Putting Nonprofits on the Policy Agenda of Post-Soviet Russia: A Story of Convergence

The Early Post-Soviet Period: 1991 to latter mid-1970s

The Russian nonprofit scene already apparent in the early post-Soviet period was far from monolithic. Russia had long been the site of a sizable array of citizen-focused, Soviet mass organizations, created by the state or party and designed to tie different constituencies to the regime (Kulmala & Tarasenko, 2016). As the perestroika period gave way to the collapse of the Soviet Union, these “legacy organizations” transformed themselves into regular nonprofits and attached themselves to increasingly autonomous regional governors, trading political support for financial subsidization (Cook & Vinogradova, 2006; Kulmala & Tarasenko, 2016). In addition, however, Russian citizens began forming their own, often-volunteer, organizations to serve a variety of unmet or under-met social needs (Jakobson & Sanovich, 2010; Pape, 2014). Finally, thanks in part to a significant surge of Western aid, a host of human rights, democracy promotion, environmental, and nonprofit support organizations took shape.

The governmental response to these developments was generally facilitative. Special laws were enacted to authorize establishment of multiple types of NPOs: public associations (May 19, 1995), youth and children social associations (June 28, 1995), charitable organizations (August 11, 1995), NPOs (January 12, 1996), and organizations for the protection of people with disabilities (November 24, 1995). Other legislation authorized the private provision of health and education services (Federal Laws N3266-1 and N 5487-1, respectively).

Although the result was a legal framework for NPOs similar to that in developed Western countries, no meaningful move was made to put in place the substantial “welfare partnership” model of nonprofit activity characterized by widespread reliance on NPOs in the provision of government-financed social welfare services that was by then widely evident in much of Western Europe and the United States (Salamon & Abramson, 1982; Salamon, 1987a; Salamon, 1995; Salamon et al., 2004, pp. 43–44; Salamon et al., 2017). Rather, the dominant attitude of the Russian government in the 1990s was one of well-wishing noninterference in third-sector affairs. Most Russian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seemed satisfied with this, very likely because noninterference was far superior to the outright hostility that typically confronted them in the past, and because they had access to substantial public and private funding from abroad and therefore could operate without state support. In addition, as noted more fully below, by the end of this period a number of them had succeeded in initiating fruitful partnerships with local political elites and businesses.

Not a Problem Stream Oversight

Viewed through the prism of the MSF, one thing that seems clear is that the inability to get active government–nonprofit cooperation in the provision of human services onto Russia’s active policy agenda during this period was not a lack of problems to be solved. Russian citizens had long since become highly dissatisfied with the performance of the bureaucratized Russian social welfare apparatus and this survived into the post-Soviet period, exacerbated by a sharp decline in government funding for health and education (Gaidar, 2003, p. 751). One of the earliest post-Soviet independent public opinion surveys, taken in 1998, thus found only 5% of respondents agreeing that “the state lives up to its obligations to the citizens” (Levada Center, 2014, p. 46).

A Distracted Policy Stream

The real barrier to bringing a serious program of government–nonprofit cooperation in the provision of social welfare services onto the active policy agenda lay, rather, in the MSF’s “policy stream.” For one thing, no real “nonprofit policy community” had yet gelled during this period to advance workable proposals. Even if it had, however, the proposals would have encountered significant push-back on grounds of “technical feasibility.” In a word, Russia’s nonprofit sector was not yet in a position to take on a major role in social welfare provision. Even the far more substantial Soviet legacy organizations were hardly equipped for such functions and other service-providing components of the sector were embryonic at best. As one prominent resource center leader conceded:

The civil society was quite weak at that time . . . Only a very few experts . . . could envisage that the civil society [could] become an important force. (Interviewee 8)

Meantime, the policy community in effective control of the policy agenda during this period, while quite aware of the social-sphere problems, had other priorities. As one expert noted, “the absolute priority for the reformers was to achieve an economic break-through. First, the market sector had to emerge and begin developing . . . When some fruits are generated [by the market sector] they can be utilized” (Interviewee 2).

