Category: Blog Post (D&I)

This blog is republished with thanks to the authour, it first appeared on Alix’s Medium blog, which you can find here

The digital world is disorienting. It permeates every aspect of our lives, but few of us understand how it works. Worse yet, few of us know where to begin if we want to make it work for us. We are discouraged from asking questions when something feels icky or confusing. If you don’t get it, you’re the problem. The technology is magic, and so are the people that build it. Because — in a slight tweak to Clarke’s third law — any technology sufficiently distanced from our own conceptual understanding is indistinguishable from magic.

What would it take to build the right types of knowledge so everyone can demystify, navigate and leverage the digital world for their purposes? For the past decade or so, there have been two dominant answers to that question:

• Create accessible opportunities for anyone interested to learn how to code
• Outsource all of that complexity to a small number of people and exoticise the skill set of that dominant class

But we know that neither of these answers gets to the heart of the question.

Enter Technical Intuition

Over the past decade, I’ve worked with activists interested in strategically adopting technology. And even groups with the most resources, clearest political beliefs and noblest aims struggle to build the right types of knowledge to do it well. It is very difficult — sometimes impossible — to act in your own best interests and in line with your politics and preferences when choosing, managing, and using technology. And while I have long been convinced that one-off trainings on hard skills are a dead end, it was only in the past few years that I have worked to explicitly target a type of knowledge I call technical intuition.

I didn’t want our organisational partners to learn to code, I wanted them to learn how to talk to developers. I didn’t want them to outsource complexity, I wanted them to learn what skills they need in-house, which they could contract out, and how that might change over time. I wanted them to become inventive with technologies that they couldn’t necessarily deploy themselves, but could understand enough and in the right ways to articulate exciting new possibilities. I wanted them to ask incisive questions about underlying data that technologies cast off. I wanted them to actively and regularly wrestle with the challenges data use might present and the decisions they would need to make to use it responsibly.

We have looked for ways of unlocking technology careers for those interested in seeking more sustainable financial futures (throw a rock and you’ll hit a boot camp). But what about those who do not want to learn to code, but still want to make meaningful choices about technology? We are faced not just with a pipeline problem but also with a pedagogical one.

And it’s not just for activists, it’s for everybody

The more I have seen technical intuition in action, the more I am convinced that it is a critical form of knowledge (not simply a skill set), and one that we as a society have not sufficiently explored or optimised for.

Technical intuition is a foundation for agency in and about the digital world and a missing cornerstone of the solution to many of our techno political challenges.

Currently, broad public participation in the decisions we make about our digital future is impossible. Asymmetric access to knowledge, power, infrastructure, and resources that drive the creation of digital spaces is driving inequality. Political, economic, and social inequality. And — as we do with most retraining efforts when economies undergo major transformation — we oversimplify the skills needed to broaden participation and access. We focus on narrow hard skills. But the acquisition of narrow hard skills like coding will re-entrench existing economic relationships rather than reshape them.

Before that happens, I suggest that we rethink what capacities we should be working towards for proactive participation and engagement in politics and new economies.

• It’s not literacy. That is too passive and submissive to systems as they are. We don’t want systems to be legible, we want them to be pliable.
• It’s not sub-speciality. In-depth understanding of one programming language that you pick up over a night class may unlock job opportunities in tech but it doesn’t help those that want to understand technology without having to focus on it as their primary skill set.
• It’s not the ability to follow discourse or news cycles about what technical systems are doing to us. That relegates non-technical people to the role of observer.

So what is it?

Technical intuition is a conceptual frame that we know and see but have never worked towards. It is a key to broad-based access to personalised decision-making within and about technical systems.

There are four dimensions of technical intuition.

To Imagine

An imagination equipped with the information and instincts to conceptualise (good and bad) and suggest (good) technical systems even without the skills of implementing the ideas

To Inquire

An ability to formulate questions that can drive understanding and decision-making, and a clarity on how and where (to what experts) you would need to direct those questions

To Decide

A clarity of how your politics and preferences (both personal and professional) connect to the decisions you can and should make about — and within — digital systems

To Demand

An animated impulse of when to be opinionated, active, and targeted if a system is designed in ways that do not align with our politics and morality

What does it look like in action?

There are many examples and situations that we experience daily in which technical intuition can support more agency and decision-making. When we are at work and considering innovative ways that technology could help us accomplish our goals, when we’re making decisions about how to engage online. But technical intuition comes to play even when we are out shopping for groceries.

