NGOs and other quasi-autonomous bodies (autonomous from the state or other donors) to carry out tasks that were formerly directly organized by state authorities. Examples of such quasi-autonomous bodies are the national agencies that have been established for Roma minorities in the Czech Republic and Romania, or the Netherlands Institute for Sinti and Roma (NISR) that existed between 2009 and 2012 (cf. van Baar 2011a: 240–41; 2014b).
How this governmentalization of civil society has taken place at the international level and how it has been articulated and promoted by various IGOs have hitherto been largely underresearched. As I have argued elsewhere (van Baar 2011a: 8–16, 163–89), the World Bank’s “good governance” and the EU’s governance agendas, for instance, are dedicated to how the mobilization of civil societal actors should contribute to new participative and deliberative forms of global and European governance and to democratizing decision-making. The European Commission (2007a: 26), for example, puts forward that CSOs could be considered as “centers of expertise” that “capitalize on their knowledge of communities by becoming trainers and advisors for mainstream providers or governmental authorities.” Within the EU, the governmentalization of civil society relates to a longer tradition of trying to bring “Europe” closer to its citizens. Particularly since the early 1990s, the EU has launched various kinds of “proximity policies” to improve participatory democracy and limit the EU’s much discussed democratic deficit(s). The desire to bring the EU closer to its citizens was one of the reasons for initiating the influential subsidiarity principle in the early 1990s:
“We affirm that decisions must be taken as closely as possible to the citizen. Greater unity can be achieved without excessive centralization. . . . Bringing to life this principle—‘subsidiarity’ or ‘nearness’—is essential if the [European] Community is to develop with the support of its citizens”2 (Council of the European Union 1992: 5).
In the context of its new governance agenda, the EU has introduced several new discourses, mechanisms, and tools that are intended to bring decision-making closer to EU citizens. Lifelong learning, activation, and the so-called “Open Method of Coordination” (OMC) are examples of what can be conceptualized as neoliberal governmental technologies of proximity:
Technologies of proximity refer to all those discourses and practices which imagine democracy in terms of positive experiences of local engagement, participation, and connection. Proximity is affirmed at the level of the citizen body: democratic life is seen to benefit from a certain closeness and connection between citizens. It is also affirmed between citizens and the formal institutions of political authority: people should feel “closer” to government. (Walters and Haahr 2005: 76)
The tools that have been developed at local, national, and supranational levels to increase the role of Romani and pro-Roma civil societal actors in decision-making can also be considered from the angle of the articulation of these technologies of proximity. Several Romani and pro-Roma activists have moved into closer collaborations with national or supranational political institutions or even into their official bodies to help foster a wide range of Roma-related development programs (dealing with issues such as social inclusion, security, participatory initiatives, empowerment, active citizenship and remembrance, community building, community policing, etc.).
This development, in which CSOs have been increasingly governmentalized in the national and supranational contexts of Roma-related policy-making, has gone together with a different perception of the role of CSOs. IGOs, but also governments, have begun to see CSOs “not so much as alternatives to government but viewed [CSOs] alongside states and markets, where they not only delivered services but also formed part of a broader ‘third sector’” (Lewis 2010: 333). This development represents a two-way process, in which, on the one hand, CSOs have become more dependent on state and suprastate actors, regarding the funding, content, and diversity of their work. Most notably, CSOs have become more dependent on contracts for service delivery or research-related activities formulated by governments and IGOs. Since the requirements of these contracts have often been rigid and demanding, smaller and less influential CSOs can frequently not easily meet these terms. Consequently, the more professionalized CSOs have often been the only ones that have had a serious chance to make such contracts with governments and IGOs. The latter two actors have also been in a more powerful position to manage the boundaries between the sectors in the three-sector model. Under these circumstances, the difficulty of continuing CSO work has particularly affected smaller, less “professional,” less mainstream, and more “ideological” CSOs. As a result, this development has also led to less diversity among the CSOs that have succeeded continuing their activities in the field of Roma-related activism, service delivery, and development or community work.
On the other hand, the governmentalization of civil society has required CSOs to become more active and more inventive in advocacy work and lobbying in relation to what they consider as their key objectives. Particularly the stronger CSOs, such as those that are unified in the transnational activist network of the European Roma Policy Coalition, have mobilized the growing links with IGOs—and also with governments—to become more active in seeking to generate more attention to what they consider as crucial to making a change at international, domestic, and local levels, in relation to issues such as empowerment, participation, litigation regarding human and minority rights, the combating of antigypsyism and Romaphobia, gender, participatory action research, and “community” or “grassroots” development.
The tensions between CSOs on the one hand and IGOs and governments on the other, as well as the ambiguous impact of the governmentalization of civil society on CSOs, have become more visible and more explicit since the ethnic turn in EU policies regarding the Roma. To a large extent, the launch of the EU Roma Framework can be considered the outcome of years of lobbying and the perpetual call of some, particularly international, CSOs for the development of more effective, more specific, and less generic policy instruments to improve the situation of the Roma throughout Europe, and to make EU countries more directly and more effectively responsible for this improvement and the combating of all kinds of phenomena that have hitherto impeded this process.
Yet, one of the conclusions that has been drawn (European Roma Policy Coalition 2012; European Roma Rights Centre 2013), is that, in the majority of EU countries, CSOs have been excluded from the development, implementation, and official evaluation of the National Roma Integration Strategies (NRIS), even while the active inclusion of Roma and civil society actors in these processes has been one of the Framework’s requirements.3 Even in those cases in which Roma and civil society actors were consulted, their consultations have had almost no effect on the content of the NRIS documents and their policy articulation and implementation (if the latter has taken place at all). Equally importantly, topics that CSOs consider crucial to making a significant change—such as Roma participation in the development, implementation, and monitoring of policies, the combating of antigypsyism, gender equality, empowerment, a human rights-based approach, adequate budget allocation, and the adoption of effective accountability, coordination, and monitoring tools—are missing or inadequately incorporated in the NRIS (European Roma Policy Coalition 2012). Moreover, the strong focus on domestic affairs regarding education, health care, housing, and employment—which is already part of the EU Roma Framework itself—has led to a neglect of the transnational dimension of migration or to addressing migration one-sidedly with regard to particular priority areas, such as social security, public order, and crime (van Baar 2014a; 2014b; van Baar, Ivasiuc, and Kreide 2019). Last but not least, the development of the NRIS has revealed more explicitly the ambiguity of how state actors involved in Roma policy-making have defined and demarcated the identity category “Roma,” seemingly to dovetail the desired policies and their target groups (Matras 2013; van Baar 2014b). Thus, as a result of the ambiguous ways in which the EU Roma Framework has been incorporated in the present-day Roma-related political and policy landscapes, we are facing a period in which Roma-related CSOs have increasingly less to say about how Roma policies are (to be) envisioned, designed, implemented, and assessed.
Scholarly Assessments of Roma-Related Nongovernmental Engagements
More than a decade ago, the anthropologist Paloma Gay y Blasco (2002: 174) suggested that, based on her fieldwork among Gitanos in Spain, we could distinguish between