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2020-03-04
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI);
Social accountability is an approach towards building accountability that relies on civic engagement in which citizens participate directly or indirectly in demanding accountability from service providers and public officials. It usually combines information on rights and service delivery with collective action for change. It has become a tool for direct engagement with service providers to ensure that citizens get adequate services or adequate explanation when those services are not available. When social accountability mechanisms are weak, the context becomes more challenging for communities or individual citizens to play a powerful role. Also, social accountability is fundamentally and ultimately a question of power as it requires both social and political pressure to ensure that duty bearers are kept on their toes. This piece will therefore explore the tools and approaches that some African social movements used to effectively drive the social accountability agenda. The tools we are exploring here are respectively social media and creative arts, while the approaches will be based on their ways of mobilising and organising. We conclude by making some recommendations for donors, government, citizens and other stakeholders.
2020-02-01
Open Society Foundations;
Civil Society Organizations and General Data Protection Regulation Compliance: Challenges, Opportunities and Best Practices, a new report from the Open Society Information Program, looks specifically at the ways that the world's most comprehensive data privacy law impacts nongovernmental organizations.
It examines, in practical terms, what these kind of organizations have done to comply with the law. It also presents research showing ways that governments, businesses, and some powerful individuals have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to use the law to prevent these organizations from pursuing public interest research and reporting.
Finally, the report provides a best practices guide that can be used to ensure compliance and limit risk.
2020-01-30
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace;
In the past two years, the Russian public's appetite for change has increased considerably. A small but growing group of Russians blame President Vladimir Putin for the country's problems, and his capacity to deliver change is now being questioned. Yet the demands for change are taking very different forms, not only in open protests but also through latent discontent, and the public has not identified a specific alternative leader as a potential agent of change.
In July 2019, the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Levada Center, Russia's main independent polling agency, conducted a third poll in two years asking 1,600 Russians about their readiness for change. The results show some striking new trends. A total of 59 percent of respondents—17 percent more than two years before—said that the country needed "decisive comprehensive change" (see Figure 1). The Russian publication of this research in November 2019 attracted a lot of attention from the media and political class. An answer came in January 2020 in a form of constitutional changes and the resignation of the government. In his annual address on January 15, Vladimir Putin said: "Our society is clearly calling for change. People want development. . . . The pace of change must be expedited every year and produce tangible results in attaining worthy living standards that would be clearly perceived by the people. And, I repeat, they must be actively involved in this process."
2020-01-28
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI);
The effective implementation of WACSI's interventions is dependent on civil society's contributions and feedback on the Institute's work in promoting an open, safe and prosperous West Africa. WACSI's interventions are guided and inspired by the critical voices from key stakeholders and engagement by different communities and groups across West Africa. At WACSI, we are conscious that civic space affects everything civil society does and everything civil society does affects civic space. A safe, open, free and enabling space for all to form and voice opinions, debate, be heard and peacefully protest, is also an essential prerequisite for achieving the ECOWAS Vision 2020. Civic freedoms including the freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, safe environments and effective participation are therefore essential. This Op-Ed critically assesses the civic space environment in 2019, predictions for 2020 and issues that need more introspection and collective action.
2020-01-17
GivingTuesday;
Giving Tuesday's 2019 Impact Report shares the results of GivingTuesday 2019; but also offers a glimpse into the implications of the generosity that occurred on the day, challenging us to imagine a world where radical generosity is unleashed every single day.
2019-12-12
Center for Economic and Policy Research;
On November 25, a short paper was released purporting to show that there was fraud in the October 20th Bolivian presidential election — and that absent this fraud, the election would have required a second round. However, the authors, Escobari and Hoover produce no credible evidence that the official results of the election should be doubted. Instead, their approach confirms our finding that the expanded MAS margin on the later tally sheets is explained by the mix of precincts considered before and after the interruption of the unofficial TREP count. Their alarm regarding "dosing" was based on a highly distorted presentation of the facts. Instead, careful examination simply reminds us that geography was even more critical to the order in which tally sheets were counted in the cómputo than to the order in the TREP.