I’ll use a consumer example that is nearly universal: my grocery store suggests that I sign up for a discount card that I scan at checkout in exchange for a reduction in the cost of my groceries.

How does technical intuition function in this situation?

First, I imagine

• What data does this initiative generate? Items my family and I have purchased. When I’ve purchased them. Possibly over a long period of time. In aggregate, this data could say many things about my habits, and it is enough granular data that it is unique to me. It could likely be used to predict my movements, my lifestyle (vices and virtues), which could be used for all kinds of purposes.
• How might that data be used by the store or by those that might purchase the data? The store may use it to micro-target ads to me. Maybe one day they will strategically charge me more based on goods they can tell I need or have a higher urgency for. An insurance company may want to know how much alcohol or over the counter medicine I purchase. Credit agencies may use the data to develop profiles or predictions about my spending habits. In some countries it may influence a social credit score.
• How might the data connect to other purchases? If it is used with other companies what might multiple sets of data about different purchases say about me? Taking Nectar cards in the UK as an example, they are used in multiple chains like service stations, railway purchases, grocery stores, and big box stores.
• You might imagine different outcomes. Like what if all of the data is one day made public? Could I be re-identified in a data set that included your weekly shop details over a 5 year period? Would it matter to me? Would it matter to others?

Then, I inquire

Does the initiative offer any detail on how the data might be used? Does it connect with schemes at other companies? How much in savings do I get? Do I want to participate and therefore incentivise this company to carry out this initiative? Are those savings worth the exchange to me personally? Is it worth it to my family? Will this one day be required? What effect would that have?

Then, I decide

I won’t sign up for a card because I don’t think the data I am exchanging for the cost savings is sufficient enough to warrant it. Or, I will sign up, because I think the 10% reduction in cost is worth the likely surveillance — and I may struggle to pay for my groceries otherwise. If that is the case, maybe I will sign up, and will include fake contact details and swap cards with friends occasionally to muck up the data being collected about me.

Then, I demand

After reflecting on this initiative, I am surprised to learn that there aren’t regulations in place about the sale of data generated through it and that the store didn’t attempt to clearly explain to me what the trade offs were for signing up. If it’s an issue that really gets me mad, I follow up in a feedback form, I raise it with friends and family and I raise it with staff at my local branch. I recognise I may have less leverage with companies than I do with say, government initiatives, but I know that most of the gaps in consumer protection exist because customers don’t have sufficient interest and technical intuition to pressure companies to be better — and politicians think we don’t care enough about these issues to warrant or incentivise regulatory action.

What’s next?

There are many people working to develop new forms of communicating complexity, but often they are designed for people either already working in technology fields, or stumbling into something new. New publications are working to increase explainability of complex content; visual designers are leveraging user interfaces as teachers of technical interplay; animators are breaking down complex technical concepts that underpin probabilistic systems; companies are hiring science communicators; researchers are studying explainability…in machine learning research papers; and people are building entire dictionaries of metaphors that can be used to explain technical concepts.

This work is exciting — we should support and encourage it. But we also need to develop more accessible conceptual scaffolding, more clearly connect concepts, and build a path for those interested in understanding how it all fits together. Our aim is not a world in which everyone is a coder, or statistician, or designer, or engineer. Or a world where everyone wants to be a technologist.

We want a world where it is possible for all of us to build technical intuition and reclaim our individuality and agency within and about digital systems.

If you are working on ways to support non-techie communities to develop technical intuition, I would love to hear from you. What are you doing to create insight and understanding? What types of insights are leading to stronger technical intuition? What effects is that having on those you are working with?

Thanks to Janet Haven, Ali Gharavi, Zara Rahman, Lucy Bernholz, Elizabeth Eagen, and Nicole Anand for helping me shape these ideas.

Alix Dunn

Executive Director and Co-Founder

The Engine Room

Alix is a recovering researcher with a passion for applying creative solutions to difficult problems. She is a hunter and gatherer, identifying data and technology strategies that can empower social change initiatives around the world to maximise their impact and make the most of their resources. She co-founded The Engine Room and leads it to be a nimble organisation that provides direct support where, when, and how initiatives need it. She sits on the Advisory Council of Open Technology Fund, and the Technology Advisory Council of Amnesty International. She plays a mean game of chess.

Non-Governmental Organisations are generally characterised by a high degree of independence, being a critical counterbalance to established political and economic structures, and act as advocates for the marginalised people and their issues. Their reputation is traditionally high in terms of morale and ethics, being perceived as down to earth and close to the people. They are the organised part of civil society and represent voices of the weakest, particularly where there is oppression and autocracy.

