Foreign funding, accountability and contention: exploring self-regulatory practices in Georgian civil society

The impact of Western development aid on civil society organisations' (CSOs') behaviours in developing countries has gained a growing amount of scholarly attention, however, less is known about individual forms of self-regulatory practices in civil society. This article explores how external resources shape accountability, internal democracy and agency of CSOs by inquiring into the case of Georgia through in-depth interviews and review of relevant CSO documents. The case of Georgian civil society is illustrative due to aid dependence, push for NGOization, contrasting persistent informality, failure of collective self-regulation and contentious state-NGO relations. Resource dependency theory (RDT) is often used to highlight organisations' adjustment of behaviours in accordance with their need for critical resources, mainly in the form of funding - but this article builds on the organisational self-regulation approach to untangle CSO's resource strategies and agency to complement and juxtapose the assumptions of the RDT.