Abstract
Due to weak state and administrative capacity, the Russian government has involved resource-rich non-state actors into policy-making since about 2005 and established numerous institutionalized platforms, networks, and forums. These networks mainly emerge on regional and local levels and are designed to generate policy advice, implement decisions, and contribute to output legitimacy. A crucial question is how the authorities govern and regulate these bodies under the terms of a hybrid regime. The paper sheds light on why and how state authorities interact with non-state actors and unravels functions and flavors of governance networks in Russia. Drawing on the empirical results of case studies on anti-drug policy conducted in the regions Samara and St Petersburg, the paper reveals that state dominance within networks is a significant characteristic, although authorities rarely apply explicit ‘hard’ tools of government onto collaborations with non-state actors. The paper also allows for theorizing on the role of governance networks in a hybrid regime.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
12 August 2020
This paper was intended for the present special section Civil Society in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes, but published previously.
Notes
See the ‘foreign agent law’ passed in 2012, which stipulates that civil society organizations receiving funding from abroad must register as ‘foreign agents’.
These consisted of a regional anti-drug commission meeting (Samara); a cross-sectoral meeting related to institutional gaps in the regional system of drug users’ social rehabilitation and resocialisation (St. Petersburg); a patients’ forum (a closed regular meeting of HIV-positive drug users, activists and medical institutions representatives) (St. Petersburg); a public council meeting organized by a federal level hospital under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Social Policy (St. Petersburg); and a cross-sectoral federal-level meeting of civil society and state authorities (Moscow), all of which were organized in 2014.
The project was approved by the Review Board of the Research Council of Norway.
In 2016, FSKN was reorganized as a unit under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Since FSKN was still in operation during the implementation of the project and our fieldwork, in this article we refer to this agency when we have the Russian drug control authorities in mind.
References
Aasland, A., Berg-Nordlie, M., & Bogdanova, E. (2016). Encouraged but controlled: Governance networks in Russian regions. East European Politics, 32(2), 148–169.
Aasland, A., Grønningsæter, P., & Meylakhs, P. (2013). More are testing positive–but is everything negative Russia and the HIV epidemic (Vol. 1, pp. 275–294). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Aasland, A., & Meylakhs, A. Y. (2018). Adjusting the scope of interaction between state and civil society: HIV prevention among drug users. In S. Kropp, et al. (Eds.), Governance in Russian regions. A policy comparison (pp. 43–71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Benevolenski, V. B., & Toepler, S. (2017). Modernising social service delivery in Russia: Evolving government support for non-profit organisations. Development in Practice, 27(1), 64–76.
Berg-Nordlie, M., Holm-Hansen, J., & Kropp, S. (2018). The Russian state as network manager: A theoretical framework. In S. Kropp, et al. (Eds.), Governance in Russian regions. A policy comparison (pp. 7–42). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bevir, Mark, & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2010). The state as cultural practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bindman, E. (2015). The state, civil society and social rights in contemporary Russia. East European Politics, 31(3), 342–360.
Bindman, E., Kulmala, M., & Bogdanova, E. (2019). NGOs and the policy-making process in Russia: The case of child welfare reform. Governance, 32(2), 207–222.
Bogdanova, E., & Bindman, E. (2016). NGOs, Policy Entrepreneurship and Child Protection in Russia: Pitfalls and Prospects for Civil Society. Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 24(2), 143–171.
Cheskin, A., & March, L. (2015). State–society relations in contemporary Russia: New forms of political and social contention. East European Politics, 31(3), 261–273.
Davies, J. S. (2011). Challenging governance theory. From network to hegemony. Bristol: Policy Press.
Davies, J. S. (2012). Network governance theory: A Gramscian critique. Environment and Planning, 44(11), 2687–2704.
Davies, J. S., Holm-Hansen, J., Kononenko, V., & Røiseland, A. (2016). Network governance in Russia: An analytical framework. East European Politics, 32(2), 131–147.
Flikke, Geir. (2016). Resurgent authoritarianism: The case of Russia’s new NGO legislation. Post-Soviet Affairs, 32(2), 103–131.
Galeotti, M. (2016). Narcotics and nationalism: Russian drug policies and futures. Foreign Policy at Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Galeotti-Russia-final.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct 2018.
Gel’man, V. (2016). The vicious circle of post-Soviet neopatrimonialism in Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs, 32(5), 455–473.
Gerschewski, J. (2013). The three pillars of stability: Legitimation, repression, and co-optation in autocratic regimes. Democratization, 20(1), 13–38.
Gill, G. (2015). Building an authoritarian polity: Russia in post-soviet times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Golovchin, M. A. (2015). Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie poteri ot rasprostranenie narkomanii v regionakh Rossii. Voprosy statistiki, 9, 47–55.
Hale, H. E. (2010). Eurasian polities as hybrid regimes: The case of Putin’s Russia. Journal of Eurasian studies, 1(1), 33–41.
Hood, C. (1983). The tools of government. London: Macmillan.
Jessop, B. (2004). Multi-level governance and multi-level meta-governance. In I. Bache & M. Flinders (Eds.), Multi-level governance (pp. 49–75). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, J. E., Kulmala, M., & Jäppinen, M. (2016). Street-level practice of Russia’s social policymaking in Saint Petersburg: Federalism, informal politics, and domestic violence. Journal of Social Policy, 45(2), 287–304.
