 We still have some friends and colleagues who I don't think it all related to their suspicious past or yet it not cleared through security. I think it's related to the fact that it's a it's a good large audience that's coming and everybody's running a little slow today from the from the weather conditions. So we're going to go ahead knowing that some others are yet to join us. My name is George Lopez, and I have the great privilege here at the United States Institute of Peace of serving as the vice president for the Academy of International Conflict Management and Peace Building. I'm delighted to welcome you and for those especially here for the first time at an event at USIP. You may not know that we're in the midst of celebrating our 30th anniversary or 30th birthday. Never trust an institution over 30, so we're going to elongate this year for as as much as we can. The United States Institute of Peace was created by Congress to be the American institution which would be committed to mitigating, dialoguing, preventing, and hopefully resolving violent conflict. In welcoming you to this forum today entitled Aid to Civil Society, a Movement Mindset, I was struck by how different life now is 30 years from the founding of USIP with regard to what we consider very important dynamics of peace processes. This report authored by Maria Sadaf and Nadia really does sort of heighten this awareness, it seems to me. At the first level, it's that a place like USIP was created to try to avert or end war. And by that we meant particularly in the 1980s the prospect for big global war. We certainly meant it with regard to civil war, but almost every civil war at the time as you'll remember had these dominant external forces of the East and West playing a role in what unfolded in the brutal internal conflicts. We know how much the pattern of violence in the world has changed over time. That violence means that more and more people are dying internally in their own countries, at the hands of their own country people. Under those conditions are definitions in search for what are the drivers of violent conflict and particularly what are the conditions for establishing and being able to institutionalize peace have changed a great deal. Thus, I don't think any of us in this room are surprised that in September of 2015, we know that world leaders will meet at the UN to adopt the new sustainable development goals, which will be the international development framework to replace the millennial development goals. That new framework will proceed as long or is planned to run as long as 2030. Among those 17 goals, one attracting a lot of attention in peace building circles is goal number 16, which focuses on peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice, and accountable institutions. The inclusion of goal 16, many of us believe, recognizes the new acceptance of the relationship between peace and security, good governance within the context of a development framework. I at least think that that's one of the cornerstones upon which this great report is built, but more importantly, it heightens our awareness and really underscores the importance of this discussion here today because this report drills down on real hard on things that the wider goal 16 does not. The first level, it seems to me, the recognition that civil movements, civil action campaigns for peace and development are dynamically related to the prospects for peace and development together. The role and place of local NGOs, the vision and the campaigns that they bring and the responsibility of donors to recognize their strength within their local context. And most interesting from my point of view is the recognition and claim in this report of this is happening in clusters of regions of the world, so we ought to think about regional hubs as a very supportive and effective mechanism for thinking about the meeting of donors, civil society campaigns, and other concerned actors in this pursuit of peace and development together. So we at USIP are very, very happy to welcome all of you. Delighted that Maria has assembled this great group of panelists to comment on the report and talk about it, you'll notice there'll be a number of great presentations here for PowerPoint. What you may also recognize is they took out what I'm supposed to announce as the appropriate hashtag for this event, and of course I didn't remember it in my own head, but I know it's hashtag and there's no greater event than an event that has three distinct hashtags. I'm also going to, in welcoming and turning over the panel to Maria, I apologize for departing stage left from you because of the snow day yesterday and our late start today. I've got some other meetings that have come up and I'm really disappointed. I can't stay in here. A number of good old friends talk about their good work. So welcome to all of you. Thank you very much. Maria, take it away. Well, thank you very much, George, and thanks to everybody for coming out despite the treacherous weather out there, beautiful sunshine, an inch of snow, but anyway, thanks for coming out. And I especially wanted to thank my fellow panelists for both for having read the report and for offering very different disciplinary perspectives on the topic of aid to social and nonviolent movements. We're very grateful that they've joined us today. And I want to thank my fellow authors of the special report, Nadya Navivala and Sadaf Lahani. A little bit about the genesis of this project by way of a short story. So Nadya, Sadaf and I had never worked together before. Nadya spends most of her time in Pakistan, in Islamabad, running at that time. She was running USIP's office and managing our peace innovation fund. And Sadaf, as a consultant to USIP, also spends a lot of time with the World Bank working on fragile state issues and extractive industries. So, needless to say, all of us came at this issue of aid to movements through extensive field experience and engaging with mainly non-traditional civil society actors in local communities who for various causes were mobilizing whether to advance human rights to challenge certain extractive practices, to challenge more repressive forms of regimes and governance. And we were all struck by the seemingly disproportionately small focus that donors were placing on the idea of support to these non-traditional civil society actors. And interestingly, the original title of this report was aid to civil society, colon, catalyst or paralysis. We really liked that title. It rhymed nicely. The problem was paralysis doesn't exist as a word in the English language. So we needed to change the title to the movement mindset. So it's a bit tamer, but we think hopefully it will provoke an interesting conversation today. So just the first slide, Safi. So just an idea, I won't read the slide out loud, but the other... So what we really wanted to focus on coming together from very different perspectives was this idea that we knew all around the world, from most recently the Arab Spring, from popular uprising for social and economic justice in places like Brazil, in a remarkable number of anti-corruption campaigns happening around the world, which many people are now referring to as the fourth wave of democratization. And so we know that people power is happening all around the world. We also knew that there's this frightening phenomenon of closing space for civil society around the world. And we're in a period of what democracy scholars are referring to as a democratic recession. And so at the same time