Disrupt & Innovate
Some learnings for civil society after a year of the pandemic
Over a year has passed since the WHO declared a global health emergency. COVID-19 has come upon the world and ever since affected everyone’s life and work. Needless to say, the work of civil society organisations has not been exempt from this.
Corona diaries, high-level reflections on what has happened, and efforts to understand a post-COVID world are plenty – several valuable insights are linked in the below brief observations. They might help in the necessary efforts to prepare for the consequences – particularly for those already marginalised.
Despite all the insecurities of analyses, some key observations seem to crystalise:
Inequalities are sharply increasing, particularly around gender dimensions, employment (‘gig economy’) and human rights. Reports by organisations like Amnesty International or Oxfam International testify to the fact that the most marginalised bear the biggest burden of COVID-19 impacts. At the same time, emergent agency for civil society includes new roles, new actors and new strategies.
Digitalisation is rapidly accelerating, in ambivalent directions (surveillance and data exploitation vs global connectivity). Yuval Noah Harari has three conclusions: data should always be used to help people; surveillance should go two ways, not just towards citizens but more bottom-up towards governments and corporations; and we must not allow high concentration of data with anyone – a data monopoly being the recipe for dictatorship.
The international community’s ability to deal with crises has unveiled the faults in the system – powerless multilateral and UN institutions, lack of global collaboration and a renaissance of nationalism.
Societies are shaking. According to the latest Edelman trust barometer, confidence in governments and institutions is severely affected. The incredible willingness of people to sacrifice, act with solidarity and discipline and show empathy, has not been capitalised upon by political leaders. If there is one truth around the pandemic, it’s this: we are strongly interconnected. Yet, global solidarity is weak and yet to become a stronger glue beyond national borders.
Societal divisions are happening between ‘old’ frontiers (liberal vs conservative worldviews) but show new, disturbing lines: identity politics and cancel culture are the downsides of the increased struggle for human and citizen rights. Extreme worldviews (conspiracy theories, anti-government and anti-elite sentiments) are becoming abundant and powerful. The attack on the US Capitol in January showed their imminent danger.
Dis-/mis- and malinformation accelerate these divisions. Digital communication and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming ‘fire accelerators’. According to the ICNL COVID-19 civic freedom tracker, civic space is more easily restricted due to the pandemic.
Closer to home, civil society organisations, while badly needed in the global discourse, are often still in a reactive/crisis mode, partly constrained by restrictive donor policies, unsurmountable operational challenges, homemade problems, and colonial legacy. Their leaders are facing immense challenges, they have to deal with complexities and interconnectedness, and the large-scale nature of the crisis challenges established leadership and good governance practices. As a result, and while the increasing responsibilities (and opportunities) for civil society organisations and their leaders become clearer and clearer, too little is being done to address those responsibilities.
Here are some of them to be dealt with as priorities:
- It is high time and overdue to intensify and radicalise partner support, power shift and locally-led responses while redefining mandates of internationally operating civil society organisations.
- There is an urgent need to engage actively with overriding societal trends (intergenerational justice, climate change and planetary boundaries, culture and value clashes, gender equality) beyond the actual mandates that ICSOs are pursuing. ICSOs need to become a more powerful, desired and competent part of responses to global crises.
- Civil society organisations need to become more than merely just users, but navigators and co-creators of the policy dimensions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, actively participating in internet governance, ethical data use and doing digital work for the marginalised.
- On a global and global-to-local level, they should establish and role-model interconnectedness and active collaboration at eye-level.
Lastly, there are increasing demands for systems change. Systems thinking is necessary, the intersectionality of trends needs to be understood, yet civil society will have to go for smart and scalable answers without lowering ambitions.
Wolfgang Jamann
Executive Director
International Civil Society Centre
Dr. Wolfgang Jamann is Executive Director of the International Civil Society Centre. Until January 2018 he was Secretary General and CEO of CARE International (Geneva). Before that he led NGO Deutsche Welthungerhilfe and the Alliance 2015, a partnership of 7 European aid organisations. From 2004-2009 he was CEO & Board member of CARE Deutschland-Luxemburg and President of the CARE Foundation. Previously, he worked for World Vision International as a regional representative in East Africa (Kenya) & Head of Humanitarian Assistance at WV Germany. After his Ph.D. dissertation in 1990 he started his career in development work at the German Foundation for International Development, later for the UNDP in Zambia. As a researcher and academic, he has published books and articles on East & Southeast Asia contributing to international studies on complex humanitarian emergencies and conflict management.
