Catch22 in donor land?
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006In 1961 Joseph Heller wrote the novel Catch22. Since then the phrase “Catch22″ has come into common use to mean a circular logic or “no-win situation”.
This came to my mind when I heard that a proposal for funding/support, submitted by the Slovenian Government to our (Dutch) Government, might not be awarded. The request relates to capacity building support to strengthen the dialogue between the government and the NGO sector in Slovenia.
We did implement a 3 years project from 2001-2004 supporting the building up of an NGO centre and a government structure and framework to deal with civil society in Slovenia. The current request is a follow-up to sustain these efforts and has been submitted under a Dutch ‘ government to government programme’.
Because the dialogue between government and civil society in the Netherlands already has a long history, we do not have a specific government department for coordination between ministries and with NGOs. Therefore it proves difficult to find expertise within our administration to support the Slovenian Government in enforcing such coordination. But fortunately our ‘government to government programme’ enables (as an exception to the rule) the involve of a private sector organisation if specific expertise in not available within our government administration itself.
So the Slovenian Government has applied for support (within this exception to the rule) recommending our participation, motivated by the trustfull relationship which was build up during our earlier 3 year project.
And what happened? The agency, managing the ‘government to government programme’ on behalf of our Ministry of Foreign Afairs, concludes that ‘they were not able to find a government institution with the required expertise’ and ’since the proposal requires the explicit support of a government institution, they have to advise the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to finance the project.
Catch22.