that we're seeing an explosion of human agency and sort of nonviolent movements, we're seeing systematic efforts by state and non-state actors to shut that space down. So for us, the question that we were grappling with and why we were attracted to it is that there are no easy answers to it, is how to support these often fluid, decentralized, leaderless movements that we know around the world are driving change. We know they're often not the focus of donor discourses, and we know that they're hard to support. So that was sort of the idea driving this research project. Next slide, please. So I won't go into the research that I've conducted with Erica Chenoweth that has compared violent and nonviolent movements in terms of their effectiveness, but I did want to show this particular slide from that research, because a couple of data points are of interest to this specific conversation. So Erica Chenoweth and I in a book called Why Silver Resistance Works found that not only historically are nonviolent campaigns twice as effective as armed struggles even against the most formidable opponents, but we also found that there's a very strong positive correlation between the levels and diversity of participation in a movement and the outcome and the success of that movement. So already just based on this basic finding, it's critical for outside actors looking to support positive social political change to think about how to effectively support those actors in civil society, labor unions, professional groups, artists guilds, women's collectives, community groups that are best able to mobilize people and that already have volunteer bases. So participation and effectiveness of campaigns are very strongly correlated. Next slide, please. We also found that this is comparing violent and nonviolent campaigns, and this won't surprise you all that there's a very strong correlation between how people fight for basic rights, freedoms, dignity, and the type of society that they live in afterwards. So we found this very strong correlation between nonviolent campaigns and movements and nonviolent transitions and democratic consolidation 10 years after the campaign. We also found in the next slide a very strong correlation between the driver of change, the driver of a transition, and the likelihood of a country going back into civil war after the end, within 10 years of the end of the campaign. So for anyone who's interested in both democratic development and consolidation and in preventing violence and in turning the tide on civil wars, understanding how to effectively support these nonviolent drivers of change is incredibly important. I'm going to conclude with the last slide. My colleagues are going to go into greater detail about the main findings of the report, but I would just highlight a few just to start the conversation. So one of the main findings or one of the main points that we raise in the report is that, given the significance of these non-traditional civil society actors in motoring change around the world, that finding ways to support those actors that are clearly locally rooted and have basis of support and they themselves are driving the agendas is very, very important. We think that in most cases, the groups that are most worth supporting and engaging are those groups that would probably launch the initiative, the project, the campaign without our support anyway. And these are often the most important actors in the society. So the groups that have motivation are clearly driven by their own agenda, their theory of change and have a volunteer base and frankly don't need a ton of money to advance their aims and their goals. We make the conclusion that to support movements and part of what a movement mindset is, is thinking through how to use more flexible, fluid funding mechanisms that have a longer term duration and that can be surged at key moments to support nonviolent campaigns and movements when they need it the most. At the same time, we fundamentally, the three of us, we know that money matters, movements and campaigns need to buy certain things to advance their mobilization efforts, but money is not the end all be all. And we find that more important often is the ability of activists and nonviolent civil society leaders to have access to each other and for the platforms for them to learn from each other, what it means to strategically engage in campaigns and movements. Basic movement building 101, how to navigate key challenges of oppression, lack of information and the like that this is often more important than money itself. We do place a lot of emphasis in the report on non-traditional civil society. We don't suggest that the international community should stop supporting traditional NGOs and CSOs, but we think that and we think that these actors have a critical role to play in supporting the capacity of non-traditional actors and campaigns and movements, in connecting them, as George mentioned, with the regional hubs that are being developed by USAID, CIDA, Aga Khan, OSF and other donors to provide venues for them to meet and connect with donors in other civil society and help build capacity. Finally, we know and Safi will talk about this next that there are huge risks and challenges involved in doing this kind of work. The constituency that is obviously most at risk are activists and activists, especially in restrictive environments when they are being targeted for repression. And so they have to be obviously consulted, engaged about which types of support by which actors is the most effective. We don't believe that US government should always be in the forefront or in certain cases should even be supporting movement actors. But we also don't think that governments, particularly governments that are fundamentally restricting human rights, violating international law, should set the parameters for what outside support should be. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Safi to talk a little bit more about the challenges. Thanks, Maria. Before I talk about the challenges and the risks, I just want to not make an assumption that anyone has actually read the report. So I'm gonna take us just one step back to pick up where Maria left off talking about the importance of the use of violence or non-violence in the success of ending conflict and consolidating democratic progress. I'm gonna talk about two types of states or two areas of work which are relevant to most of us here. First of all, that of fragile states and the second one to do with countering violent extremism and talk about why support to social movements are important for both of those agendas. So the first one, fragile states. We're talking about a wide range of different countries here, everything from Zimbabwe to Kenya to Syria, but the commonality is that we're talking about countries where the government is either unwilling or unable to provide core functions to the majority of its people. And that means that paradoxically, this is where you need the type of CSO action that we're talking about, the organized civil society, the demands for social accountability that can actually bring about the change that's required for these states to be responsive and address some of these lines of fragility that exist within them. And we seem to be missing this opportunity quite frequently, like North, Sudan, Yemen are all examples of recent processes which have resulted in some kind of peace agreement or some kind of transitional governance, but partly because of the lack of involvement of a diverse range of voices