH in the Past Year (N = 235)

Type of activity	% of mentions
Donating money to a citizens association or NGO	13.9
Volunteering	13.6
Signing a petition (in-person or online)	13.6
Social movement	11.7
Organizing neighbors, co-workers, or other groups around some common interest	9.9
Protest, demonstration, or strike	9.1
Public discussion/consultations	7.5
Sharing information about a public issue on social media (posting, commenting, or forwarding)	7.5
Contacted, or attempted to contact, a politician or a civil servant to express your views	5.9
Other	4.0
Active involvement and/or membership in a civil society organization	3.5
Total Activities Mentioned	375

Source: “Perceptions of Civil Society and Activism,” survey conducted by IPSOS Bosnia-Herzegovina, November 2019.

Note: BiH = Bosnia-Herzegovina; NGO = non-governmental organization.

Content of Engagement

Active respondents were most often motivated to participate by helping those vulnerable, improving social services, and addressing particular issues. Respondents specified their reasons for participation as helping others in need (18.4% of mentions), advocating for more or better services (14.5%), raising people’s awareness and knowledge about a problem or issue (14.5%), and addressing a local concern or issue (10.9%) (Table 2). Respondents in BiH were equally as likely as respondents across our survey’s countries to mention their motivation for engagement as helping those in need, while more likely to mention advocating for more or better services. The second and fourth motivations are clearly consistent with everyday activism’s focus on practical concerns, often considered social or economic issues, rooted in daily life, and typically located close to home. The first is connected to the locally accepted norm of helping those socially vulnerable, and likely includes everyday humanitarianism, such as making donations for medical treatment. ⁶³ “Raising peoples’ awareness and knowledge about a problem or issue” is harder to pin down, and could refer to either a concrete problem or a more abstract, idealized goal like social justice or conservative values.

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Table 2

Motive for Participation in Civic Activities in BiH in the Past Year

Motive	% of mentions a
To help someone or a group in need	18.4
To advocate for more or better services	14.5
To raise people’s awareness and knowledge about a problem or issue	14.5
To address a local concern or issue	10.9
To fight corruption	9.9
To support a local government or its policy	9.7
To support national government or its policy	6.0
To protest against the local or national government or government policy	5.6
To protest against economic or employment conditions	5.1
Because my friends or family are involved	4.8
Other	0.7

Source: “Perceptions of Civil Society and Activism,” survey conducted by IPSOS Bosnia-Herzegovina, November 2019.

Note: Number of respondents = 235, number of mentions = 414. BiH = Bosnia-Herzegovina.

a

Respondents were able to mention all that apply.

A survey question asking citizens to identify the largest unmet problems that could be addressed by citizen participation sought to capture the issues that garnered citizen support for civic action. The top three answers were unemployment, poverty, and work-related issues; corruption; and health and social care (Table 3). The first and third highest answers convey support for everyday activism. Citizens also seem to conceive of corruption as a concrete problem limiting economic opportunities, rather than as only an amorphous force. ⁶⁴

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Table 3

Largest Unmet Problems ^a that Could Be Addressed by the Involvement of Citizens

	% of mentions
Unemployment, poverty, and work-related issues	18.5
Corruption	14.1
Health and social care	14.1
Human rights	10.1
Rights of socially vulnerable groups	7.2
Rule of Law, impartial judiciary	6.2
Women’s rights	5.5
Environmental protection	5.2
Education	4.7
Quality and sustainability of democracy	4.6
Greater protection of national values	4.0
Protection from Europeanization/Westernization	2.8
Protection of Religious values	2.8
Other	0.3

Source: “Perceptions of Civil Society and Activism,” survey conducted by IPSOS Bosnia-Herzegovina, November 2019.

Note: Number of respondents = 1,028; Number of mentions: 3,083.

a

Respondents were able to choose three.

As another indicator of respondents’ support for civic engagement on tangible community issues, the top choice of respondents to our survey question about what would influence their decision about whether to trust a CSO to do the right thing for the people of BiH was “the organization has done something to improve our community” (25.8%). The option of policy advocacy trailed behind.