King, E. J. (2017). Civil society and the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Russian Federation, Civil Society and Health: Contributions and Potential. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459048/. Accessed 20 Oct 2018.
Kropp, S., & Aasland, A. (2018). Patterns of governance in Russia—Feedback of empirical findings into governance theory. In S. Kropp, et al. (Eds.), Governance in Russian regions. A policy comparison (pp. 219–245). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kropp, S., Aasland, A., Berg-Nordlie, M., Holm-Hansen, J., & Schuhmann, J. (Eds.). (2018). Governance in Russian regions. A policy comparison. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lunze, K., Lunze, F. I., Raj, A., et al. (2015). Stigma and human rights abuses against people who inject drugs in Russia—A qualitative investigation to inform policy and public health strategies. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0136030. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0136030.
Marshall, A. (2014). From drug war to culture war: Russia’s growing role in the global drug debate. GDPO Policy brief: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/gdpo/files/GDPO%20Russia%20Article-1.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct 2018.
Myhre, M., & Berg-Nordlie, M. (2016). ‘The state cannot help them all’. Russian media discourse on the inclusion of non-state actors in governance. East European Politics, 32(2), 192–214.
North, D. C. (1992). Transaction costs, institutions, and economic performance. San Francisco: ICS Press.
Owen, C., & Bindman, E. (2019). Civic participation in a hybrid regime: Limited pluralism in policymaking and delivery in contemporary Russia. Government and Opposition, 54(1), 98–120.
Owen-Smith, J., & Powell, W. W. (2013). Networks and institutions. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver, Kerstin Sahlin, & Roy Suddaby (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 596–643). Los Angeles: Sage.
Pape, U. (2014). The politics of HIV/AIDS in Russia (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies). London: Routledge.
Petrov, N., Lipman, M., & Hale, H. E. (2014). Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from putin to putin. Post-Soviet Affairs, 30, 1–16.
Rhodes, R. A. W. (1997). Understanding governance: Policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Sakwa, R. (2010). The dual state in Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs, 26(3), 185–206.
Salamon, L. M., & Toepler, S. (2015). Government-nonprofit cooperation: Anomaly or necessity? Voluntas. International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 26(6), 2155–2177.
Scharpf, F. W. (1994). Games real actors could play: Positive and negative coordination in embedded negotiations. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 6(1), 27–53.
Sereda, M., & Brednikova, O. (2017). Between ‘work’ and ‘service’: The specifics of the process of institualization and professionalization of rehabilitation centers (the case of St. Petersburg). In M. Sereda & O. Brednikova (Eds.), Collection of materials from the scientific conference “Rehabilitation of drug users: between religion and science (pp. 36–48). St. Petersburg: Pero Publishers. (in Russian).
Shinkevich, V., & Fedorova, E. (2016). Model’ sistemy kompleksnoi reabilitatsii i resotsializatsii lits, potreblyayushchikh narkoticheskie sredsvta i prikhotropnye veshchestva v nemeditsinskykh tselyax: po rezul’tatam izucheniya opyta v sub’’ektakh Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Rostovskii nauchnyi zhurnal, 6, 67–84.
Skokova, Y., Pape, U., & Krasnopolskaya, I. (2018). The non-profit sector in today’s Russia: Between confrontation and co-optation. Europe-Asia Studies, 70(4), 531–563.
Sørensen, E. (2006). Metagovernance: the changing role of politicians in processes of democratic governance. American Review of Public Administration, 36, 98–114.
Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2016). Metagoverning collaborative innovation in governance networks. American Review of Public Administration, 47, 1–19.
Starodubtsev, A. (2018). Federalism and regional policy in contemporary Russia. Abingdon: Routledge.
Tarasenko, A. (2015). Russian welfare reform and social NGOs: strategies for claim-making and service provision in the case of Saint Petersburg. East European Politics, 31(3), 294–313.
Tarasenko, A. (2018). Russian non-profit organisations in service delivery: Neoliberal and statist social policy principles intertwined. Europe-Asia Studies, 70(4), 514–530.
Teets, J. C. (2013). Let many civil societies bloom. the rise of consultative authoritarianism in China. The China Quarterly, 213, 19–38.
Treisman, D. (Ed.). (2018). The new autocracy: Information, politics, and policy in putin’s Russia. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.
Zubarevich, N. (2014). Monitoring krizisa i postkrizisnogo razvitiya regionov Rossii. http://www.socpol.ru/atlas/overviews/social_sphere/kris.shtml. Accessed 28 Jan 2018.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Research Council of Norway (NORRUSS program), which funded the project ‘Network governance: A tool for understanding Russian policy-making?’ (Project No. 220615), and to the German Metro Foundation, which funded the project ‘Governance in Russian regions.’ This article is based on a collaboration between both projects. The empirical data for this article were collected by the Norwegian team in cooperation with the Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Aasland, A., Kropp, S. & Meylakhs, A.Y. Between Collaboration and Subordination: State and Non-state Actors in Russian Anti-drug Policy. Voluntas 31, 422–436 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-019-00158-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-019-00158-9