Upcoming Digital Debate: Who is afraid of African data sovereignty?
Those who follow the news know that these days, politicians tend to use the term sovereignty mainly in two different contexts: when it comes to close borders and keep migrants and refugees out or in discussions that touch on the ongoing transformation of our societies. That’s the moment they advocate for technological, cyber, and/or data sovereignty.
It was, thus, a question of time that somebody would bring up the issue of African data sovereignty. It happened in the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique in summer 2020 when the Senegalese law professor Jean-Louis Corréa stated that the data extraction by entities of the Global North is not benefitting Africans. He made no difference between data collection and mining for commercial and other purposes and called on African leaders to resist the ongoing cyber colonialism[1].
At around the same time, Paul Currion identified the unfinished business of decolonization and described it from the following angles: how aid flows map soft power relationships between former colonial powers and former colonies; how the career trajectory of many international aid workers often resembles that of colonial administrators; and how the aid beneficiary has been constructed as a post-colonial Other[2]. And now data.
Hence, it seems obvious to put the role of Africa in the global digital market on the agenda of the Digital Debates event series which was launched by the International Civil Society Centre in 2021. Once a month Barbara Iverson hosts such a debate. The next one will be held on 1 April and discuss the question: Is Africa “falling prey” to data colonialism?
We invite you to join this discussion here: Digital Debate 2: Is Africa ‘falling prey’ to Data Colonialism? – The International Civil Society Centre (icscentre.org)
Barbara Iverson will host Jean-Louis Corréa together with Karen Guevara of the Equanimity Foundation.
[1] Jean-Louis Corréa, [Tribune] Numérique : l’Afrique veut donner de la voix, in : Jeune Afrique, 9 July 2020, https://t1p.de/hgql
[2] Paul Currion, Decolonising aid, again – The unfinished business of decolonisation is the original sin of the modern aid industry, in: The New Humanitarian, 13 July 2020, https://t1p.de/4ful
Karl Steinacker
Digital Advisor
International Civil Society Centre
Karl Steinacker is currently the Digital Advisor of the International Civil Society Centre. He studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and international law at Cambridge University. He then spent three decades working for the United Nations (UNDP, UNRWA, DPKO, UNHCR) in the fields of development, peacekeeping and refugee protection. At the UN Refugee Agency, he held positions in Africa and at its Headquarters and was responsible for Registration, Statistics, and Data and Identity Management as well as for Camp Coordination/Camp Management.
Between Power and Irrelevance: Are ICSOs actually looking at shifting their roles?
In the first of two guest blogs, accompanying the publication of ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs’, George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz argued that if the ‘charity architecture’ in which our ICSO sector has been embedded for decades does not change, ICSOs will not be able to achieve the long-term impact they promise to deliver.
In this companion blog, Barney Tallack and Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken discuss some recent changes in the environment of ICSOs and what this means for their role. An upcoming interview with all four authors on these big questions of power and relevance of ICSOs will also be released later this month on the Centre’s Civil Society Futures and Innovation Podcast.
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What has shifted over the past 12-18 months, in terms of ICSO power and relevance?
The COVID-19 pandemic primarily accelerated underlying challenges, providing additional drivers for what have been longer-standing trends:
- The financial duress, which started well before the pandemic based on plateauing and/or declining fundraising in traditional ‘markets’ deepened. Some big ICSOs, such as World Vision and Save the Children, had good years in 2020 in terms of income. Many others, however, were treading water or are in decline, and furloughs and layoffs are now more common.
- Southern philanthropy is increasing – its impact on North-founded ICSOs uncertain.
- An increased interest in Mergers & Acquisitions.
- A shift towards a network model of autonomous, lean organisations.
- Increased operational interest in shared services, office space, etc.
- Significant soul-searching on anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion. Strong emphasis on cognitive awareness-raising, in the form of discussion, training, etc. – even though research shows this has limited impact and can even backfire, when used as the sole solution.
