ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates three decades of aid provided to gender equality initiatives in Central-Eastern Europe and the debates and dilemmas associated with it. CEE offers a particularly rich case for studying how donor practices and priorities shape gender equality advocacy since emerging funding frameworks were developed and applied here, and women’s organizations were targeted as essential vehicles of change and recipients of aid. Three main debates interrogate the ways in which funding practices impact gender equality activism. The first, which emerged in CEE during the democratic assistance programs of the 1990s, involves the increasing NGOization of women’s organizing and the accompanying “project feminism.” The second debate, highlighted by the EU accession process and the project of building gender equality architectures, involves the increasing professionalization of women’s organizations and the legalistic strategies they pursue. The final debate, associated with the post-2008 period of austerity and the rise of right-wing populism in CEE, involves the ways in which the funding landscape has helped or hindered the inclusion of historically marginalized groups. These debates have produced important insights about how donor practices and priorities shape gender equality advocacy.
