The NGO-ization of social movements in neoliberal times: contemporary feminisms in Romania and Belgium

As women gained access to influence politics through formal official channels, social justice concerns of feminist activists started to be pursued through institutionalized forms of political intervention. Scholars have argued for a shift in feminist activism from participation in political movements to lobby and advocacy within formal organizations. The institutionalization and professionalization of the feminist movement were widely associated with feminist and women NGOs collaborating with governmental gender equality bodies to advance movement goals and achieve policy success. While some insisted on the benefits of infusing feminist ideas and practices within the state, others considered that NGO-ization made the feminist movement susceptible of co-optation, contributing to its demobilization and depoliticization. The financial dependency on public or private subsidies studded the NGO-ization hypothesis and urged scholars to analyse the effects of funding on feminist organizations and their capacity for mobilization. Despite the general diagnosis of a demobilized movement comprising an overabundance of depoliticized NGOs, contemporary feminist movement reveals as a space in which formal official organizations and informal groups co-exist, which use both disruptive and disciplined strategies, in different political locations, with various material resources, from friends and comrades’ contributions, to state funds or private grants. However, the NGO form seems to dominate feminist movement organizations that turned into stable and legitimate partners of the state or international institutions, being more visible in the public space, while the informal groups are more fluid and less conspicuous. The major shortcoming within the literature that analyses these transformation is the fact that NGO-ization, institutionalization, professionalization and bureaucratization are used interchangeably and the relation between them is ambiguous. Similarly, scholars however do not always seem to agree if there is a causal relation or a co-occurrence regarding the outcomes of these processes – co-optation, demobilization and depoliticization. By comparing NGOized feminist organizations and Street feminist groups in Belgium and Romania, in this research I aim to provide an answer to the question of what is NGO-izationand to trace the development of the NGO-ization process and its entanglements with neoliberal modes of governance and techniques. Drawing both on social movements and NGO-ization literature, by analysing the NGO-ization process, I aim to disentangle the links between institutionalization, professionalization, bureaucratization and financial dependence and bring some clarifications concerning the outcomes associated with them such as demobilization, depoliticization and co-optation.