that have come up from the grassroots, eventually these negotiations unravel, and we can see that quite clearly right now. Unfortunately, we're also talking about states, and I think Sarah might pick up on this later, where you have closing space for civil society, where their activities are restricted, where you see restrictions on their registration, where you see the policy and the legal environment really coming down on these actors at a time and in places where their activities are so important. Something else that characterizes them is often that you see a lot of NGOs, I think that Nadi will pick up on this theme. If you think about the aid environment in Afghanistan, in Yemen, 500 NGOs registered with the government since 2011, since January 2011 uprising, that's an awful lot of civic action that's going on. But the point is that in many of these aid environments, we're talking about NGOs that have become the clients of donors or governments and not necessarily representative of people's points of views, they don't have a constituency, and we're not really sure how they fit into the feedback mechanism that constitutes social accountability. So that's a little bit about why this is important for fragile states. Why is it important for countering violent extremism? This growing area of work, or maybe it's just a different frame for the work that we do already. There's two things I think that we should think about here. One is that amongst the groups that we see today using violence and advocating the use of violence, many of these groups started off as local struggles as civic organizations with specific demands, often minority groups, or they had very specific demands for power sharing or an inclusion within government structures. And what we see for some of them is a much long timeframe to the point where they start using the use of violence, like Boko Haram or the Yusufiya group as it was known before, seven years of increased radicalization before they started to use violence. In Syria, the opposition, it was a much shorter timeframe, but it would be interesting to see what that tipping point is or where that cost-benefit analysis of where they start to use violence becomes distorted and what could external actors support do in changing that equation. The second part of it is that if we see civil society as critical to our work on countering violent extremism as President Obama emphasized at the summit, was it last week or the week before? We are talking about organizations that need to have legitimacy, credibility, access to a grassroots constituency, ability to mobilize. And unfortunately, in most cases, we're not talking about the types of NGOs that are favored by donors. I'll give you an example. On the work that we did in Afghanistan on Extractive Industries and Conflict, we surveyed communities in Baglan, in Bamyan Province, in Kunar, and out of religious leaders, tribal leaders, local government representatives, NGOs were the least trusted of all of them, despite everything that they've delivered and the development aims they've been able to achieve. So it's just, it's an interesting thing to think about. So I'm gonna move on to the challenges here. So there's a number of challenges. I've split them into kind of two groups. The first set of challenges are associated with the nature of the types of civic actions and social movements that we're talking about. As Maria mentioned, they're often fluid. They tend to be leaderless. How do we know who's in charge here? Is anyone in charge at any given time? What is the role of the crowd versus the role of leaders? That's not true of all of them. That's certainly true of some of them at certain points. They certainly don't have an eminy officer who's gonna report back to funders. And often they have difficulty in growing beyond a particular locale or a particular set of interests and also in sustaining planned and sequential actions. And very importantly, that's why they have the little ACME bomb there at the bottom, nonviolent discipline is really important as well. And not all social movements manage to maintain that, which can be very problematic for donors. Coming on, to talk a little bit more about that, many of them have to use extra institutional ways of organizing and acting because the legal environment, the policy environment doesn't allow them to use existing channels. There aren't existing channels for interfacing with governments. So strikes, protests, sit-ins, sometimes destruction of public property, these are all ways in which they use in order to highlight their claims, their aims. And again, donors may not be so comfortable with these disruptive type of actions. One of the fears is that the disruption leads to instability, which can be true. I think that we, here on the panel, we all believe that, at least the authors believe that stability is not the same thing as a stable status quo at any time, but that's something that donors always weigh up in their support. Many movements have clear, discrete goals, such as the reinstatement of food and fuel subsidies or political aims. And often these change over time. Again, very difficult for donors to sort of plan within time frames. What is it that we're gonna support? How are we going to do this? What is it that you wanna do in a year's time? What do you wanna do in three years' time? What kind of budget do you need for that? It's something that's not, we're not really used to dealing with these types of entities. One of the most challenging things that we found with organizations in Afghanistan is that the conceptual frames and the language used by the local struggles is sometimes very different from what donors are used to. And at times this is actually antithetical to the types of values that we believe in, human rights, gender empowerment, et cetera. You may find expressions of these locally, but it's often not the language that we align ourselves with. It's an important point, and I think it's something that we have to think about how we can do better, but it's difficult, difficult for donors to align themselves with that. The last thing I wanna mention in terms of the nature of civic action is, as Maria mentioned, the really diverse forms of support they require. You know, like grants over a three-year period just isn't going to cut it for how these groups organize and what it is they're going to try to achieve. And we're just not used to providing in-kind assistance, diplomatic cover and legal assistance, untraceable petty cash payments, or peer-to-peer learning network, something that we might be more familiar with. But we're talking about really a wide range of different types of assistance that go beyond what we normally conceive of as support to civil society. Okay, the last set of challenges here that relate more to our institutions. I wanna apologize for the cartoon to start with. I know that's a little UN symbol there, but there's no subliminal message in that at all. So the first point is that the context matters hugely. We're talking about different types of actors. We're talking about different processes that can change month to month, year to year. How do we keep a handle on these and how do we ensure that our forms of support are targeted well towards these? Clearly, the extra institutional issue, the methods that they use are definitely problematic for donors. How do we help them to maintain nonviolent discipline? It's definitely a challenge, again. The costs and skills that institutions have to exercise in order to support these types