- Long-term transition to ‘digital first’ organisations. But will ICSOs be willing to relinquish control when it comes to people-powered forms of campaigning and fundraising? And succeed in effectively linking online and face-to-face collaboration and organising?
#ShiftThePower: Highly relevant – but in need of some nuance
The #shiftthepower and decolonising aid narratives, rhetorically, have become stronger and calls for action louder. The key question is: will ICSOs hear the critiques of Global South civil society, academics and governments and respond this time with greater clarity on how their role and size need to change and/or reduce significantly, in order to retain legitimacy and relevance? And can they discern the contexts in which a larger scale and global presence is still adding value?
At the same time, let’s add some nuance. For instance, which parts of global South civil society do not agree with the stance that ICSOs are crowding them out, and why not? We also urge the sector to take a nuanced, contextualised approach. The request to simply transfer unrestricted resources to Southern CSOs does not recognise the necessity for northern ICSOs to still create that income in the first place. They can only do this by being out in front of the public in their own markets, or by mobilising citizens to give their governments the mandates to allocate resources.
At the same time, a good amount of philanthropy is provided by high wealth individuals (increasingly from all parts of the world) who still need persuading that direct transfer of resources to CSOs in the Global South means that their ways of imprinting on such delivery will be more limited.
Equally, the commitment of boards, staff and volunteers to social justice and solidarity should not be dismissively categorised as being all about self-interest. It is the “how”, the “forms and norms” (as we say in the book) that need to change. It is not about the wholesale removal of Northern ICSOs from the equation.
Are ICSOs actually rethinking roles – in a serious way?
ICSOs need to seriously rethink shifting their roles to respond to this set of drivers, but we have not yet seen widespread openness to doing this in significant ways. By this, we mean more focused, specific and limited roles that really add value to the system, given the maturity of Global South civil society. Few ICSOs have fundamentally changed their role, power structure, or organisational “forms and norms”.
How ICSO leaders can start doing this:
- Engage with your critical friends/stakeholders to ask for robust critique of where your organisation is helpful and where it is not
- Know that recognising the need to change roles in some areas does not invalidate your organisation’s historic purpose and achievements up to that point
- Frame sharing power with Southern peers and moving to new roles as a way of regaining valuable legitimacy and relevance
What these new roles could look like:
- Be the campaigning ally/presence in their home countries for truly global multi-stakeholder co-owned and co-created campaigns
- In public education and mobilisation, connect missions abroad to social justice issues at home
- Provide, upon request, focused consulting services in specific thematic and technical niches
- Offer policy research services, targeting mainly governments and institutions based in Europe, the Americas, and other wealthy nations
- Broker relationships in multi-stakeholder collaborations
- Play a backbone role, upon request, in networks of Global South actors to support collective impact
- Be open to merging or being acquired by other actors (including in the Global South) for specific expertise or country footprint.
As practitioners, we will be keen to follow whether we will see such role shifts develop, and with them a greater handover of power, authority and decision rights – not just responsibility and risk – to country-level leadership, national boards and to partners.
As a sector, we need now more than ever to identify and share models of transformative practice in role shifting, and we will stay connected with the Centre to do this together in future. So if you have something significant to share on this, please get in touch!
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Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, alongside George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz, are co-authors of the recently published book Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs. You can discover more details about it here.
Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken
Principal Consultant
Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken has worked on international development and civil society issues for 30 years, in practice, in academia and as independent consultant. Before launching her consulting practice, Five Oaks Consulting, Tosca was the Director of the Transnational NGO Initiative at Syracuse University, USA. She focuses on NGO change management, leadership development and organisational culture. She has served as board member of InterAction, Public Interest Registry, ProLiteracy and Cadasta. Early in her career, Tosca worked as development practitioner for NGOs, the UN, the World Bank and at a think tank based in the Netherlands, Tosca’s country of birth.
Barney Tallack
Consultant on INGO strategy and transformation
Barney has worked as a practitioner in the INGO sector for nearly 30 years. He has held senior leadership and Board member roles in a variety of international and UK based organisations. He has deep experience in leading strategy and organisational transformation programmes, supporting restructurings, governance and NGO mergers. As Director of Strategy for Oxfam International, he ran the global strategy process and for five years the global transformation and change programme.