Data from other recent surveys and investigations of civic activism in BiH support our survey’s findings about public participation often involving everyday concerns and consistent with the local norm of helping vulnerable people. One study found citizens in BiH assessed CSO legitimacy through the idea of “solving concrete problems.” ⁶⁵ A 2015 youth survey in BiH indicated the most commonly reported types of volunteer activities focused on needs in the community and assisting vulnerable groups. ⁶⁶ Young people in a 2018 survey prioritized values focused on tangible economic and social concerns over more abstract ideals such as individual freedom. ⁶⁷ These polls likely reflect BiH citizens’ anger about the post-war state’s unwillingness to provide quality basic services. Bosnians’ frustration about the state’s withdrawal from providing services is shared by many citizens across the globe. ⁶⁸

Largely consistent with our survey’s findings on civic participation on everyday concerns, qualitative research by Puljek-Shank and Fritsch document a shift after the 2014 plenums’ lack of progress on social justice goals to a pragmatic “local first” approach. ⁶⁹ Similar to a strategy used by recent social movements in Serbia and North Macedonia, these actions focus on issues that are concrete and local yet also have broader symbolic meaning and resonance. ⁷⁰ These concrete issues in BiH include helping victims of floods, opposing the closing of a hospital, and supporting the restarting of a worker-managed factory. These tangible, often place-based concerns also speak to larger problems of public corruption and citizen concern about the government’s abandonment of responsibility for citizens’ basic socio-economic well-being. Recent protests against another place-based concern—the building of hydroelectric dams—have been launched by citizen, women, sporting, and ecological activists from rural and urban areas. They have decried the dams as projects driven by greed and threatening drinking water sources, ecotourism, or biodiversity. ⁷¹ These initiatives changed regional policy, with the Federation parliament banning new construction of small hydroelectric dams, a step boosted by approval from actor Leonardo DiCaprio. ⁷²

The suspicious and unsolved deaths of two young men in Banja Luka and Sarajevo in 2018 and 2017, respectively, have spurred sizable, repeated protests by the “Justice for David“ and “Justice for Dženan Memić” movements. ⁷³ One respondent described these family-led movements as against everyday corruption. ⁷⁴ Another claimed they struck a chord because ordinary people were arrested for minor infractions of the law while public officials routinely got away with large crimes. ⁷⁵ Illustrating the resonance of the movement, it mobilized 10,000s of more people compared with the RS ruling party’s smaller counter-mobilization in late 2018. Although these movements continue to mobilize citizens, they are more ambitious and target higher-level corruption than everyday activism or a localized approach. They have been met with violent repression in the RS and have not changed policy, although they may have contributed to victories of opposition parties in a number of Bosnia’s cities in the 2020 local elections.

Citizens expressing conservative goals have also publicly engaged in BiH. Secondary analysis and media suggest that conservative citizens are often mobilized through ruling nationalist parties in BiH. As mentioned above, RS’s ruling party mobilized its conservative backers against the Justice for David supporters in 2018. ⁷⁶ Conservative activists used threats and violence to deter or disrupt LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) events until 2019, when human rights activists in BiH used a mix of transactional and participatory approaches to hold the country’s first Pride march. ⁷⁷ Surprisingly few respondents prioritized conservative issues in answers to our survey question asking about the largest unmet problems that could be addressed by the involvement of citizens. Only 4.0 percent of respondents’ mentions were “greater protection of national values,” 2.8 percent of mentions identified “protection from Europeanization or Westernization,” and 2.8 percent of mentions specified “protection of religious values” (Table 3). Our survey data indicating that few citizens view conservative causes as large unmet problems to be addressed by civic engagement suggest that groups advocating conservative issues are more vocal than broad-based.

Forms of Participation

Citizen responses about their civic participation suggest how they engage includes, but reaches beyond, formal organizations. Of the 22.9 percent of respondents who engaged in a public activity in the past year, just over half—52.3 percent—reported membership in a voluntary association, with 83.0 percent of those being CSOs. When asked about how they engaged publicly, 13.9 percent of respondents’ mentions involved donating money to CSOs while only 3.5 percent of respondents’ mentions indicated active membership or involvement in a CSO. In comparison, the role of groups in facilitating other types of participation was ambiguous. Volunteering (13.6%); signing a petition (13.6%); participating in a social movement (11.7%); organizing neighbors, co-workers, or other groups around a common issue (9.9%); and participating in a protest or strike (9.1%) could be done either with or without CSOs.

Secondary analysis portrays significant citizen action through non-institutionalized, horizontally organized activities, consistent with everyday activism featuring citizens rather than full-time activists. Citizen activists involved in the plenums later mobilized informally to provide aid to victims of flooding in May 2014, after public authorities largely failed to do so. ⁷⁸ The movements seeking justice for murdered young men have been led by families rather than CSOs.

