CMDS Affiliated Faculty Kristina Irion Publishes Article on International Media Assistance in the Western Balkans

CMDS affiliated faculty Kristina Irion together with Tarik Jusić published an article entitled "International Assistance and Media Democratization in the Western Balkans: A Cross-National Comparison." The article appears in the current Global Media Journal German Edition in a Special issue on International Media Assistance (IMA): Experiences and Prospects.

The cross-national analysis concludes that the effects of IMA are highly constrained by the local context. A decade of IMA of varying intensity is not sufficient to construct media institutions when, in order to function properly, they have to outperform their local context. From today’s vantage point it becomes obvious, that in the short-term scaling-up IMA does not necessarily improve outcomes. The experiences in the region suggest that imported solutions have not been sufficiently cognitive of all aspects of local conditions and international strategies have tended to be rather schematic and have lacked strategic approaches to promote media policy stability, credible media reform and implementation. To a certain extent, the loss of IMA effectiveness is also self-inflicted.

This article is the outcome of a regional research project on „Development of Functional Media Institutions in Western Balkans - A Comparative Study“ supported by the Regional Research Promotion Programme (RRPP), a scheme funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).