Non-Governmental Actors

The role and the effects of international diffusion, understood as a process, in the post-Soviet political, social and economic transformations (regardless of their democratic or non-democratic character) cannot be fully embraced without taking into consideration the heterogeneity of participating governmental, inter-governmental or non-governmental actors (see e.g. Stone 2000, 2004) embedded in specific configurations of power relations. The complexity of external influences in the post-Soviet regime change is inter alia revealed by the multilevel regime transition approach in Obydenkova and Libman’s Chapter 2 to this volume, placing external and internal actors into multiple polity settings (national, subnational and supranational). Whether conceptualized in terms of international or transnational diffusion ¹ of cognitive and organizational models (e.g. Börzel and Risse 2012; Simmons, Dobbin and Garrett 2006; Strang and Soule 1998) or in terms of policy transfers ² (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Evans and Davies 1999; Dolowitz and Marsh 1996), the process ‘by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000: 5) cannot be perceived as programmed replication, implying ‘departure and arrival points’ (Dakowska 2006: 717). This uncertain and unforeseeable character of diffusion can be attributed to the effects produced by the multiplicity of agents acting in international/transnational or national/subnational polity settings and the diversity – often the divergence – of their objectives and logics (professional, ideological or other, proper to each field of activity).