The above is an idealistic description, but it forms the most valuable capital of NGOs and should determine their way of working, as well as their ability to reach impact. It also forms a fairly fragile basis, as reputation and legitimacy are concepts that can be shaken easily and with dramatic consequences.

Every year, NGOs (or Civil Society Organisations, to use a more positive term) are scrutinised in the Edelman Trust Barometer, together with other institutions. Every year CSOs are frontrunners in public perception and trustworthiness, way above media, political and economic institutions.  Every year the trust ratings for CSOs oscillate around 50% (half of the people don’t trust NGOs), and every year, they drop somewhere – the latest figures seeing a big drop in the US and Canada from 58 to 49% – worse so by the so-called ‘informed public’ (from 73 to 51%).

The trust barometer shows many variables and regional differences and is not the only indicator on what is happening around established institutions. But it gives some credence to the widely noticeable development in thinking that institutions, the ‘glue and backbone’ of a thriving and stable society, are under scrutiny and losing support. This is particularly true when they are seen as exclusive and moving away from the interests of people. This is a phenomenon that has been described in the enlightening book ‘Why Nations Fail’ by Acemoglu and Robinson. So, a lot is at stake.

Of course, context matters. It is notable that some more autocratic regimes like China or Turkey are experiencing a sharp rise of trust in NGOs – this should come as no surprise given the dramatic shrinking space of citizen rights. Looking at the US and Europe, one would assume that the surprising developments of Brexit and the aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016 has also affected public perception – but it looks as if this goes in the opposite direction as one would have expected. The so-called Oxfam scandal in early 2018 has not yet been factored in, but will likely show up in next year’s barometer.

One of the biggest shifts of context over the past years has happened in Europe. With the de-stabilisation of Europe’s closest neighbour (the Middle East), the massive impact of the flow of refugees since 2015, and the inability of the political elites, particularly in the EU, to handle the situation, public opinion has changed direction, towards anti-establishment (and anti-foreigners). It goes way beyond the usual levels of 15-20% right wingers that show up more or less disguised in opinion and election polls. Also, Europe as the traditional haven of liberal democracy is under attack from actors that contest those values and would benefit from weakening the EU – Russia, and ultra-conservative moguls in the US and Europe. Their latest move is the foundation that Steve Bannon wants to create to support and mentor populist movements in Europe.

CSOs are in the middle of this. Their often global nature, their identification with multilateralism, and their social capital is under attack and scrutiny, as much as their legitimacy. ICSOs who work on social justice in the global South, and have a large and international structure, are caught between the danger of being instrumentalised for business or foreign security agendas and their attachment to donor interests. The public’s expectation for CSOs to be humanistic and selfless contrasts with a high level of professionalism, and an increased branding of CSOs as an ‘industry’ (latest example in Germany is the attack on refugee organisations as ‘anti-deportation-industry’).

At times this leads to splits of almost unbearable distances within those organisations – between the external philanthropic narrative and political and advocacy work, between donor funding and defending independence, between professionalisation and grass-roots orientation. Too often, and increasingly, CSOs are being seen as putting organisational issues above the cause, and thereby mimicking isolationist behaviour of some nation states.

Particularly disputed is the necessary empowerment and transfer of responsibility to partners and new actors in the global south, to youth, social entrepreneurs and activists. Here, transfer of resources seems to matter most, and cause high emotions and a growing divide in the civil society sector, particularly between established ICSOs and local organisations.

Much of the above calls for change – within and between Civil Society organisations. Very rusty business models might not crack unless pressure from the public, donors and new actors mounts. Decreasing levels of trust are an alarming sign and should accelerate changes – safeguarding what has been achieved in terms of professionalism, high standards, established models for solidarity; but handover of what needs to be let go in terms of ownership and decision making.

Civil Society Organisations have to re-gain support of the public majority in the middle, in order to maintain trust and their license to operate. They should embrace citizen-oriented forms of action, be politically more bold, more inspiring, and form multi-actor movements to call out on abuses of power. They need to move closer to their original mandates, and live their values and ethics more consequently. And they should not be afraid of working themselves out of their jobs.

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.