Implicit in this formulation, and in the hands-off attitude toward nonprofits during this period, was a fairly constricted image of the nonprofit sphere. Nonprofits, in this view, were useful accouterments of advanced societies, enriching citizen life through culture, sports, and hobbies; providing premier services for those able to pay; facilitating political engagement and human rights; but not assuming primary responsibilities for human service provision.

On the contrary, the only social-sector reform ideas percolating in the policy primeval soup at this time focused on preserving, not dismantling, the prevailing state-dominated system of direct social welfare provision. Reflecting this, the 1993 Russian Constitution proclaimed Russia a “Social State” and delineated an impressive list of social and economic guarantees the State owes its citizens. Reformers considered such guaranteed state social welfare provision to be one feature of the Soviet system worth preserving because its investments in human capital would offer Russia a crucial comparative advantage in its transition to a market economy (Gaidar, 2003, p. 36). Their policy ideas therefore reflected concepts embodied in the New Public Management and its Thatcherite “quasi-market” cousin calling for injection of business-type performance indicators into state-dominated social welfare bureaucracies and a shift to consumer-side subsidies that would force state-run service establishments to compete for “customers” against for-profit providers in the market (Borins, 1995; Gref Program, 2000, pp. 7–11, 25; Lane, 2000; Tullock, 1965). Little attention was paid, however, to notions of government–nonprofit interdependence or the “welfare partnership” pattern evident in much of Western Europe and the United States.

Significantly, this constricted image of the nonprofit sphere was reinforced by the external agencies funding Russia’s nonprofit development during this period. Far from encouraging nonprofit engagement in human service provision, the United States, for example, focused its energies on democracy promotion (Quigley, 2000, p. 198). This focus was shared, moreover, by other Western donors, which concentrated their aid on organizations involved in “democratic consolidation” (Carothers & Ottoway, 2000). The notion that civil society could be actively engaged in the delivery of social welfare services, or that such involvement could strengthen their advocacy activity, was never effectively integrated into this substantial support strategy.

Political Stream Challenges

Further complicating possible agenda status for the idea of a deeper partnership between government and the nonprofit sector was the likelihood that any such proposal would fail Kingdon’s “value acceptability” test, and therefore its political viability. Despite their strong misgivings about the quality of state-provided human services, the 1998 Levada survey revealed that more than 70% of Russia’s citizens remained firmly convinced that “most people will not be able to survive without tutelage from the state” (Levada Center, 2014, p. 46). The strong public push-back during this period to the possible replacement of direct state-provided health care with a private health insurance scheme further confirmed that tampering with the Communist regime’s comprehensive social safety net would be “underappreciated” by the population and hence a nonstarter in the political stream.

Finally, the value acceptability of greater reliance on NPOs was also put at serious risk during this early post-Soviet period by growing reports of widespread abuse of the new nonprofit laws. Because the new laws granting tax and other benefits to nonprofits were not accompanied by sufficient enforcement of the nonprofit-distribution constraint under which such organizations were supposed to operate, far too many registered nonprofits turned out to be for-profits “in disguise,” tainting the reputation of this sector (Jakobson & Sanovich, 2010, pp. 285–287; Kuzminov, 2007).

In short, Kingdon’s MSF offers useful insights pinpointing why the possibility of integrating nonprofit providers into Russia’s human service delivery system never made it on to the active reform agenda during the first decade of post-Soviet policymaking. This is all the more striking in view of the social welfare crisis that the transition to a market economy triggered by eliminating a key component of the former regime’s social welfare system: the state-owned enterprises that actually provided many of the crucial social welfare services (Wathen & Allard, 2014). Nor did the more systematic plan for coping with this crisis that emerged from the so-called “Gref Center” at the turn of the century acknowledge a significant role for NPOs. While identifying nonstate providers as essential elements for a fully “modernized” social welfare system, the Gref Program did not single out nonprofits as a subsector especially crucial to such modernization. As late as 2007, therefore, a prominent independent Russian think tank, itself a nonprofit, could publish a broad overview of the history of Russian welfare reforms that faulted “civil society institutions,” such as NGOs, for “playing essentially no role in social policy formulation,” due to their “overall weakness” and inability “to formulate their own constructive proposals . . .” (Maleva, 2007, p. 15).

