in Albanian Journal of Politics, Vol. 4, N. 1, 2008.

This paper reconstructs the different phases of the western donors’ policy of supporting the development of a civil society in Albania and discusses why, after the initial welcoming of the policy, its outcomes in terms of growth of local NGOs have been widely considered unsatisfactory. What emerged from the inquiry is that the main criticism towards Civil Society Promotion (CSP), raised in the Albanian public sphere, was that its real beneficiaries turned out to be local NGO representatives themselves not the society at large. If the outcomes of CSP in Albania do not differ significantly from other post-communist contexts, the lack of previous experience of civil organizations and the economic and political troubles experienced by the country made the Albanian NGOs’ struggle to gain social legitimacy particularly difficult. The paper examines in detail this aspect by exploring in particular the local NGO representatives’ understanding of their role in the post-communist transformation.