Sarah Henderson has written a courageous and eye-opening account of Western programs to create civil society in Russia. After having spent 12 months conducting surveys and interviews with more than a hundred activists of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a dozen Russian cities, as well as doing consultancy work for three major foreign foundations over a seven-year period, Henderson has provided one of the first comprehensive looks at the impact that Western democracy aid—now a $7 billion industry—has had in Russia (p. 5). Her disturbing conclusion is that, despite good intentions, such programs have been counterproductive.

Consistently Henderson finds that learning to play by the donors' rules and tuning language to what donors wanted to hear was more important to successful fund-raising than actually building civil society. By 2002, Western donors were increasingly relying for assessment and disbursement on a new elite, a Moscow-centered “civic oligarchy” with the power to determine who gets money and who does not (pp. 162–63). The perverse incentives of the grant-making process resulted in a lack of grassroots support for many programs that, on paper, seemed highly successful. This is understandable, she says, since it is the U.S. taxpayer, not the average Russian, who is often the real constituent (p. 22). These incentives encourage attention to short-term quantitative results and lead to projects that lack sustainability. The result is “principled clientelism” (p. 28)—an unhealthy dependency on foreign assistance that, despite the high-sounding moral claims of donors, has in fact created a “virtual” civil society, with patterns of behavior that may actually undermine indigenous civic institutions (p. 145). Such results, the author points out, are far from unique to Russia. They have arisen before, in Latin America and Africa (p. 11), where similar “supply driven” assistance programs also focused on the agendas of the donor agencies at the expense of the needs of domestic societies (p. 75).

Yet despite her stark findings, Henderson is reluctant to be too critical of democracy assistance. She draws a distinction between “creating civil society” and the “emergence of a nonprofit sector.” While the former failed, she attributes the latter directly to the efforts of donor organizations (p. 167). In her concluding chapter, she even suggests reasons for optimism about the long-term impact of such aid.

One reason, she says, is that aid provided to civic development was merely misused rather than stolen. This represents “enormous progress” from previous efforts that channeled money through the state (p. 168). Still, one wonders whether this is a distinction that has any meaning for Russians. It has also been argued, for example, that the money misused in the privatization of the Russian economy nevertheless resulted in a fundamental transformation of socioeconomic incentives. Over time, the first wave of “robber barons” would be sure to reinvest the assets they had stolen, to the benefit of society as a whole. Judging from a 1998 survey that Henderson herself cites, however, only 4% of Russians trusted Russian charities, while 65% considered them “an artificial face for dirty tricks” (p. 55). The present generation apparently sees a direct connection between economic and charitable malfeasance.

Her second argument, not unrelated to the first, is that funding even unsustainable NGOs is not a complete waste of effort. It is, after all, possible that from them a future political leader may someday emerge. Henderson is correct in suggesting that the unintended consequences of Western assistance can be good as well as bad, but this is scant comfort if the problem lies in the unintended consequences themselves. Surely, investing so much money in democracy should be more than a gamble.

Henderson's solutions convey a hopefulness born of unyielding optimism. First, shift the focus from NGOs to a broader vision of civil society that actually accomplishes things the local community wants. As she cogently remarks, “it was unclear to me why one unfunded group's ability to attract 2,000 people off the streets to a health screening clinic sponsored by the local administration was not, in donors' eyes, building civil society, but yet another cookie cutter round table for a smattering of NGO leaders on ‘working with local government’ was” (pp. 153–54).

Second, she recommends that assistance be shifted from large grants that favor the well connected to small grants that build ties of friendship and mentoring within the local community. A good suggestion, but, as Henderson herself recognizes, one that runs headlong into the reality that implementing it would mean asking development agencies “to put themselves out of work” (p. 173).

It might make more sense to begin by addressing a problem that runs like a red skein throughout the book—the striking imbalance in accountability. While aid recipients are burdened by an endless stream of paperwork—in 1998 over 50% had to write monthly progress reports to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—Western donors have almost no accountability. “In the end,” as one senior program officer at the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) put it, “IREX is always blaming USAID, USAID always blames the State Department and Congress, and so it goes” (p. 87).

Henderson's account of her research methodology in Appendix A should be required reading for graduate students. In addition to providing a thoughtful description of the methodological and cultural problems she faced crafting culturally meaningful surveys, it is an inspiring tale of intellectual perseverance in the face of skepticism about the value of mailing surveys cold to an “unsophisticated” Russian population. Disproving the conventional wisdom, she got a 52% response rate, with more responses from smaller cities than from large urban centers! It seems that local civic activists had a lot to get off their chests, but no one had thought to ask them.

Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia is a rare gem, a detailed case study that provides crucial insights into the working assumptions of U.S. foreign assistance. It does for democracy assistance what Janine Wedel's Collision and Collusion (1998) did for Western economic assistance to Eastern Europe, exposing the counterintuitive impact that well-meaning but poorly thought-out programs can have. While it is hard to be sanguine about policymakers heeding these lessons, as Henderson herself might say, one can always hope.