What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Giving Compass' Take:
• European Foundation Centre and Funders’ Initiative for Civil Society explain that as states confine civil society, it is essential for organizations to push back and maintain their position in the world in order to prevent states from overstepping.
• How can organizations partner for the common cause of their own defense? What does a world without, or with significantly reduced, civil society look like?
• Learn more about the importance of civil society in democracies.
Implicit and overt state-sponsored stigmatization of parts of civil society is on the rise, with groups seeking to hold governments to account accused of being ‘anti-development’, working against economic security, or even of being terrorist sympathizers/supporters. More worrying is the increase in state-sponsored harassment, intimidation, and violence towards those deemed to pose a threat to the interests of ruling parties. As a result of these trends, citizens are finding it harder to hold their political leaders to account, while some are struggling to maintain effective operations in countries where the government is hostile to their presence.
How are funders responding? A survey and series of interviews undertaken in 2016 by the European Foundation Centre suggests that while international development and humanitarian funders and INGOs are aware that closing civil society space is a problem, many do not see this as a fundamental threat to their overall missions and actions. Most international philanthropic foundations and INGOs who act as intermediary funders are taking an ‘adaptation and mitigation’ approach to these constraints.
Whereas a small number of philanthropic development organizations engage in advocacy to challenge shrinking space, most do not. Instead, the ‘new normal’ has seen re-configuring of grant programmes to ensure that they do not fall foul of new national laws; others are changing organizational structures or reducing the scope of their work overall; limiting partnerships and maintaining a distance between the more outspoken spectrum of development and human rights actors. As a last resort, funders and INGOs are making the painful choice of pulling out of difficult operating environments altogether. When this happens, local civil society is left bereft of critical resources to do their work, resulting in a smaller, deflated and ultimately less effective civil society to underpin development.
There are, of course, a few lights: some foundations and INGOs, for example, have been developing policies that aim to strengthen civil society space, even in difficult operating environments.
Leaving the defence of civil society space in developing countries to a handful of actors on the ground is unlikely to be sufficient. We suggest that a stronger effort to respond collectively to closing space, in a strategic, coordinated fashion, is urgently needed in order to create a more enabling environment for civil society in which development and humanitarian action can succeed.
A free and open civil society is critical to hold governments to account and to deliver on development’s aim of better equality and poverty reduction. Yet recent years have witnessed an alarming rise in restrictions placed on civil society’s ability to operate, including in developing countries, to the extent that some have described the phenomenon as a ‘global emergency’. The trend has encompassed a range of repressive measures by governments, from constraints on freedom of assembly to imposing excessive red tape and limitations on NGOs receiving funding from foreign donors. The restrictions and laws placed on civil society are contagious: similar laws designed to control their activities are multiplying across the world.