The EU Funds Civil Society in the Western Balkans. So Why Is It Getting Weaker?

There is a version of this story that sounds reassuring. The European Union invests millions every year in civil society across the Western Balkans. Grants flow to human rights organisations, women’s groups, environmental activists, youth organisations, and anti-corruption watchdogs. Brussels talks about civil society as a pillar of the accession process. Officials use words like “partnership” and “engagement” and “local ownership.”

The version that people working in these organisations will actually tell you, if you ask them honestly, is different. Funding is unpredictable. Administrative requirements are crushing. The organisations doing the most difficult work in the most difficult places are often the least equipped to navigate a grant system designed for well-resourced institutions. And in several countries, the political environment has become actively hostile to civil society at the same time as EU support has declined.

What the EU Actually Does?

The EU channels support to civil society in the Western Balkans through several different mechanisms. The Civil Society Facility, operating under the IPA pre-accession funding instrument, is the main dedicated stream. There are also thematic programs under the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, CERV, various bilateral programs, and funding routed through several regional initiatives.

The numbers are not trivial. Over the current IPA III period running to 2027, hundreds of millions of euros are allocated across the region for democratic governance, rule of law, and fundamental rights, with civil society support embedded across these priorities. Individual grants range from small project funding of a few thousand euros to multi-year institutional support running into the millions.

Beyond money, the EU also uses civil society engagement as a formal part of the accession process. Organisations are consulted during the preparation of the annual progress reports. They participate in Joint Consultative Committees. They feed into the screening process for individual chapters. At least on paper, civil society is supposed to be a genuine interlocutor in the conversation about whether a country is ready for EU membership.

The Gap Between What Exists and What Works

Ask people who run civil society organisations in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, or Tirana what they actually experience, and a consistent set of frustrations emerges. The first is unpredictability. EU funding cycles do not match organisational realities. A two-year project grant does not allow an organisation to plan strategically, retain experienced staff, or invest in institutional capacity. When a grant ends, everything it paid for, including the expertise of the people involved, often disappears. The organisations that survive are the ones that have learned to constantly hunt for the next grant, which is itself a full-time job that takes energy away from the actual work.

The second is the administrative weight. EU grant management requires a level of financial reporting, documentation, and compliance infrastructure that is genuinely difficult to maintain for small and medium-sized organisations operating in countries where accounting standards, banking systems, and procurement rules differ from EU norms. Audits are stressful. Visibility requirements consume staff time. The cost of compliance is real and often underestimated in project budgets.

The third is relevance. Not all EU-funded programs are designed with the actual needs and priorities of local civil society in mind. Some are. But there is a persistent tension between what Brussels thinks should be prioritised and what organisations on the ground know to be urgent. Environmental organisations in North Macedonia, for instance, have spent years trying to get adequate attention for air pollution as a public health crisis while EU programs were focused elsewhere. LGBTI organisations in the region have watched their funding shrink at the exact moment when the political hostility they face has intensified.

The Political Dimension

Civil society in the Western Balkans does not operate in a neutral environment. In several countries, governments have become openly antagonistic toward organisations that monitor their work, document human rights violations, or advocate for groups that are deemed politically inconvenient. Smear campaigns against NGOs are common. In Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, legislation modelled on Russia’s “foreign agent” laws has been proposed and, in some form, advanced. In Serbia, organisations that work on accountability and transparency face persistent harassment.

This is not a new problem. But it has gotten worse in the last few years, and the EU’s response has been, at best, inconsistent. When governments that are formally EU candidates use their platforms to delegitimise civil society, the signal from Brussels matters. A clear and repeated message that civil society is a partner and that attacks on it are incompatible with EU values would help. That message has sometimes been sent, and sometimes not.

There is also a structural tension that the EU has not fully resolved. On one hand, the EU works with governments on accession reforms, which requires maintaining a functional relationship with those same governments. On the other hand, those governments are sometimes the source of the problem. Finding ways to support civil society robustly without that support becoming a bargaining chip in the wider accession negotiation is difficult, but it is a difficulty the EU needs to take more seriously.

What Is Actually Working?

It would be unfair to describe the situation as entirely bleak. There are EU-funded programs that have made a genuine difference.

The support provided to independent media and fact-checking organisations across the region has helped sustain journalism that would otherwise not exist. Legal aid programs funded through EU mechanisms have meant that people who faced discrimination or human rights violations could access a lawyer. Youth exchanges and civil society capacity-building programs have connected activists across borders and given young people working on difficult issues a sense that they are part of something larger.

The Civil Society Facility has also in recent years moved toward more flexible funding models, including core funding support that allows organisations to cover operational costs rather than only project activities. This is significant. An organisation that can pay its rent and retain its staff is in a fundamentally different position than one that can only invoice for activities within a narrowly defined project scope.

What Needs to Change?

The organisations working on the ground are not shy about what they want. More multi-year, flexible funding. Less bureaucracy. Genuine consultation rather than box-ticking participation. A clearer and louder EU voice when governments attack civil society. And a recognition that the organisations doing the most important work, often on the most marginalised communities, are frequently the least institutionally developed, and that the grant system should be designed to include them rather than to exclude them by default.

None of this is impossible. Some of it is already moving in the right direction.

But the overall picture remains one of a funder that genuinely believes in civil society, that has not yet built a system fully capable of supporting it in the conditions that actually exist. The Western Balkans is not Brussels. The gap between policy intention and lived reality is wide. Closing it requires more than good intentions on paper. It requires a sustained, honest look at what is working and what is not, and the willingness to change things accordingly.

Civil society in the region has not given up. It would be reasonable to ask the EU to match that commitment.