June 2, 2016
Guest post from Jenny Hodgson of the Global Fund for Community Foundations It’s almost always the same argument. Or excuse. Governments joining the accelerating global trend of restricting civil society at home like to claim that they are protecting their country against meddling “foreign powers”. No one has to like, or agree, with that point of view in order
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A crunch point for Indian civil society – what are the options?
April 29, 2016
Second installment on last week’s India visit. Vlog from Lucknow and a debate with Oxfam India’s Vanita Suneja In the rolling, 16 hour-a-day seminar that is a field trip, one topic kept coming up in my conversations in India last week. Many civil society organizations feel beleaguered. As the Indian economy booms, the foreign aid agencies on which many
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Why ‘Raising Your Voice’ is crucial in development, and getting harder in many countries
October 16, 2015
Today is Blog Action Day (as if you didn’t know) and this year’s theme is ‘raising your voice’. That resonates with me for both positive and negative reasons. On the negative side, in dozens of developing countries it’s getting a lot more dangerous to raise your voice, if what you say is not congenial to the government. States are busily
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ICYMI: why civil society space is under assault around the world and other posts on NGOs
October 13, 2015
Final installment in this series of re-posts of the most read summer blogs, for those who missed FP2P due to our email notification meltdown (or your holidays). In the 1980s and 90s civil society, and civil society organizations (CSOs) came to be seen as key players in development; aid donors and INGOs like Oxfam increasingly sought them out as partners.
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5 trends that explain why civil society space is under assault around the world
August 25, 2015
In the 1980s and 90s civil society, and civil society organizations (CSOs) came to be seen as key players in development; aid donors and INGOs like Oxfam increasingly sought them out as partners. So the current global crackdown on ‘civil society space’ is particularly worrying – a major pillar of development is under threat. Ross Clarke (left) and Araddhya Mehtta
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The Civil Society Flashpoint: Why the global crackdown? What can be done about it?
March 6, 2014
This guest post comes from Thomas Carothers and Saskia Brechenmacher of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drawing from their new report, Closing Space: Democracy and Human Rights Support Under Fire When the concept of civil society took the international aid community by storm in the 1990s, many aid providers reveled in the alluring idea of civil society as a
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