Explaining Civic Engagement

Delving beyond describing civic participation, I conducted multivariate statistical analysis of the survey data to explain participation. Analysis tested the effect of resources, demographics, norms, and grievances on the probability that a respondent participated in at least one public activity in the past year (Table A1 describes coding).

The factors that had a statistically significant relationship to civic participation in BiH include agreement with a norm of citizen engagement, grievance about how democracy is working, the resources of education ⁷⁹ and membership in voluntary groups, and the demographic variables of age and ethnicity. More specifically, the higher a respondent’s agreement that citizens should be actively engaged in social and public life, the greater her dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working in BiH, and the higher her memberships in voluntary groups, the greater the probability she engaged in a civic activity (Table 4, Model 1). In addition, a respondent who is more educated, is younger, and is of a background other than Bosniak is more likely to civically participate. The significance of resources is consistent with literature predicting activism. That said, it is worth noting that membership in CSOs still facilitates participation even in an environment where participation often appears less-institutionalized. The impact of youth and agreement with the norm that citizens should be actively engaged points to the importance of democratic political culture for participation. Bosniaks’ lower level of engagement compared with Croats, Serbs, and “others” is surprising and cannot be explained by differences between entities. Finally, dissatisfaction with democracy’s functioning fuels rather than depresses activism.

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Table 4

Predicting Engagement in at Least One Civic Activity in BiH

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3
Resources
Education	.0536*	.0529*	.0502*
Group Membership index	.3118***	.3110***	.3095***
Demographics
Age	–.0017*	–.0016*	–.0017*
Gender	.0153	.0121	.0223
Settlement	–.0434	–.0458	–.0374
Ethnicity	.0275*	.0286*	.0265*
Norms
Prefer democratic government	–.0116	–.0094	–.0141
Citizens should be actively engaged in social and public life	.0570*	.0624*	.0732*
Satisfaction with the way democracy is working	–.0383**	–.0348*	–.0328*
Concerns
Unemployment and corruption		–.0795*
Conservative values			.1790**
Cons.	.1994*	.2359*	.1448*
Observations	1,015	1,015	1,015
R 2	.2326	.2361	.2415

Source: “Perceptions of Civil Society and Activism,” survey conducted by IPSOS Bosnia-Herzegovina, November 2019.

Note: BiH = Bosnia-Herzegovina.

*

significant at the .05 level, **significant at the .01 level, ***significant at the .001 level.

The second and third models test whether citizens’ prioritization of certain unmet problems deserving of citizen engagement influences their own civic action. Model 2 includes a dimension centered on concern about unemployment and corruption, suggesting citizens linked corruption with socio-economic outcomes. Model 3 focuses on concern about conservative values, specifically protection of national values and from Europeanization. ⁸⁰ Analysis found concern about intractable socio-economic problems negatively related to civic engagement (Table 4, Model 2), but concern about conservative values positively related to engagement (Table 4, Model 3). This suggests those respondents most concerned about conservative values—even though they make up only 6.8 percent of the mentions of the largest unmet problems (Table 3)—are more likely than respondents focused on other problems to take public action in BiH, increasing their visibility and potential power.

Activists’ Perspectives on Civic Engagement

Theory on frame alignment suggests that CSOs can effectively create opportunities for participatory action if they frame contentious issues in ways that resonate with citizens. ⁸¹ Our survey suggests that civic activists interested in engaging a broad base of BiH citizens would benefit from portraying their work in ways that tap into citizens’ priorities of everyday concerns and the norm of helping those in need. Citizens most often mentioned unemployment, corruption, and health and social care as the largest unmet problems that could be addressed by citizens. Those citizens who have participated embrace the norm of citizen engagement in social and public life and are dissatisfied with the way BiH’s democracy is working. They express greater trust in CSOs that do something to improve their community. This section analyzes interview testimony to begin to probe if civic activists use approaches and frames that align with the concerns and norms our respondents identified. ⁸²

Illustrating steps to encourage participatory action, several activists whose organizations had significant roots in the community emphasized concerted interaction with their constituents to understand their problems and develop activities that respond to community members’ needs. ⁸³ One activist advocated prioritizing the needs of citizens over the survival of one’s CSO. ⁸⁴ Although an activist with a more hierarchical CSO believed that connecting with rural citizens required going house-to-house, he provided no evidence of his CSO doing this. In addition, other activists ⁸⁵ critiqued the work of his CSO for playing the “NGO game” ⁸⁶ of catering to foreign donors rather than to citizens. A youth activist admitted, “we should have done more to ask communities about what is needed.” ⁸⁷

