From Benchmarking to Bottom-Up Resilience: Evaluating Civil Society's Role in Rule of Law Reform in The Western Balkans

Abstract

The European Union’s (EU) enlargement strategy has traditionally relied on conditionality and benchmarking to incentivise reforms in candidate countries. Yet, in recent years, this top-down approach has produced diminishing returns, fostering symbolic compliance, and stabilitocracy rather than deep institutional transformation. Against this backdrop, the study explores whether civil society organisations (CSOs) can act as autonomous agents of democratic change, sustaining rule of law reforms from below by integrating Europeanisation theory, civil society scholarship, and resilience studies. A qualitative, inductive approach is employed, combining comparative case study analysis with semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Serbia and North Macedonia were selected as most similar systems cases: both share EU accession trajectories and post-socialist legacies, yet display divergent outcomes in rule of law performance and civil society-state relations. Across both cases, CSOs emerge as translators, mobilisers, and protective intermediaries: they translate EU benchmarks into domestic reform proposals, mobilise societal constituencies to demand accountability, and internationalise domestic violations to raise reputational costs for governments. Yet, the research shows that these functions can only generate systemic transformation when three conditions align, technical capacity coupled with public legitimacy, predictable long-term resourcing, and credible external political leverage. Where any of these are absent, civil society shifts into compensatory roles that preserve accountability without achieving deep reform. The cases reveal the structural limits of treating CSOs as technical implementers of EU agendas rather than as political actors in their own right. A credible EU enlargement strategy must therefore move beyond formal consultation and project funding, embedding civil society into the core of the accession process as a partner in democratic transformation from the bottom-up.