This is happily not the case for NGOs and common people, they are ready to cooperate but of course they also face problems with establishing and maintaining East-East cooperation. First of all the poor capacity of most CEE NGOs. They miss technical skills in their offices, if they have offices at all. They fail to get financial support especially for their overhead costs, in the recent situation it has been really hard to run an organization. Then there is a lack of common laws on NGOs in CEE and furthermore language differences are a problem.
International cooperation is preferred by most funding organizations and Western governments.
But their criteria and standards for giving grants are quite high, the NGOs are for example only considered eligible when they have a Western partner or at least contacts with Western NGOs. In this way, CEE NGOs are forced to cooperate with the West. Additionally there is a preference for Western partners because of the expectations of receiving more information and financial support. Because of this 'looking to the west' and eligibility criteria only a few people of the whole environmental movement can be involved in international cooperation. Since not so many well developed NGOs exist and within these groups not so many people have the skills, like speaking 'conference English', to deal with western NGOs.