REFRAMING SOCIAL POLICY: ‘I will continue to work there because it pays me a salary, but I do not be­lieve in civil society having an impact’. Respondents felt that donors had been quite inflexible sometimes, and pres­sure to get funding forced many local organisations to operate in secrecy and avoid coordination. They knew that they had to compete with other non-genuine organi­sations, and donors’ failure to identify which was which had sometimes put their future at risk. As they said, it had been about which was better at marketing rather than based on the quality of the service. At the same time, lack of secure and long­term funding had limited their ability to operate and think strategically beyond the short term. As a result, projects with a short shelf life have predominated. Because until now most of the sector depends wholly on western funding, this had imposed a completely new set of pressures on emerging organisations. Faced with the obli­gation to justify and qualify their funding they had to produce evidence of results, even in those cases where the projects have been relatively short lived. ‘I do ask them, how do they do it in the west? They should know by now that philanthropy is so minimal here. The first case of philanthropy I can recall was early in 1995 when a man from Fier paid the fare for his wife to come to Tirana for a women’s meeting. We celebrated that. Now, I like to think that was purely philan­thropic and not for other reasons.’ Policy making and actors The nature of external interventions in Albania has followed a course of de­velopment that has been well noted in other countries – from reactive roots, starting with emergency or aid delivery programs, to financial assistance such as credit aid, to technocratic support. Some emergency programs had an unexpectedly long life span 85 ; others failed or ran short of money before achieving much of note. Even in major programs there has been a tendency to short-term vision and poor planning, lending great irony to their naming as strategies. Even in regard to the over-arching current strategy, the NSSED, it was observed ­‘The World Bank knows they need the resources to develop capacities. They recognise the lack of capacities but they say they don’t have money, so other do­nors should come in and put the money. That is a pretty weak excuse because if the World Bank didn’t have the money, they should not have started the strategy first. Otherwise, maybe they should have got the money first, which raises the whole question to what extent other donors are committed to the poverty strategy, in fi­nancial terms not just in Washington rhetoric.’ Little regard was given to the Government per se as an actor in policy mak­ing in the country. As one of the respondents from the third sector remarked‘May I never get to the stage of needing anything from the state, because I would die’. 85 Such as projects at the time of the Kosovo conflict. The spending of resources outlived the refugee crisis by many months, surplus monies being redirected with great haste to ill-thought out projects. 212