This blog first appeared on the Balkan Civil Society Development Network website

Shrinking Civic Space and the Crisis of CSO Legitimacy

Recent times have seen an alarming rise of government measures that restrict and close space for the civil society to exercise core civic freedoms, to advance citizens’ rights and to hold governments accountable. Increasingly, citizens and their organizations suffer from the suppression of their rights to free speech, from obstructions to run their programmes to threats to activists’ lives. The CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2018 reports “serious systemic problems with civic space (the space for civil society) in 109 countries, the majority. In 2017, attacks on civic space came even in countries where they were rarely seen before”.^[1] This means that only four percent of the world’s population lives in countries where civic space is considered fully open. In its report from the previous year, CIVICUS already concluded “that the restriction of civic space has become the norm rather than exception. It should now be considered a global emergency”.^[2]

The most obvious and visible restrictions are often those by strong-armed governments, repressing legitimate protest, cutting down free speech and limiting access to the internet.  Equally chilling, however, are the instances when governments use tactics within the legal realm to regulate Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and their funding mechanisms. Many government bodies have started to use a narrative that delegitimizes or even demonizes CSOs, framing them as foreign agents that aim to undermine national sovereignty. Under the curtain of transparency and accountability, government regulations argue for tighter regulation, requiring from foreign-funded organizations to seek approval from official institutions, demanding income and asset declarations of CSO leaders, and raising the bar for reporting obligations on internal accountability and governance. While there are existing gaps in CSO accountability and transparency practices worldwide that need to be acknowledged, these imposed regulations and their affiliated restrictions are often “harassing in nature and not guided by a legitimate interest of transparency or accountability”.^[3] In many cases, governments further intrumentalise these arguments to picture CSOs as a privileged elite, creating a protracted debate that distracts CSOs from their initial advocacy, divides their unity as a sector and creates mistrust in them as legitimate representatives of their constituencies.^[4]

Many communities under pressure, CSOs, and activists, develop coordinated and strategic responses to these clampdowns, share resistance tools and tactics and are able to show solidarity in the short-term when organizations are under direct attack.^[5] Nevertheless, the declining confidence in CSOs by the people they profess to serve does not only stem from the restrictive or manipulative government policies but is also due to the way CSOs most commonly practice accountability.

The digital revolution of recent years has contributed to transforming our culture of communication and global interaction, which not only makes the information more easily accessible but it also offers significantly wider range of opportunities for people to organize themselves to fight for common causes. We currently witness an unprecedented age when people rightfully demand active engagement in an organizations so that they can co-create outcomes with public institutions just like with CSOs.

Traditional and rather static forms of CSOs have not always caught up with these increasing demands for participation. A BOND survey on effectiveness^[6], the Aid Watch Palestine research^[7], and the What Went Wrong Foundation^[8], all show that stakeholder involvement in CSO decision-making remains limited. Key barriers include a culture that, whilst philosophically appearing receptive to stakeholder input, is often wedded to linear or inflexible design, review, and decision-making processes in practice. Furthermore, CSOs often lack resources, skills and technology to invest in implementing the desired participative and responsive approaches, thus missing out on the opportunity to enhance trust in their relationships with their beneficiaries.

Yet, not only is this missing culture of accountability to all stakeholders, in particular to local communities and people of the grassroots, a programmatic or technical issue, it has also a greatly broader structural dimension that we have to address. We need to acknowledge that the credibility of our sector is under question and take requests from stakeholders seriously. Unless we face our skeptics and ourselves, with an honest and self-critical debate about our modus operandi and our guiding principles and commitments, we, as civil society sector, face the risk of plunging into an unprecedented legitimacy crisis.

Assessing the case of aid officials sexually exploiting victims of humanitarian disasters, Anabel Cruz, the Founder Director of the Communication and Development Institute (ICD) of Uruguay and CIVICUS Board Chair, calls out “the clear culture of abuse of power in environments where there is a vulnerability and in relationships that already imply an imbalance of power.” She suggests that it is this imbalance which we have to acknowledge and address, by empowering local communities to hold CSOs to account and by forging stronger relationships to our roots that we can hopefully prevent such occurrences in the future and rebuild public trust in CSOs.^[9]

Without people’s trust and recognition of CSOs as the legitimate representative of their voices, our fightback against repression and restriction of civic space will be ineffective. Since national governments and other powerful actors quickly learn from each other how to restrict civic space, we must, instead, also realize that the improvement of our own accountability is a critical part of the equation.  Should we want to be successful in defending and reclaiming the civic space, then our approach to accountability needs to be dynamic, with the central spot being given to the dialogue and the interactive relationships with all our stakeholders so that it becomes embedded in the local constituencies’ needs.