An Opening From the Problem Stream

One factor at work is what Kingdon would recognize as the evolving “problem stream” facing Russian policymakers in the latter 1990s and into the first decade of the new century. In particular, the disastrous virtual collapse of the Russian economy in this period, coupled with the disappearance of the previous prop for the country’s social welfare system provided by state-owned enterprises, created a budgetary crisis for Russian policymakers. Not surprisingly in this climate, attention came to focus on the “very big [government] funds” flowing into the social policy sphere (Interviewee 4). Worse yet, the substantial funds being absorbed by this sphere did not seem to be relieving popular dissatisfaction with the quality of available services. Well into the first decade of the new century, over half of the population still rated the state’s medical care and social services as “bad,” and only 5% rated them as “good” (National Research University Higher School of Economics, 2011, p. 2). Policymakers were therefore on the look-out for ways to address this situation, creating an opening for nonprofit policy entrepreneurs.

Constructing a Nonprofit Presence in the Policy Stream

Fortuitously, in regions spread broadly across the country, embryonic NPOs were busily at work during the latter 1990s and early 2000s filling this void. Faced with the loss of important elements of the previous social welfare delivery system, and with help from many of the support centers initially sponsored by Western donors, a new breed of indigenous NPOs moved into the breach, providing tangible aid to a host of populations never served, or left underserved, by the state social welfare system. More than that, in a number of regions—Novosibirsk, Archangelsk, Yaroslavl, Krasnoyarsk, and St. Petersburg—they successfully reached out to recently empowered regional authorities for support and persuaded local businesses to kick in as well. Slowly but surely, the indigenous NPO communities began to develop a reputation for technical competence, innovative programming, and the ability to work with local authorities and generate business support. The city of Krasnoyarsk thus launched a municipal grant competition for NPOs working with youth in 1999, and the regional government followed up with a broader “Social Partnership” grant competition for NPOs in 2005 (Interviewee 7). NPOs in the Novosibirsk region reported establishing interactions with authorities in that region as early as 1997–1998 that led to regional government funding of NPO-originated hotlines for women experiencing violence, family crisis centers and other services” (Interviewee 8). A nonprofit support center leader in Arkhangelsk Oblast explained clearly how the process of stimulating the creation of early regional nonprofit support programs took place:

We ourselves designed [this regional government support program]. We worked with the regional Parliament and with the Arkhangelsk City Administration to persuade them . . . We had experience making grants to nonprofits with funding from regional businesses—grants to support orphans, the elderly, and other categories of disadvantaged citizens. We accumulated positive experience with such social projects [and] were able to demonstrate both efficiency and effectiveness. (Interviewee 9)

Regional nonprofit leaders were not content to operate only in their separate regions, moreover. They reached out to the Presidential Representatives in their respective regions to report their achievements to Federal authorities (Interviewees 8 and 9). They co-organized Social Project Fairs through which to advertise and disseminate these regional experiments. The Presidential Representative in one of these districts, who later emerged as the First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, was so impressed by these developments that he began holding annual events to learn about, and publicize, NPO social innovations (Interviewee 9). NPOs were thus on their way to establishing what Kingdom would term the “technical feasibility” of their contributions to social welfare policy. As one regional nonprofit leader put it: “At first there are individual projects in the regions. The practice is tested, then it jumps to the federal level. I think this is an understandable mechanism” (Interviewee 9). It is also a mechanism easily recognized as a critical step in the agenda-setting process identified by Kingdon and other MSF analysts. In Kingdon’s terms, local nonprofits were effectively constructing a nonprofit “policy/solution stream” from the ground up.