of institutions or these types of associations, you have to maintain possibly a surge capacity or some kind of more flexible instruments. You have to be able to identify, diagnose constantly. You have to relationship build. You have to develop and undertake a qualitatively different type of objective setting and monitoring as well than what we're used to, the log frames and the M&E reports and financial reports and so on. And especially if we're talking about building an ecosystem, which I'll come to at the end. So what we're talking about is a huge amount of political and sometimes fiduciary risk, at least from where we are currently institutionally. Supporting the wrong kind of movement, I'm sure, is far more risky than supporting the right type of movement. So the political incentives within our institutions also don't allow us to think differently about who to support. As I mentioned before, movements can contribute to short-term instability. Their aims change over time and often they align themselves with other types of actors and countries with which we don't want to be associated. That's an awful lot of political terrain to navigate. And at the same time, we're faced with knowledge gaps. In the report, we have one official from a development agency who said that despite dedicated young on-the-ball staff who are constantly monitoring the environment, they were not at all prepared for what happened during the Arab uprisings. They didn't know which actors were going to be involved. They didn't know how this was going to pan out. So it involves a huge amount of knowledge. And part of that knowledge is also about how we understand political change. Right now, there's a lot of talk about how the Arab uprisings are unsuccessful. We're not seeing outcomes that we would have hoped for. But is this really the time to measure success? Or is this really the way to measure success? Do political transitions suddenly happen and then you see a transformation that's neat and linear? I don't think we know really how these processes unfold yet and how we can support them. The last point I'm going to make about our institutional challenges is the whole ecosystem approach. CSOs are just one little part of an entire space, an entire democratic space that involves a policy framework, the laws of the country, the different channels for effective participation. So while we're talking about direct support to CSOs, we're also talking about a wide range of other types of interventions. And this means not just a whole of government approach, but also a whole of donor approach in any given context. Great. Thank you very much, Safi, and on to Nadia. Thanks. Okay, if you see me on my phone, it's because I'm tweeting, so feel free to tweet questions to me. You'll find me on Twitter as Nadia Navi and I'll be checking it. So what I'm gonna do is apply kind of this discussion into Pakistan, where I actually, I thought I was a genius because I evolved this approach and then I went back and found that people who had been looking at this in other countries and other places had actually found the exact same problems in the same, very similar responses to those problems. And many things that I'll say, the reaction is, well, donors can't do this. What I've found is that donors just aren't doing it. They often have the flexibility, but they're not using those mechanisms because there are more incentives to basically do things the way we're doing them rather than a push to say, no, it's important to do things in a very counterintuitive way. So first, Pakistan. The context there is that this is a country where we have spent billions of dollars to improve stabilization and governance. Civil society is a big piece of this and increasingly we are directing dollars to civil society in Pakistan and all over the world. So this is our central contention that most of your civil society dollars that are aimed at creating governance stabilization and social change of different kinds is being channeled through NGOs. But NGOs are not the drivers of social change. It's citizen campaigns and movements that are. There's research done on this in Pakistan which compares foreign funded organizations with locally supported ones. It finds that the foreign funded organizations which we call NGOs across the board just the same, the foreign funded ones do not have civil society value in that they are not able to mobilize volunteers. They're not able to raise funds locally and they tend to get higher prices instead of discounts and in-kind support. On the other hand, you have operating in parallel a very, I would say self-help society. It's very giving and it will do a lot for itself but there are barriers to organizing which are political, which are social, which are also legal. And it's in looking at these barriers that we can come up with more effective ways to support organized civil society and support them in organizing rather than looking at our tools of dollars and then shaping our approach accordingly. So this is what I learned and what I did in Pakistan. Two and a half years, many people don't know that USIP does programming in other contexts. And we work with civil society. So first what I would suggest doing or what I did is you kind of expand the approach of what civil society is beyond registered organizations. Many of the groups that I was working with were not registered, had never received support before and these are often local associations, volunteer groups essentially that come together and a lot of youth organizations that come together. So knowing who's out there requires a lot of networking. You find one person in the hub, they refer you to others, you have to go out there and find them, they're not knocking on your door. This requires relationships, it requires trust, it requires mobility. The security restrictions are becoming very extreme for US diplomats, far worse than security conditions because there's a much higher value being placed on security than effectiveness. And for, I think there are ways to outsource this type of work, but if our State Department in USA are gonna be directly relevant to these changes in society, we need to be willing to take some risks. So yeah, so secondly, once we know the gamut of who's out there beyond the registered organizations and we found them, we need to support them in ways that are flexible. And basically change our metrics of who we decide to support. What I would critically look for in talking to organizations is people who came to me and said, this is what we're gonna do, take it or leave it. We're gonna do it anyways. They had a very clear sense of mission. They tended to operate on shoestring budgets. They had a lot of local support. Actually, most of them had never received donor support. They sustained entirely on local contributions, which were not much. And that also told me that these people don't need that much to work. And with a very small amount of funding, we can kind of enhance what they're able to do by enabling them to get materials. That's what they needed. They didn't need salaries. They didn't need administrative support. They didn't need offices. And actually these things would hurt them. So what happens often is that the reason NGOs have a lot of trouble is because they display very high, they display a lot of signs of high material comfort and material incentives. They have the offices, they have the cars, they have the above market salaries. They've become a new elite in these societies. And as soon as you take a group that has come together