Dynamic CSO Accountability and the Use of Feedback

Nearly 15 years ago, Kumi Naidoo already challenged CSOs to acknowledge that their accountability had to work in many different directions: “upward to donors and regulators downwards to beneficiaries, outwards to peers, members and partners, and inward accountability to staff, board, and volunteers”.^[10] So why do we still struggle to live up to this multi-dimensional perception of accountability, and what can we do to step up our game?

In the eyes of donors and governments, CSO accountability has for a long time been a rather static exercise; they demand from CSOs to provide a sound accounting of the funds management, to abide by the laws and to comply with the funding and registration requirements. But there have been very few demands to transfer the right to accountability from exclusively those that have authority over an organization (e.g. donors) to anyone that has been affected by the organization’s work.

Such a shift to a more dynamic understanding of accountability is a process that takes time because it needs an open organizational culture for learning and adaptability, flexible decision- making structures and mechanisms that put people’s participation and the systematic use of feedback at the core of the CSO. Here the participation cannot be viewed as a one-way street in which the stakeholders provide feedback to CSOs which, in return, discuss these inputs among themselves in their backrooms. Instead, it requires from the organizations and establishment of a more comprehensive feedback systems, with tools and processes that allow them to engage with the stakeholders properly, to respond to their input, and to co-find solutions with them.

Feedback is the information collected deliberately from stakeholders about their perspectives on a CSO’s policies, programs, and operations that affect them, including on the impact an organization achieves. This information must come from people and focus on what people think, feel and aspire instead of simply collecting information about the people. The feedback is an important evidence for CSOs – possibly the most important piece of evidence – about how to learn and how to improve their performance. It can be collected and analyzed in many formal and informal ways; obviously, it is the most useful when, as a result of this feedback, changes are made. Evidence collected by FeedbackLabs^[11] suggests that using constituent feedback results can be linked to better outcomes in politics, education, health and community infrastructure.

Increased accountability and increased effectiveness are mutually reinforcing- when we listen to the people we are working with and for, it is more likely that they will support us and engage with us. An effective feedback systems (listening, creating space for open dialogue, co-creating solutions, building partnerships based on mutually reinforcing goals, making changes in alignment with views of the people you seek to serve), is, therefore, a crucial process to leverage the full potential of people’s skills, resources and capacities towards our shared cause and to achieve a better outcome of accountability.

If we truly want to redress the power imbalances between the communities we work for and ourselves as CSOs and regain trust and legitimacy that is currently lost, not only do we have to give these stakeholders a voice, but we must also provide effective systems and tools that will enable them to hold us accountable.

The Global Standard for CSO Accountability as a tool for Dynamic Accountability

The Global Standard for CSO Accountability, a self-regulating reference standard, is such a tool through which CSOs can demonstrate to stakeholders what they stand for and how they define the good practice of accountability. Stakeholders, in turn, can refer to the Global Standard, assess CSOs practices, and demand of them to implement it and to live up to the 12 commitments it contains.^[12] By encompassing Dynamic Accountability, a term originally coined by the youth-led movement Restless Development, the Global Standard is an important tool for CSOs to benchmark their own tools and practices in regard to effective stakeholder participation and learn how to enhance and improve them.

The Global Standard for CSO Accountability was developed through a partnership of nine CSO network organizations championing accountability practices among CSOs at regional or sub-regional levels in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). It was developed in a bottom-up process through mutual learning between the nine partners and intensive consultation of thousands of their member organizations. The final framework was agreed in April 2017 in New Delhi and officially launched during the International Civil Society Week in December 2017 in Fiji.

Being a reference for reflection, discussion, and change, it can be adapted to different cultural, geographical and organizational needs. It provides a powerful starting point to build participative work relationships in and among CSOs worldwide. Different organizations can engage with the Global Standard in various forms. It can be the starting point for a debate either internally or with partners, beneficiaries, governments and donors about the desired and needed practices for accountability and effectiveness. Using the Global Standard as a benchmark can help CSOs and their stakeholders to critically assess their structures, practices, instruments and organizational culture, and to identify concrete steps to address some of their weak spots. Since it provides an important framework for much needed self-reflection, it is a powerful tool for learning and improvement.

Each CSO can decide on which aspects of the Global Standard are the most beneficial to itself and to its members, and at which moment in time. Being a reference for reflection, discussion, and change, it can be adapted to different cultural, geographical and organizational needs.

