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EU’s support to civil society in Kazakhstan: A pilot evaluation of the social capital generated

In the last decade, several studies have been devoted to the analysis of the EU’s support to civil society abroad, but only recently has scholarly attention turned to Central Asia. Most of the research in this field has adopted a macro-level perspective, concerned with the supply side of external democratization, and has examined external assistance to civil society in terms of democratization ideal types and typologies. The main contribution of this study consists of a meso-level analysis of the outcomes of the EU’s support to civil society in terms of production of social capital, conceived as the raw material of civil society itself. More precisely, the article evaluates the first wave of grants awarded to civil society organizations in Kazakhstan as part of two EU funding schemes—the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and the Non-State Actors and Local Authorities in Development. The article sheds new light on the use of social capital and its two dimensions-structural and cognitive-as heuristic tools for evaluating civil society support programs.