Enabling Environment National Assessments: Civil Society Response Strategies

Featuring reflections on civil society strategies to create a more enabling environment, this paper draws on the findings of the Enabling Environment National Assessments (EENA), held in 22 countries between 2013 and 2016 (Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Colombia, Honduras, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, South Africa, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zambia). (See Related Summaries, below.) The paper is also informed by an advocacy workshop that brought 14 EENA partners and Turkish civil society representatives together in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2016 to draw out common learning from the EENA process on civil society responses.

Civil society strategies identified and discussed in the paper, in part through case studies of particular EENA country CSO strategies, include:

• Developing constructive dialogue with governments - The need that arises is for CSOs to work collectively towards developing structured, regular, and transparent engagements with governments. Participants in assessments affirm that the need for engagement is constant. This is the case even when the government is seen to be sharing a background and some aspirations with civil society. EENA participants put forward some examples of practical initiatives to develop relations. In Mozambique, for example, as part of advocacy towards a new law on associations, CSOs held a national conference of civil society with government representatives to create a new dialogue space. As the dialogue revealed some previously unexplored government willingness to cooperate with civil society, this was followed up with the development of a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between CSOs, the government, and donors. In addition to engaging with government officials, in several contexts, such as Brazil, India, Mozambique, and Nigeria, CSOs are working with national parliaments.
• Using the legal system - Advocating for new CSO regulatory laws, where these are out of date or inadequate, or seeking changes to, or further dialogue over, restrictive laws and regulations can achieve successes. For example, in Zambia, the restrictive NGO [non-governmental organisation] Act was suspended following civil society advocacy to enable dialogue between the government and CSOs about changing the law. However, working through the legal system is an approach that is usually slow-moving.
• Working at the regional and international level - For example, in Bolivia, CSOs took their campaign against the law on legal personality to the international level, including by making inputs into the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Along with a UPR submission, documentation that CSOs used to support their argument included the EENA report, other civil society reports, and an elaborated study on the freedom of association in Bolivia. This won a recommendation at the UNHRC that the law should be changed. CSOs innovated by working closely with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, Maina Kiai, alongside the ombudsman, to bring an appeal to the country’s constitutional court. Bolivian CSOs are also seeking to work at the regional level, and at the time of writing are cooperating with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) to bring a case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Some participants stated there is a need to monitor how governments respect, comply with, and implement commitments they make in the international arena that are relevant to civil society. There is a need for the international sharing of good practices, particularly civil society success stories, to encourage learning from and replication of good practice.
• Campaigning and outreach - When the Zambian government went ahead with the implementation of the 2009 NGO Act in the face of CSO opposition, many CSOs took part in a boycott of registration procedures under the law. Another response suggested in some contexts is to provide training for state officials, acknowledging that lack of capacity and knowledge at the level of government officials can be a hindrance for civil society.
• Engaging the public and working with the media - Holding regular public consultations with citizens and working with and through the media are among the CSO strategies to reach citizens. One of the responses suggested to strengthen engagement with the media was to develop and offer practical tools and training for the media, so that media practitioners can understand and report on civil society more accurately. An example is to tell human stories about civil society that explain its value and impact in ways that people find easy to relate to. The impacts of restriction on civic space can be told in terms of the effects on citizens of continuing corruption and poor accountability over public services, and it can be emphasised how civil society challenges these ingrained governance deficits. There are some initiatives to develop networks of independent media practitioners. For example, there is a network of independent journalists in Brazil. In contexts such as Mexico, where journalists are threatened and attacked in some locales, workshops have also been given on safety for media practitioners. Such initiatives create fresh opportunities for CSOs to engage with media practitioners and explore the potential for mutual support. Social media offers an additional channel for civil society, particularly when conventional media channels are blocked, as noted for example from Cambodia. Social media offers potential but also challenges; training for CSOs in how to make effective use of social media is suggested. Civil society advocacy to recognise the importance of internet freedom of expression and net neutrality may be needed. Brazil offers a success story, with extensive civil society advocacy resulting in the passing of the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in 2014.
• Monitoring, research, and evidence generation - Part of what monitoring and documentation can achieve, it is suggested by the Cambodia EENA, is to increase awareness of restrictive laws and how they impact on civil society. Examples of useful research projects offered include collaboration between CSOs and government agencies in Brazil to gather better quality statistics on the make-up of civil society. EENA processes were acknowledged as providing a useful stimulus for dialogue based on evidence. Evidence is described here as being more convincing when it can be shown to have been gathered at the local level through strong presences on the ground. This entails having strong networks to gather and transmit evidence. Evidence is nothing unless it is communicated well. There is a need for civil society to think more thoroughly about the end purpose it seeks to achieve from its research, and the audiences it wants to reach and influence, and to communicate, design and package the information accordingly. This implies developing skills in using multiple communications channels to reach target audiences, and developing communication skills.
• Cooperation and coalitions - When civil society is being restricted, the response needs to be unified, to stop governments attempting to apply divide and rule policies to civil society, and to articulate towards governments that civil society has common concerns about restrictions. In several contexts, including Cambodia, Nigeria, Panama and Zambia, CSOs involved in the EENA assessments asserted the value of holding regular national level civil society dialogues and consultations, as a means of building solidarity, growing awareness of laws and regulations and their implications, and developing the legitimacy of CSO advocacy. It is noted that there can be no one size fits all model for developing and growing civil society coalitions. The examples also indicate that there is a need to pay attention to developing practical principles, grounded in accountability and transparency, that take account of and offer ways of managing the differences that inevitably arise when CSOs work in coalitions.
• Self-regulation - By taking responsibility for transparency and accountability initiatives CSOs can make it less likely that governments will apply regulations that are unduly restrictive or that are imposed without consultation. In some contexts, such as Cameroon, the debate about the need for accountability by civil society is not well advanced, but elsewhere, there are examples of working schemes. There is joint working between CSOs on civil society self-regulation in Bolivia, and agreement of a voluntary code of conduct is a chief area of focus of the CSO coalition being developed in Jordan. Learning from across the EENA research is that self-regulation should be inexpensive and locally applicable and understandable, so that there will be wide uptake across a range of civil society.

In conclusion, the paper has focused on bringing together learning from the EENA process about how civil society is responding to challenges in its environment. It has showcased in particular a range of civil society success stories in overcoming these challenges, along with the obstacles such responses encountered. "The responses as a whole serve as a reminder that even when the environment for civil society is very disenabling, it is important to understand that there are still strategies that CSOs can deploy, from a range of different tools, to push back against restriction and seek to make their environment more enabling."