What do you do if you decide to come back home after a decade of circumventing the globe, designing and delivering public policies, only to find a society that is much more conservative and less inclined to follow meritocratic principles than the one that you left at the end of the 1990s? If you are a public policy expert and a relentless civic activist alike Diana Topcic-Rosenberg, you join a newly formed liberal party and start a quest to normalise Croatian politics from scratch.
This is, in brief, the story of Topcic-Rosenberg’s entrance into politics that started four years ago, when she joined the Civic Liberal Alliance of Croatia, known better by its abbreviation, GLAS. She came back to her Adriatic homeland after earning a Public Administration Master’s degree from Harvard University and a twenty-year career in the field of international development, with organizations such as the International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps. But she was not satisfied with what she encountered.
“I think that, over a period of time, women were pushed to the margins of public and political life and there has been an attempt to redefine our role solely as mothers, as family caretakers,” she says. In a way, she has seen her role in politics to be one of the antidotes to these developments. “This is where we, as liberals, and particularly as females, should be going – creating space for women to be equal to men in all aspects of society.”
Topcic-Rosenberg’s own primary cause since she came back to Croatia has been child’s rights, in particular – adoption. She found ADOPTA, the Organization for the Support to Adoption, that grew into a think-tank about adoption with a strong professional and advocacy influence, even outside the country. She created the organization after over 20 years of experience of project management in the humanitarian and public policy sector that brought her to disaster-stricken countries, from the former Yugoslavia to Central America and Africa.
Topcic - Rosenberg