Many activists acknowledged citizens’ priority concerns about everyday struggles, recognizing that CSOs needed to connect their work to citizens’ everyday lives. An activist seeking to increase the percentage of women in IT jobs attributed progress to responding to both young people’s dire need for jobs and IT businesses’ need for skilled workers. ⁸⁸ As an illustration of everyday environmentalism, an activist for a self-described grassroots organization highlighted how it stopped construction of an enterprise in his small town that would have threatened the quality of local air and water by mobilizing citizens to halt local government permission. ⁸⁹ One activist for a marginalized group described her CSO’s three-pronged strategy for working toward her organization’s goals of respect for human rights and social inclusion. ⁹⁰ The strategy included top-down and participatory approaches through changing laws and community-based work of building a community of supporters of this marginalized group. This involved ignoring the donor-friendly term of “non-discrimination,” which she said citizens bristled over as everybody feels discriminated against, for example, by politicized employment practices. Instead, she described a workshop with high school students that used the frame of shared human needs by illustrating that the top concerns of this marginalized group were the same as citizens throughout BiH: employment and poverty.

Noting citizens’ interests in civic action achieving concrete results, several activists suggested adopting a strategy of tackling issues on which progress can be made. One activist described his vision of how to empower citizens: “The wrong approach of NGOs is when they argue entrenched corruption is everywhere. [Instead] they must offer concrete suggestions about what is best for both public employees and citizens to do” about corruption. ⁹¹ As an effort to do this, he was battling corruption in the health sector, which citizens encounter in their daily lives. Several CSOs were working on transparency initiatives to reduce corruption in health care. ⁹²

In discussing their organizations’ relationship to citizens, several activists who critically reflected on their activism acknowledged that doing more to make visible improvements in communities would help CSOs engage more citizens. Reflecting on her twenty years of work with different CSOs, an activist recognized that she was motivated to stay engaged because she can see the difference in her town (as measured by educational outcomes) of the work of her current small citizens association. ⁹³ She contrasted this with the burnout she experienced working for a large international NGO in Sarajevo, where results were more elusive. A youth activist feared citizens believed CSOs engaged in “money laundering” because they do not see the impact of the money CSOs receive. ⁹⁴

However, this youth activist and an activist working against corruption ⁹⁵ were both skeptical that evidence could change peoples’ minds about CSOs’ work and encourage citizen activism. Instead, they were concerned about peoples’ “mentality” of passivity toward and coping with dysfunctional public institutions and/or the lack of logic behind their views.

Analysis of testimony from a small number of CSO activists suggests that activists in BiH understood many of citizens’ concerns, although hierarchical CSOs appeared less effective in demonstrating this in their work. It provides modest support for an approach tied to everyday concerns and seeking concrete results. However, it also offers evidence for an approach that flows in the opposite direction, in which CSOs work on large problems and then attempt to explain to citizens how these problems should matter for their everyday lives. Even activists who acknowledge that CSOs can do better in engaging citizens often consider the hostility of hybrid political authorities, dwindling and narrowly focused donors, and citizens’ disinterest as stubborn obstacles to civic action. These findings from a modest number of interviews require more substantial field research to assess their generalizability. Activists who criticized citizens for passivity and coping seemed to miss the opportunity to take advantage of citizens’ broad agreement with the norm that citizens should be actively engaged in social and public life (77.5% of respondents) and to funnel widespread dissatisfaction with how democracy is working (69.0% of respondents) into civic engagement.

What are the social and political consequences of and potential for everyday activism in BiH? The survey data support Puljek-Shank and Fritsch’s argument that it has boosted BiH citizens’ views about legitimacy of civic activism, through its focus on problems that matter first to people rather than to donors or ruling parties. Media and secondary analysis suggest it has helped solve concrete problems and has sometimes brought about policy change especially at BiH’s local and sometimes at regional levels. Multiple scholars assert BiH CSOs most often achieved policy changes that were implemented when they used both participatory approaches engaging citizens around everyday concerns and transactional activist approaches. ⁹⁶ These two-pronged approaches are illustrated here by the civic mobilization against everyday environmental threats and for everyday rights for marginalized citizens. ⁹⁷ Participation around everyday concerns demonstrates how ordinary citizens and CSO activists have adapted and continue to adapt to constraints imposed by BiH’s consociational system that incentivizes ethnonationalism, particularly at the highest levels of governance, while still making a difference. ⁹⁸