on a volunteer basis and you give them a lot of money, you tell them they need to report and give you accounts and all of this stuff, you're suddenly diverting their mission away from what they're doing, their time away from what they're doing and having them professionalized. And then we do this through capacity building all the time. We want them to be able to be professionals, but they weren't, they were activists when we started. And then they have to sustain these budgets. They have to sustain these salaries. And then suddenly the money dries up for women's rights and everybody wants to do violent extremism. So then the same groups are coming to you and they're ready to work on violent extremism as of last year. So you can see how this becomes a problem and there's no sustained agenda and often it looks great to us because we enter these societies and we're like, wow, they speak our language. But the problem is that everybody in that society knows what's going on. And it's, they're very frustrated. So, and it discredits the space and it makes it harder for local activists to enter the space. There used to be a very active left in Pakistan. Very, it was this great generation of activists and you don't see them anymore today because these people now have an option to work in professional organizations and channel that energy in a slightly different way, which is less effective. So, okay. So in dealing with these groups, once you've identified them, it's very important to allow idea ownership when I was very against strategies. And I had worked at USAID. I know how this town loves strategies. The problem with strategies is that you're defining, even at that level, too much what you wanna see. And it restricts your ability to pick up the best ideas that come to you. I avoided any kind of strategy and I just picked the best ideas that came to me. This ended up being something we'd never thought of before, which was public space and taking back public space in Pakistan. What was happening? So Pakistan, I mean, if you go there, it's a restrictive environment because of the security. Visually, you see graffiti everywhere, which is often divisive, hateful, sectarian, political, and in a violent way. And people are generally scared of public space. But what a lot of groups started coming and proposing to us, the ones who were locally supported, who were volunteer-driven, is they wanted to do things out there, whether it was in media, whether it was kind of on billboards. They wanted to do things on streets. And this is the opposite of what's been happening with a lot of our assistance that has been channeled into private spaces, private elite spaces, and very event-driven. When you work with legitimate groups that have local support, you're suddenly able to work in public space. And this also taught us a lot about how locals were responding and how they were able to respond in Pakistan. Okay. So finally, when we get to M&E, there's a huge, this huge, people would always say, how do you know this is gonna work? And I would always tell them, well, you know, you don't, because social change is not linear. And if they really wanted to, I could give them a bunch of M&E reports, but they weren't gonna read them anyways. And what I said is the way that we know this works is if we seed it and it grows, it attracts local supporters, more than it started with. You can go to Facebook pages and see if a group has 80,000 supporters versus the 200 people who went to the training, you can tell that they've mobilized some local support. You can also look at how locals, how Pakistanis are assessing what's working in that society, word of mouth. I would go around and talk to people, they'd be like, oh yeah, did you see the 60-second film festival? I was like, yeah. So I would actually hear people talking about things. I would see it randomly be painted on the wall of the mall, or we'd see people picking it up. I mean, you would just see... And so there's another guy who does this as well, but essentially you're looking for ripple effects. You're looking for the reiteration of your message without you stimulating it directly. So that's what I would tell them. The other thing is you wanna see if it continues past your support. The funding has ended, does it continue, does it grow? We actually, so what we would actually do is we would give them a small amount of funding, which could be displaced by a local donor, and then we wanted them to find private supporters, find private companies that will support you after this. And that actually worked. Most of several of our initiatives actually grew after our funding ended in pretty big ways. So I'll close with that. And just two points. I mean, legitimacy is very important because it allows you to work in public space essentially over private space. And while money matters, that's not the most important bit of this. When we look at the things that people need to organize, for example, January 30th, there was a bombing in Shikharpur on a Shia shrine. And after that 1,200 survivors marched about, it was a couple of hours from Shikharpur to Karachi. And when they got there, the Karachi government declared the protest and participation in it as a criminal offense and threatened to arrest the protesters. So this is a problem and nobody notices that it's happening. And this is where there is a value of people noticing beyond governments, beyond aid, and also stressing the right to peaceful protest in Pakistan and looking at other ways in which we can help activists link up, learn, and just look at really what they need, not what we're willing to give them. Thank you. Thank you so much Nadia. So now you've heard from the three authors of the special report. Now we're going to hear from three respondents who are eminently well placed to offer reactions from their various disciplinary vantage points. So we're gonna start with Neil Levine from USADRG. Thank you all. And thank you for the report and panelists. I wanna congratulate Maria, Sadaf, and Nadia for this piece of work, both for its timeliness coming kind of post-Arab spring and also in the context that has been referred to as kind of the global closing of political space. Timeliness, number one, digestibility, 16, 14 pages with footnotes, all of which I read very carefully because you talked to a lot of my friends within AID. And then just on the high quality of really talking about a new phenomenon that I believe is underappreciated and understudied. In terms of your USAID context, I'm sure you didn't talk to everybody, but you talked to a lot of the people who gave you insights into the nature of the challenges we face. And I thought the report captured them and you've spoken to some of them. And I think I'm gonna be very brief because there's a lot on the table here and I really wanna take advantage of the knowledge in the room to get to questions, but really wanna comment on the report in terms of the what, the how, and the what next and really focus more on the what next and cover some of the things to call out that were covered in the report and in the conversation. And then maybe in the Q and A, I can explain for those who don't know why those restrictions and challenges are keenly felt. They're really real and there are reasons behind them, but that doesn't mean that they are inflexible or that work isn't being done to address them. And I would say, by the way, I kind of accept in large degree the critique and the challenges of donor organizations here. So, but my job is really to respond and improve