New-Found Prominence in the Political Stream

A further crucial boost to active agenda status for the concept of state–nonprofit cooperation came, surprisingly enough, from the third of the key process streams identified by Kingdon: the political stream. This dimension of agenda-dynamics is particularly difficult to assess in the context of Russia, but it seems clear that certain political and economic calculations were involved in what ultimately led to the break-through moment of NPO access to the policy agenda in 2009. For one thing, because of the NPOs’ success in tapping business contributions, increased cooperation with NPOs offered one potential avenue for addressing the problem stream issue of inadequate budgetary resources for the social-sector. Noted one official close to the discussions: “[O]ne could use the NPO’s resources. The state did have such an interest [in that] . . .” (Interviewee 4).

This feature of the pre-2009 regional NPO support programs was well understood by the programs’ designers. “Our main argument, built into the design of the program,” explained one such NPO leader, “was that for each ruble from the [region’s] budget, the program would raise a ruble from the business community. Fundraising from business sources was our responsibility . . . The program generated extra-budgetary resources for the social sphere” (Interviewee 9).

This possibility naturally attracted the attention of the Presidential Administration, confirming the MSF’s suggestion that links to an on-going problem stream can be enormously helpful in gaining agenda status for an idea. Whether for this or other reasons, steps were initiated in the early years of the Putin era in Russian politics to “turn the third sector into an ally in solving social problems and, at the same time, prevent its politicization.” (Jakobson & Sanovich, 2010, p. 294; Interviewee 3). The strategy for achieving this was to curry favor with those segments of the NPO community willing to work with the state without posing fundamental political challenges to its legitimacy. It was this strategy that likely led Vladimir Putin, newly elected as President in 2000, to follow the suggestion of his Presidential Administration to convene a Civic Forum in 2001 to begin a national dialogue to see what this newly visible citizen sector could contribute to the state’s social welfare activities. The result was a pivotal event not only for what it accomplished but also for what it set in motion. The Moscow Forum legitimized the nonprofit sector as a partner for government and served as a template for similar events in the regions. Ultimately, this led to legislation creating a network of “Public Chambers,” giving nonprofits a platform through which to demonstrate their readiness for cooperation with authorities and showcase the useful innovations they were capable of providing. This was then supplemented in 2005 by the launch of a modest program of “Presidential grants” to third-sector organizations. By the latter 2000s, therefore, this political stream had developed to the point at which more active state-civil society cooperation in support of shared social welfare goals became politically viable. As one NPO leader explained, “only after the Forum, did NPOs become noticed and recognized . . . The situation changed, and the development began” (Interviewee 2).

Creation of a Nonprofit Policy Community

As one of its most consequential outcomes, the establishment of formal venues for government–nonprofit dialogue in the regions helped form another crucial component identified in the MSF as a precursor to active agenda status: that is, a nonprofit policy community made up of newly emboldened “policy entrepreneurs.” Included here was a network of effective support center directors, NPO leaders, and academics, who naturally began to incubate ideas for policy steps that could help encourage and expand these NPO contributions.

The Higher School of Economics under the leadership of Rector Kuzminov and Vice Rector Jakobson assembled one such significant group of experts from several leading universities, think tanks, and NPOs (Interviewee 2). These experts in turn found their way to officials in the Government who were receptive to such ideas, including particularly in the Ministry of Economic Development (MED), which had been charged with formulating a “mid-term development program” for the government. In what the MSF would identify as a “softening up” process (Kingdon, 1984/2011, p. 127), this led, by 2004, to a shift in the venue for developing a concrete agenda of ideas for engaging civil society in the solution of social problems from external institutions to the MED and the formation within this Ministry of a working group drawing heavily on the recently established external nonprofit policy community (Interviewee 3). The nonprofit sector was now near to being incorporated into the official agenda of the government.

Two Additional Policy/Solution Stream Assists

Also helpful to an item’s prospects for reaching agenda status according to the MSF are the item’s consistency with ideas already “floating” in what Kingdon referred to as the policy “primeval soup”; and the item’s consistency with key societal values. In both cases, developments in the policy/solution stream during this early- to mid-2000s proved helpful in advancing the idea of government–nonprofit collaboration in the provision of social welfare services to active agenda status.

