Highly complex post-conflict environments have challenged the capacities of international organizations and non-governmental organizations, pushing them into networks of various durability and sustainability. Interestingly, these actors manage to function through these networks despite their at times conflicting goals for a given post-conflict environment. This study explains who controls the final policy outcomes in these networks, and to what effect the social development and institutional sustainability of a post-conflict state. In the post-Cold War security environment, microfinance has emerged as a favored instrument by practitioners for community rehabilitation and economic development in post-conflict states, and the microfinance sector in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina is the backdrop of this work. The study illuminates how transnational networks embolden some NGOs and/or IGOs while diluting the power of others. As such, the study exposes the comparative advantage of each network type operating in the post-conflict microfinance environment of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The study produced specific attributes of “winning” networks, namely those which harness the transformative power of NGOs and enable balanced policies of peacebuilding/social rehabilitation and long-term state-building and institutional reconstruction. The study presents principles of network mobilization. For NGO sector “winning” networks tend to possess diverse sources of resource supply (financial, institutional, and political) that are spread out among many donors. Such networks are also characterized by little policy coherence among network members. These two network characteristics allow the NGO to remain embedded in donor structures and draw from the resources they offer while also insulating and shielding the policy implementation from the, at times conflicting, donor pressures.