Findings: practice as constructive power
How have the contributors to this book followed the partners, and
what have they found?
Patrice McMahon finds that many indigenous Bosnian NGOs after
the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords did not advance their official mandates of interethnic reconciliation, and yet their donors continued to
fund them for years. Clearly, neither the donors nor the Bosnian
NGOs were highly committed to the salient normative agenda of
ethnic tolerance and peace that ostensibly brought them together. If the
NGO operations over these years did not promote interethnic reconciliation, then what other effects might they have had? It seems fair to
hypothesize that NGO societal partners in Bosnia were heterogeneous
in their rationalities and/or norms, rather than homogeneous as most
NGO theories would expect. McMahon hints at possible latent agendas of the donors (containing conflict and preventing refugees) and of
the Bosnian NGOs (income generation for their staffs and support for
their ethnic communities).