With the aim to improve their existing codes and tools, the project partners collectively built the Global standard upon their already existing accountability instruments and took into account the important achievements already made by other global initiatives, in particular, the Istanbul Principles and the Core Humanitarian Standard. By capturing these different frameworks and principles in one reference standard and developing them further to facilitate their practical implementation, the Global Standard points to the important role that Accountability Initiatives can play in securing civil rights. It suggests a wide range of practical indicators that different types of organizations can use to evidence accountability impacts to the broader public. Having comprehensive standards and safeguards in place that are implemented and enforced by the CSOs on the national and regional level, is a powerful and self-empowering approach to improve CSO accountability practices, to include stakeholders and to demonstrate evidence of impacts, which will increase trust with people, partners, supporters, and donors.

Being an initiative born out of the sector, it can show one of civil society’s efforts to contribute to a more enabling environment. The different global initiatives are currently exploring the avenues for their future cooperation, so they can reinforce a common narrative civil society sector, and present to the public what CSOs are committed to doing, how they want to work and what impacts they are achieving, in a suitable and realistic form.

A growing number of organizations engages with the Global Standard on national, regional and global levels, which demonstrates that the promotion of Dynamic Accountability resonates with the wider CSO-community. By endorsing the Global Standard, organizations make a public promise to work individually and together towards the fulfillment of its 12 Commitments and thus advocating for a more enabling environment for civil society.

Nevertheless, Dynamic accountability is a process over time that needs to develop gradually. With this in mind, the Global Standard itself must be dynamic and further developed to include contemporary challenges.

What We Need to Do Next

The Global Standard is a tool that, if institutionalized by many CSOs, can serve as a starting point for a global community of practice that explores the possibilities of Dynamic Accountability together. This joint community has to build a strong and united voice to solve contemporary problems around CSO transparency and accountability as well as standards and reporting. This includes the following issues:

1. Disclosing Information as a Form of Protection

We need to discuss the issue of the potential vulnerability which intimidates the CSOs in case they become more transparent.  To what extent shall we disclose the information without endangering the protection of our primary constituencies or the people we work with? The safety of the people we work with and those we work for is of paramount importance; we need to make sure that they can make informed decisions about the extent to which the CSOs can disclose their data. This is a highly sensitive issue which needs to be considered by those parties which demand greater transparency from the CSOs.

2. Donors’ Acceptance of Dynamic Accountability

Many donors encourage the civil society partners to be more accountable to them than to their primary constituencies. This creates unhealthy dependencies and discourages inclusiveness and accountability practices with the civil actors. This could be considered “unhealthy” as it indirectly contributes to the narrative of foreign interests and the problem of shrinking civic space. Marija J. Stephan suggests that “congressional reporting requirements for civil society funding should incentivize flexible programming and monitoring and evaluation approaches that ensure accountability while allowing local partners to lead and assume ownership”.^[13]

3. Donors’ Acceptance for Failures and Learning Processes

In her research interviews with senior management of various CSOs, Angela Crack recognizes the existence of a clear pressure to demonstrate value for money and very low tolerance for organizations that make mistakes. The recent scandals have not just taught us that we need to rethink our own ethical, transparency and accountability practices, but they have also urged the donors to rethink about how they might have indirectly contributed to a practice of focusing on making the reports as positive as possible, rather than focusing on learning.  We need to start a conversation so that CSOs and donors can work together and give room for mistakes and create a culture of honest reflection and learning from these without facing immediate threats to the nature of their work.^[14]

4. Interoperability between Standards and Donor Requirements

Many organizations are faced with the problem of the administrative workload due to different requirements by the state, the donors as well as the international, national and internal standards. We need to work together to develop a system that will facilitate the process for the  CSOs to cope with those various  requirements without losing the emphasis of organizational, cultural and thematic context as well as the ownership of the codes they impose on themselves. Therefore, we need to explore and have a clear and joint understanding of how different reporting requirements and standards complement each other.

5. Cooperate Better with CSOs and Develop the Common Narrative.

In order to measure the great contribution of the CSOs in the achievement of SDGs^[15] and the creation of a more empowering environment, we need to speak with one voice. We need to be clear about how we work together and how we complement each other so as to address these immense challenges that the world faces today.

These challenges, clearly, cannot be solved by a single organization or network, but should be seen, instead as an agenda that needs to unite the voices of different kind of actors. The Global Standard aims to unite these voices in working together to address these issues and create more effectiveness for all. If thousands of CSOs practice the dynamic approach to accountability and if the donors accept it, it has the potential of transforming the civil society sector into a highly participative and responsive actor, generating trust on the ground, leveraging stakeholder contributions for greater impact and contributing to a more enabling environment for CSOs. This, in the long run, can help organizations to create a strong case for their legitimacy and thus be more resilient against attempts to shrink the space in which they operate.