our ability to work in this space. And not because it's a critique, but because in terms of promoting democratic change on a worldwide basis and elevating human rights, it's what we need to be doing. So the what I think has been largely explained, the value of the report is it tells us what we're talking about in terms of what our social movements. And from the AID and donor perspective, we've worked for decades with what we call politically active civil society. And so events like the Arab Spring with the mobilization of broad swaths of the population really introduced the phenomenon on a global or regional and really global stage. And we realized that we didn't know all that much of what we needed to know on it. I will say that AID for a long time has worked with mass organizations through our support to labor unions, through political parties and others, but these are well known players. And what was happening in the Middle East around, I think we thought was something new and that we did not completely understand. So this represents an advance in our understanding. And I think in a very timely way. It also talks about how we work. And you've really underscored some of the challenges and the report calls out some of the ways that the bureaucracy and donors have responded, I think in a positive way, to more fully engage social movements. And some of the examples that were thrown out is that it is not entirely new, but the idea of using established civil society partners as intermediaries and fiduciaries to then on-grant to small local organizations is something that's been around. This paper suggests that that is one effective way and that I think the authors would say, yes, do more of it and find ways to do it and get to the areas. And I really am taken with, what I walked away from the most salient point is that the folks that we can work with and do work and deliver programs and have been for some time, may not be the, certainly not the only, but may not be the best reflection of the most effective way to get at the phenomenon that we're trying to influence or join with local actors to play a part in. And that does require some thought. I think so the how we work is covered in the report. I think the most interesting thing is what next? And what I take away is about three or four recommendations. The first is what I said before is expand the efforts underway to work through in years to get to that level of social movement to explore and greater understand the relationship between what we would call politically active civil society and broader social movements. This was the topic of a symposium we had back in February where we talked to some of the leading experts, some of them on this panel, to kind of explore what those relationships and what the intersection of those things, because what we found in the Arab Spring in the case of Egypt is that these were not two distinct phenomenons, but they were actually one working together and feeding off each other in that the locally rooted NGOs may be the workspaces, the cell phone source, the places where people met, but it was beyond and through and much broader than that in the case of Egypt. The other is, and it's mentioned in the report, is that beyond resources, the ability to exercise our convening authority as a donor, particularly, and this has been done before, in terms of closing political space where human rights defenders and others are under threat, that we have the ability to both act in a protective way to associate ourselves in a way that would give a measure of protection to folks there, and then there's material resource for those who are suffering, or for families that are separated, and that is both a convening authority to bring people together in safe space, but also a diplomatic tool that we can use. The third area as mentioned in the report is a new innovation that was developed in response to the president's call for the stand with civil society, and this is the creation of civil society innovation hubs. And again, this is a new model of working with partners broadly to co-create approaches for engaging civil society. This generated over 300 responses from civil society globally. A culling of that group was done, and there's an ongoing dialogue effort, region by region, to establish these hubs, whether they be physical brick-and-mortar structures or virtual hubs as resource centers, safe spaces, and places where we can further explore what are the needs of civil society, and I would say social movements to respond to areas particularly where democratic space is closing. The last piece, which I think is not mentioned in the report, or only briefly, is the whole area of community philanthropy, which I think gets at some of the, it's not called best practices in the report, but some of the recommendations is why work with community philanthropy? Well, by definition, almost it's rooted in the local context, and that was the first recommendation, context, context, context. Secondly, it's a way to access local resources, whether that be financial, human, or social capital, that really speaks to the local experience and is a way to guide what the donor, well-intentioned donor effort is. And then the third advantage in community philanthropy is generally that's built for the long haul, and that I think the idea, I'm very taken with the idea is should we evaluate where we are with the Arab Spring? And I said to Sarah is it would be the equivalent in our historical experiences evaluating the American Revolution in about 1779, where it was 13 more years before we had a constitution and a continuing experiment in democracy that leads on till this day. So I think some perspective on that from our own history is probably appropriate. So again, built for the long term. And then finally, and this is on any panel, areas for further research is the giveaway, but just to tell you, I was noticing in the recommendations, the slide that you had up in terms of what I would call applying the systems approach or knowing the local ecosystem and the one before that the previous point is gonna help me here. That would be great. That's it. Knowledge gaps and political change. There's really taken by your comment in terms of strategies and their relative value. Okay, I think strategy is really good. Bad strategy is really bad. And you get a thing, but what should the strategy do and why I support them is that it should have a broadly understood, understanding the local context that reflects input from local knowledge, number one. Number two, it should have a theory of change of some kind. What is it that you're trying to do with all resources be they the donor resource, locally generated resource, what is your expectation and your experience tells you that? Does one theory of change is, will this continue once the donor assistance and why do we think that? And a good strategy would involve that. And then it also is your vehicle for building support for what you're trying to accomplish. So in a very kind of process oriented way, a strategy well done and well written has a good problem statement, an excellent theory of change that's plausible and allows a banner to be struck that other people will flock to and the other people that we want to flock to are within your agency and with the American Congress of something that makes sense, but they need to know what is it that we're trying to do? Because think for a minute what we are asking in terms of the American people, US taxpayers, we're asking you to take a portion of your income, we