The first of these built on the New Public Management reform ideas advanced in the 1990s to introduce market logics into the social welfare system by authorizing outsourcing of service provision to nonstate, mainly for-profit, institutions (e.g., Government of the Russian Federation [GRF], 2005, 2010). As part of these measures, reform advocates successfully pushed for special set-asides to enable small and medium-sized business enterprises (SMEs) to participate in the embryonic social welfare outsourcing market. In the process, however, they provided what would become a convenient rationale for advocates of nonprofit involvement to press for comparable supports for nonprofits.

Similarly, important steps were taken to overcome the value deficit that had impeded earlier fuller nonprofit access to agenda status. Well into the 2000s, the regional branches of the state human service bureaucracies fought a rear-guard battle against the entire outsourcing strategy (Interviewee 8), complaining in particular about any suggestion that nonprofits be involved on grounds that nonprofit were “primarily political actors” fundamentally “working against” governmental agencies (Interviewees 7 and 1), and that “the people’s money” will get “lost” if it is “given” to NPOs (Interviewee 9). Complicating matters further, elements within the nonprofit sector itself, such as human rights NGOs, took issue with any move toward cooperation with public authorities on grounds that this would lead to a loss of nonprofit autonomy, mute the sector’s advocacy voice, and give state authorities undue control over the sector (Interviewee 2).

The sector’s demonstrations of technical competence, innovativeness, and effectiveness in handling regional grants went a long way toward undercutting such criticisms. Beyond this, however, scholars at the Higher School of Economics came forward in 2000 with a reconceptualization of the contemporary Russian nonprofit scene that offered a halo of sorts on the newly emerging nonprofit service-providing organizations. The heart of this reconceptualization was the identification of a distinctly new class of Russian NPOs, helpfully labeled “rooted” organizations. This distinguished the service-oriented organizations from both the fundamentally political organizations “imported” into Russia from abroad, from the “fake” nonprofits that surfaced in the 1990s, and from the pseudo-nonprofits that the surviving Soviet mass organizations had become (Jakobson & Sanovich, 2010). According to this reconceptualization, these “rooted organizations” were the true heirs to Russia’s many prerevolutionary charities, exhibiting “altruistic aspirations” and dedication to the actual service needs of the Russian people, thus legitimizing their significant involvement in the delivery of contemporary social welfare services.

A Useful Policy Window

Against this backdrop of potentially converging problem, policy/solution, and political streams, the formal end of the Putin presidency and the election of Dmitry Medvedev to replace him in 2008, though partly contrived, nevertheless seemed to provide just the extra impetus needed to move the discussion of incentives to promote government–nonprofit cooperation in the social welfare field into a more active phase (Interviewee 2). In Kingdon’s terms, it opened a “window of opportunity” to “couple” the three streams of problems, solutions, and politics and achieve formal agenda status for a program of state-NPO cooperation.

The Coupling Process: Emergence of an Effective “Policy/Political Entrepreneur”

According to Kingdon (1984/2011, p. 20), the fortuitous co-existence of advantageous separate streams of problems, solutions, and politics along with the opening of a window of opportunity, while necessary for an issue to gain agenda status, is still not sufficient. Also needed is what Kingdon termed a “policy entrepreneur,” that is, a person in a position to “coupl[e] solutions to problems, and problems and solutions to politics.”

In the case of Russia, at least in the case examined here, the term “policy entrepreneur” does not quite do justice to the actual role performed. This is so because here the agenda-setting phase of the policy process seems much more tightly tied to the policy decision phase, with actions in both spheres carried out in tandem, and, in this case, in the same institution. In a sense, unlike the suggestions of Herweg et al. (2015, p. 446), the roles of “policy entrepreneur” and “political entrepreneur” are almost merged in Russia as the policy entrepreneur tests policy ideas against the political appetites of higher ups in the bureaucracy as they are formulated.

