Albania’s civil society is facing a funding crisis. But at the same time, it is also facing a crisis of institutional architecture.
For years, its capacity has been built largely on foreign funding—from the EU, governments, foundations, and international agencies. This support enabled the development of the sector’s capacities and activities, but it also created structural dependency, as it was not accompanied by the development of a sustainable domestic funding base. As a result, over the years, a quiet crisis appears to have emerged in a sector that is essential to democracy, transparency, and European integration: capacity existed, but its economic sustainability within the country remained weak.
This reality becomes visible whenever donors change their priorities, reduce programmes, or withdraw funding. As a result, what is lost is not simply a project, but, above all, a monitoring platform, a database, or a critical voice.
The ENNHRI 2026 report links this weakness directly to Albania’s and Kosovo’s high dependence on external sources. When USAID or other programmes withdrew, the space for civil-society expertise began to tilt.
But the problem goes deeper than a lack of money. It concerns the very way in which the market for civil-society expertise has been built and operates.
For years, the discussion has focused primarily on the amount of funding available, while less attention has been paid to the question of what these funds actually produce and what measurable impact they have on society. In this sense, the real challenge lies in building a sustainable model in which funding is directly linked to the quality of outputs, the use of expertise, and its actual impact on public policy and public debate.
Within this landscape, organisations that have built administrative capacity, established relationships with donors, and developed specialised teams for preparing applications absorb a large share of available resources. They win projects, employ experts, build track records, and win again. New organisations, independent institutes, individual experts, and structures outside Tirana remain on the periphery. The Matthew Effect becomes visible: those who have are given more, while those who have less increasingly lose the opportunity to preserve and strengthen their capacity.
This is how what could be described as an oligopolisation of civil-society expertise has emerged over the years.
This does not refer to formal agreements between organisations, but to the gradual concentration of access to resources, information, and opportunities to influence the public agenda.
Funding becomes concentrated among a limited number of organisations.
The same experts appear across projects, reports, conferences, and the media.
The funded voice becomes more visible than the independent voice that lacks resources.
Topics that have a “fundable product” enter the public debate, while problems without a corresponding funding opportunity remain in the shadows.
A country may have hundreds of registered organisations and yet have a much narrower market of expertise that actually produces analysis and influences policy.
This debate is not simply about “more funding for NGOs.”
Civil society is not a second arm of public administration; it is part of the infrastructure of democracy.
Just as the state funds its administration because it needs institutional capacity, democracy also needs independent expertise, civic monitoring, alternative analysis, citizen oversight, think tanks, and independent research.
Yet when the administration is funded while a large part of civil-society expertise is left to compete in an unstructured market, a clear structural asymmetry emerges.
The state has resources to produce its own arguments, while society lacks comparable resources to produce alternatives. This imbalance, together with the concentration of expertise, has weakened not only civil society but also the quality of public decision-making.
The comparison with the European Union makes this distinction clear.
In the EU, around 80% of funding resources for civil-society organisations are managed by the Member States themselves.
All Member States provide public funding at national, regional, or local levels. Some countries also provide institutional support for administrative costs.
The CERV programme (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) for 2021–2027 has a budget of more than €1.5 billion and is specifically designed to support organisations defending rights, democratic values, and the rule of law.
The underlying logic is that democracy itself needs to be financed. Organisations should not have to survive solely from one project to the next.
The EU also faces challenges. Up to 35% of organisations identify the lack of funding related to thematic priorities as a constraint, while 30% identify a lack of core funding. However, the European system has far greater sources of financing than Albania, including public funding, EU resources, private philanthropy, and other institutional sources. The European Commission itself has identified the need for more multiannual funding and mechanisms capable of reaching smaller organisations.
Meanwhile, the Western Balkans finds itself between these two models.
More than 40% of organisations surveyed relied on a single type of donor for more than half of their funding.
In 2024, up to 25% of organisations participating in the DG ENEST assessment reported that they had received no donor funding at all—almost twice the share recorded the previous year.
Organisations without funding tend to be smaller, have lower turnover, and rely more heavily on volunteers.
But beyond all of this, civil-society expertise in Albania faces a more specific problem: the absence of domestic funding as a buffer against disruptions in foreign-funding policies.
Public funding remains limited and is largely based on projects linked to government interests and clientelism. Philanthropy and institutional funding remain extremely weak.
When external support declines, the entire structure of civil society becomes unbalanced.
As a result of the lack of a sustainable perspective and the necessary support from the state, the pluralism of expertise is increasingly being lost.
The expectation in a semi-functional democracy is that government, universities, think tanks, civil society, media, and business should coexist as parallel sources of knowledge, scrutiny, and public debate. In today’s reality, however, some of these channels have been weakened or financially constrained, and the most visible consequence is the weakening of public debate.
Civil-society expertise, as a public good, is forced to rely on the state because society needs independent expertise and the market does not guarantee it by itself.
This debate is therefore not about simply asking for a few more funds. Given the need to redistribute financial support, it should also be accompanied by a more transparent, competitive, decentralised, multiannual system that is less dependent on a limited group of funding sources and beneficiaries.
Public funding should serve as the national foundation, while European funding should provide the connection to standards and support the survival and strengthening of civil-society capacities. At the same time, if public and private funding can help genuinely open the market to different institutes, experts, and organisations, then it can be said that the country is moving towards building the full infrastructure required for pluralism in civil-society expertise.
With a civil society that is inadequately funded, our society cannot effectively scrutinise power. But with the existing problem of expertise being concentrated in a small number of organisations, we also cannot achieve the necessary pluralism of ideas.
The democracy we are building needs to rest on independent expertise. That means investing in its infrastructure in order to close the widening gap between the need for high-quality public policies and the capacity to produce them independently.