In this brief, we replicate the results of Escobari and Hoover, discover errors in their analysis, and eventually find that the approach essentially confirms our own findings that the change in margin was predictable.
2019-12-12
Center for Economic and Policy Research;
The OAS final audit of the Bolivian elections, published on December 4th, concludes that there was "intentional manipulation" and "serious irregularities" that make it impossible to verify the results of the election. Members of the de facto government and other critics of former president Evo Morales have used the findings of the OAS audit to corroborate allegations of electoral fraud leveled in the hours and days following the vote. But the following analysis shows that the report itself presents a biased and misleading account of the audit's findings, presenting serious inaccuracies and downplaying or ignoring altogether any evidence that runs counter to the fraud narrative that the OAS has promoted since the day after the election.
This analysis is not meant to serve as a validation of the electoral results themselves. Rather, it is an analysis of the OAS's actual findings and of the neutrality and rigor of the audit itself. This is not about supporting one political party or candidate over another. Nor is it solely about Bolivia. This is about the need for independent electoral observation in the hemisphere, and about accountability for an organization that has abandoned any semblance of neutrality under the leadership of Secretary General Luis Almagro.
2019-11-19
Peace and Security Funders Group;
Through the Peace and Security Funding Index, Candid and the Peace and Security Funders Group aim to illuminate the field of peace and security grantmaking and provide a nuanced understanding of the issues and strategies peace and security funders support. The Index tracks funding for work to prevent future conflict, resolve existing conflict, and support stability and peace across 24 issue areas (e.g., peacebuilding, nuclear issues). It includes grantmaking by institutional funders, including private foundations, public charities, and community foundations.
Funding for peace and security remains small relative to foundation funding overall. Peace and security grantmaking represented just 1.2 percent of the nearly $33 billion given by foundations in Candid's research set of grantmaking by 1,000 of the largest U.S. foundations.
2019-11-11
Rockefeller Archive Center;
My dissertation examines the role of smart power in U.S.-Spain relations during the Spanish transition to democracy. The archives of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) held several collections that enriched my analysis of the development of soft power by the United States in Spain. At the archives, I found records on the movement of Pablo Picasso's Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art to the Prado in Madrid, Nelson Rockefeller's impact on the Spanish transition, how the Ford Foundation and Peter Fraenkel helped administer Spanish educational reforms and exchanges of the 1970s, and how human rights played a vital role in the Spanish transition.
2019-11-08
Center for Economic and Policy Research;
This paper presents results from statistical analysis of election returns and tally sheets from Bolivia's October 20 elections. This analysis finds no evidence that irregularities or fraud affected the official result that gave President Evo Morales a first-round victory. The paper presents a step-by-step breakdown of what happened with Bolivia's vote counts (both the unofficial quick count, and the slower official count), seeking to dispel confusion over the process. The report includes the results of 500 simulations that show that Morales's first-round victory was not just possible, but probable, based on the results of the initial 83.85 percent of votes in the quick count.
2019-11-01
Open Society Foundations;
Despite deep concerns about the future of democracy, people in Central and Eastern Europe retain a strong attachment to civil society and faith in the freedoms achieved with the collapse of Communism, according to States of Change: Attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a report from the Open Society Foundations.
Based on polling by YouGov conducted in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, States of Change provides a snapshot of current opinion on democracy, freedom of speech, the market economy, and the media in the former Eastern Bloc and Germany.
2019-10-23
Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA);
Over the last two decades, technology tools available for civil society actors in Africa have tremendously evolved. Journalists and activists relied mostly on print media to call out dictators and authoritarian regimes. To avoid being incarcerated, they hid their identities or never stayed in one location. Today, they use digital technologies to mask their identities and digital footprints, and communicate in real-time with informants and reporters using technologically advanced tools . To keep pace with the world and be effective in the work that they do, such media and civil society actors have had to embrace new and emerging technologies to facilitate their work.