take it away and we send it overseas. And so they have a very responsible reason why the difficulty of oversight, fiduciary risk and all of that, why those exist. And so as stewards of that, we have to take that into account. That said, the areas of democratic change that are occurring today that I'm really willing to believe that we're not getting to the most salient actors and for that we need to better understand the space to develop powerful theories of change and challenge our systems to get resources there. I think the hubs, community philanthropy and smart officers who are able to get out beyond the wire to really understand their local environment all add to, are all part of the new approach or a movement approach that this report speaks of. Let me stop there, I look forward to your questions. Great, super helpful, thanks so much Neil. And I recall Nadi and I, I love her dearly and she's often the voice of reason on everything but we did have a few back and forths about strategy and the importance of strategy but I see I didn't have much influence on her. Anyway, so now Sarah Mendelson from CSIS is gonna comment. Thank you so much, it's great to be here and thank you for this important report from I wanna note three very compelling smart women and that's great to see. The comments that I'm gonna make on the report in part draw on a series of papers that I've been doing and giving around college campuses actually, William & Mary, Arizona State, Stanford and Cornell and a short policy paper will be coming out very shortly. Reading the report I felt like we are all seeing a very similar phenomenon of the closing space and certain parts of civil society or populations opening up and taking advantage of the space. But I wanna, in the time that I have, slightly reframe the problem and share with you work that is really in the early stages and by we, I'm joined by Monette Zard who's in New York, Sara Muhammad who's in the back, raise your hand and with support from the Oak Foundation. We have basically, we've problematized the issue of closing space and we can talk more about what we mean by closing space. There's plenty of evidence that in fact there is a very hostile environment in many places around the world for civil society, NGOs, bloggers, journalists, LGBT activists. And over the next several years CSIS is interested in actually building an international consortium with thinkers from universities and think tanks, particularly from the global south, to really dig deep into why space is closing and what the specific remedies are. So what I'm presenting very briefly is a working hypothesis that there are different causes in different contexts and they require very specific remedies. Here are a few of them that we've easily identified. Clearly the sources of funding seems to be problematic but we don't know if multilateralizing funding versus some mix of domestic and foreign is gonna make a difference but we need to understand the sources of funding. We have an assumption that I would disagree that this aspect of money, people have to be, have enough money to support their family. It's not, I understand the issue of salaries that become, that essentially separate you from the local context but I think we have to not overdraw that point and understand that people need to make a living. And the issue is how you do that. And the domestic philanthropy piece is hard and difficult and we need to figure that out. There's some speculation that the closing space is a result of the level of anti-American sentiment or anti-global north sentiment or anti-west depending on where you are. There is some understanding that this is about how countries are using and abusing counterterrorism policies and that needs to be explored. Especially in places where there are legitimately security issues where hundreds of people have died in a matter of months and the government feels some responsibility but is overusing or overreaching with legislation. There's use and abuse of religious arguments or what some have called cultural. But there are two that I wanna focus on really quickly. One is we are beginning to detect that there is a dynamic relationship between the opening, the open government agenda, the connectivity that citizens have in this digital era, a kind of shifting of sovereignty that is very threatening to a lot of governments. And so that may be one of the things we wanna really dig deep into. And then there's this issue of NGO legitimacy. So I wanna take a minute on each. The open government agenda, which I associate myself with strongly, is really based on the idea that the government data shared with populations can lead to better governance, that transparency and accountability are good things. There is the question that I wanna raise that are there unintended consequences of this increased demand and lawful release of government data? And if so, how do we anticipate those? What are the risks around the world? What are the risks to activists? And what kinds of data might actually help mitigate the risks? And I'm gonna give you an answer in a second. This issue of NGO legitimacy is one I've found not only fascinating, I think it requires an enormous amount of more research. The development literature is really digging deep into this. And you hear quotes like accountability deficit, constituency deficit, dependent syndrome. But one of the most vivid examples to me has was the letter released in August, 2014 by civicus signed by an enormous number of NGO leaders, basically making the statement, and this is a kind of dramatic statement, this is prior to International Civil Society Week, suggesting the Universal Declaration quote, lies and tatters, close quote, that informal movements were deeply challenging more organized NGOs and calling for a quote, radical rehaul of civil society. So there's something going on in many parts of the world where indeed NGOs are recognizing there's a problem and they're trying to figure out how to respond to it. So an answer, and I'm gonna argue that there is no single answer to any of this closing space that we really need, this is an all hands on deck moment, we need a lot more research and a lot more answers. But one idea that I'm road testing is that actually an increased amount of focus on public opinion data can help. We need organizations listening and responding to local populations. From a rights perspective, I'd like to know what do populations in any given context know about human rights, how do they think about human rights, how do they experience rights to reframe strategic action campaigns? And I've done this in Russia, I draw on the work of Professor Jim Ron who we hosted earlier this week from the University of Minnesota who has a whole team of research and has done survey work in India, Mexico, Nigeria and a few other countries. The trick is one can in fact get the public opinion survey data funded, you can gather the data. The trick is bringing the data to a format is both digestible for organizations that organizations want to listen to the data that they are interested in it and then using the data to be able to engage populations. That's hard and I'm suggesting that there actually needs to be a kind of broker or boundary organization to bring this together. I think a lot of us are hanging our ornaments on that tree that is the regional hubs which colleagues from USAID are advancing. One idea is an international human rights social science NGO consortium that brings this together. There are examples of those kinds of consortiums. I