Unfortunately, the closed nature of government decision-making in Russia makes it difficult to penetrate this aspect of the agenda-setting process. What is clear, is that such an effective policy-cum-political entrepreneur surfaced in the process leading to the rise of government–nonprofit cooperation to agenda status in the person of Artem Shadrin, an unassuming former researcher at the reform-oriented Gaidar Institute of Economic Policy and later at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), who assumed the position in the mid-2000s as Deputy Director of the Department of Analysis and Monitoring of Priority Programs in Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development (MED). In the words of one close observer, Shadrin treated the promotion of a substantial role for NPOs in human service delivery as “some sort of personal mission” (Interviewee 2). Shadrin was “the ‘true motor’” behind this move to bring NPOs into the provision of publicly funded human services, noted another (Interviewee 4).

Shadrin’s job was both to forge a consensus among the think tank, academic, and NPO support center figures that formed the informal “nonprofit bloc” already identified, and a key set of quite senior governmental leaders whose support would likely be needed to advance this idea through the MED and the powerful Presidential Administration. As a former researcher at the well-regarded Gaidar Institute and the HSE, Shadrin had immediate credibility with the “nonprofit bloc” of academics and practitioners. In his role as “political entrepreneur,” Shadrin had the benefit of key potential allies strategically located within the MED and the Presidential Administration. Included here were prominent Presidential Representatives in Russia’s regions, such as Sergey Kirienko in the Privolzhsky Federal District, who supported the NPO social project fairs that helped boost NPO credibility and who later became Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration; and Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration in the early 2000s, who oversaw the 2001 Civic Forum and headed a work group on the reform of NPO law. What is more, within the Ministry of Economic Development to which Shadrin was appointed in 2004, a succession of Deputy Ministers—Dimitriev, Levitskaya, Popova, Klepach, Fomichev, and ultimately MED Minister Nabiullina—articulated support for the promotion of a substantial role for NPOs in human service delivery.

In making the case to these officials, Shadrin was able to reference the problem stream concerns and potential solutions already attracting attention among his ministry colleagues: the enormous budgetary costs of the state-dominated human service delivery systems, the evidence of continued citizen dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of the resulting services, the search for “market-conforming” reforms that could inject greater competition and accountability into this system, and the evidence of growing nonprofit capability to deliver quality services and bring additional resources into the system.

MED was an ideal base from which to achieve this coupling of problems, solutions, and politics. Certainly in the Russian context, locating this function inside the bureaucracy was a definite plus. And MED was a particularly useful such locus, operating as it did outside the “social bloc” ministries of health, education, and social services, which, as one Interviewee 3 noted, have “conflicts of interest” in protecting “their own networks of government-owned institutions.” Perhaps because of this and its reputation for “solving problems requiring interagency coordination” (Interviewee 4), MED had been tasked with formulating a mid-term development program that included possible social welfare reforms (Interviewee 4). This gave Shadrin’s unit the legitimacy to advance proposals that other elements of the bureaucracy might easily have shot down.

Shadrin and his staff seem to have functioned as the secretariat to this array of actors, keeping the component parts informed, and keeping the topic alive and moving forward. He thus met the standard of the effective coupler portrayed by Herweg et al. (2018, p. 28): a person who “must be not only persistent but also skilled at coupling.”

What emerged from this process was a consensus “Concept to Facilitate the Development of Charitable Activities and Volunteering in the Russian Federation.” This document was then legitimized through a series of public hearings organized by the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation during 2008 and quickly advanced to official agenda status thanks to the “window of opportunity” created by Russia’s presidential election of 2008, which elevated Vladimir Putin’s ally, Dmitri Medvedev, to the presidency, and made “National Projects” aimed at increasing the effectiveness of the social-sphere a central element of the Medvedev–Putin platform. By June of 2009, therefore, the Concept document vetted through the Public Chamber in 2008 was issued as a high-level government decree (Postanovlenie Pravitelstva) complete with a list of “action items” that included development of the set of laws establishing the tool kit (GRF, 2009). These laws were then formally developed by the MED staff and approved without apparent modification by the state Duma over the next several years. This demonstrates that the suggestions made by some students of the MSF approach (e.g., Howlett et al., 2014) to the effect that additional streams are needed to handle the policy enactment phase of the policy process may not be needed in authoritarian polities such as Russia, where access to the active policy agenda is almost tantamount to enactment.