Please book your place on Eventbrite and come join us on Thursday 19 April, from 13h00-18h00, in Park Building room 2.23 for a workshop organised by the Transnational Civil Society

Civil society is in crisis. Civic space is shrinking rapidly, not only in autocracies and semi-democracies, but also in mature liberal democracies. Across the world, governments are using laws and regulations to restrict organisations from registering, protesting and accessing funds. This has resulted in what CIVICUS calls a ‘global emergency’ of civic space; an erosion of civil liberties that fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state.

Panel 1: Effectiveness and Accountability Under Attack 

Panel 2: Aidworkers Under Attack

Roundtable: So What Next?

Aid and development workers struggle with the stress caused by this insecure operating environment. All too often they do not receive sufficient support with key aspects of their working experience, including coping with high-risk situations, challenging institutionalised discrimination and adapting to culturally/linguistically diverse contexts.

Against this backdrop, NGOs are facing increasingly strident criticism of their transparency and accountability, as most recently illustrated by the Oxfam prostitution scandal. The Edelman global survey of public perceptions of NGOs revealed that levels of trust had plummeted to record lows even before the story had hit the headlines. It seems likely that the allegations will cause yet more reputational damage to the sector, and provide fodder for critics to argue that official aid budgets should be slashed.

Civil society organisations are also under pressure to demonstrate their ‘effectiveness’, particularly following the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the increased focus of donors on ‘value for money’. Public cynicism, too, makes it harder for activists to find new ways to encourage wider participation in their campaigns.

This workshop considers different dimensions of the manifold threats that confront NGOs and civil society.

Panel 1: Effectiveness and Accountability Under Attack

  • Dr James Dennis (Portsmouth): The Digital Renewal of Civil Society? 38 Degrees and the Organisational Management of Digital-Micro Activism
  • Dr Mark Field (Portsmouth): A Transparency Paradox? Civil Society Organisations as Monitors of the EU’s Online Systems
  • Prof Hilary Footitt and Dr Wine Tesseur (Reading): How can development NGOs be more accountable to communities? Languages and cultural knowledge
  • Dr Susana Sampaio-Dias (Portsmouth): Human Rights News Under Attack
  • Gemma Houldey (Sussex): Negotiating risk and vulnerability as a humanitarian worker in compound settings

Panel 2: Aidworkers Under Attack

  • Dr Angela Crack (Portsmouth): Abuse in Humanitarian Aid: why does it happen, and what can be done to prevent it?
  • Cllr Helen Evans (former Global Head of Safeguarding, Oxfam): How can DFID strengthen safeguarding practices? A 10 point action plan
  • Prof Rosa Freedman (Reading) and Sarah Blakemore (Director of Keeping Children Safe): Humanitarian or Harmer? Safeguarding children in peacekeeping contexts
  • Dr Silke Roth (Southampton): Gender, Power and Aidwork – Doing and Undoing Gender in Aid Organizations
  • Ahmed Uddin (Portsmouth): Observations from the field: Mali

Roundtable: So What Next?

  • Shaista Aziz (Journalist, writer, former aid worker of 15 years and co-founder of Intersectional Feminist Foreign Policy).
  • Vicky Cann (Corporate Europe Observatory: A campaign group working to expose corporate lobbying in the EU)
  • Dr Larissa Fast (Overseas Development Institute)
  • Dr Armine Ishkanian (London School of Economics)
  • Rocio Moreno Lopez (Executive Director of Accountable Now, the only global cross-sectoral regulatory body for NGOs)
  • Jean-Christophe Nothias (NGO Advisor: A Geneva-based media organization that provides a global ranking of NGOs)
  • Andreas Pavlou (Involve: A charity that promotes democracy in the UK and globally)