think J-PAL is one of them, although not explicitly focused on the survey data. I think there's no question the report, as with some other work, is tapping into a very important, dangerous and I think existential problem for a lot of organizations and we need to be thinking about all sorts of ways in which we address the problems. Thank you. Great, that's very helpful. Thanks so much Sarah. And our final speaker will be Alexandre Marc from the World Bank. So thank you very much. This was indeed a very, very interesting report and I think you're touching to a lot of very important issue. Let me take a step back a little bit from the perspective of the World Bank. I mean we are an organization that works mostly around state. So what I'm interested, what we're interested in is the process of state building and institution building. And we've seen very, very clearly from the work that we've done in the WDR 2011, our World Development Report on Conflict that institution absolutely central to any societal change and how institutions work and the state is only one of those institutions. I was going to show you a few slides but for the rapid, because I don't have so much time, I just want to tell you that one of the slide we have is the sort of model of what a state here and we've set up four components. So one component is the sort of political processes, political pact, the institution that support the political pact. The second one is the delivery of services, the delivery of security, of justice and the financing of the state. Then there's another one that is the local government that we tend to forget always but is absolutely central because that's part of the state too but is the state that is in touch with the citizen and finally we have all the organization that are outside of the state that actually make the state meaningful, make it work, right? And these are the civil society organization. Now if you look at the financing flow that go into those different categories after a conflict, you will see that it's completely overwhelming going to the capacity issue and overwhelmingly going to and a little bit going to some local government issue but actually there's very little going either to the civic society or civic engagement. There is from some organization that if you took the overall flow for development, very little going to parliamentary or not even parliamentary, any institution that deals with the sort of political pact. And therefore if we agree that those four element that essential for legitimacy, for authority and for capacity which are the free element of the state, then we see that we have a big gap and what I like with this report it goes a bit into this gap. So now on the NGO work, I fully agree with the report and of course there's a big variety of NGO but I think the problem of our work with NGO is really the flip side of our culture of accountability and our culture of result of orientation. And that is, we have to be very conscious that this culture has a real serious flip side which is the fact that we always want to decide what are the results we want from here, from DC, from Paris, from England. And then we want to decide who's going to be accountable and we say accountable the population but at the end is for us because we're taxpayer as you're saying. But then you start to have a big problem and Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan have put to this problem of double accountability of what the central problem of society is today in when donors are so heavily involved is that you have, you have, you should have accountability to your citizen but actually you end up having only accountability to your donors because that's what really matters for the money. So the second problem with our, so we like NGOs when they are basically our arm, when they are like our hand, they're our body, right? They're part of our body. We can control them with our mind, with our understanding, with everything and then we feel comfortable and that's we can see the problems with that. The second thing is we have, we are very technocratic, our development institution and we believe that what makes legitimacy is efficient delivery of service and more and more survey tells us and as I was mentioned, yeah, you can have a nice school but if it's developed by illegitimate people, if it's done in an illegitimate way, it's just not going to have the impact you want to have out of that. So we massively construct school and construct with NGO and develop health center and we are astonished, there's no legitimacy that comes out of that and there can be no legitimacy because they're problem of efficacy but also because there's much deeper problem behind who delivers it, how it's delivered, how much population I consulted. So these are the problems that I completely agree, they're very well mentioned there. Now when you move to what you are suggesting is to move much more directly support civic movement, then you, I think you touched the heart of the problem and this pose for us, Westerner organization, a number of problem. First, I think the problem is institutions. You sustain movements if you have institution behind them. Everything shows you the big movements in society have always been followed by the establishment of institutions. The French Revolution has been followed by a huge attention of institutions, not very participatory institution by the way at the beginning at least, but institutions. So I always have a little, I think it's really important when we talk about civic action to relatively quickly think about institutions. Now what happened in Yemen, for example, is you have this beautiful, I mean I work quite a lot in Yemen, you have this beautiful movement of the population but when you needed to translate these findings in terms of the reality of a state, then you needed institution. And what were the institution there ready to take over? It was the clans, mostly, some of the Islamic party that were actually well organized and Aden who had left some strong institution based on the Soviet model, right? So these are the type of, and actually most of the institutions in Yemen come from Aden, come from people from the south. So you had actually an institution that took over the social movement. So I think just thinking of social movement without thinking what are the institutions that are going to take behind it is really something we need to think about it. The second problem I think we have is that as it was said, social change are not linear. Societies need to experiment different elements. I mean the Arab screen was interesting. For my institution it was first seen as an employment program, problem. An employment problem, discrepancy between employment and the labor market. Then very quickly it became, well it's a problem of voice, it's a problem of people having voice. And then we realized that actually really deeply there it was a problem of model of society. And that's where we all became very uncomfortable with what we were doing, right? And where we were actually now relatively comfortable with going back to the Statue Co in a number of countries. So we have here a problem that if you start to move with civic action you also have to be respecting what countries see as their trajectory of change and the necessary conflict they will be inside society to move around the society in a certain direction. And that has big political and difficult implication. The third aspect that I think is really important is the fact that the model of change of society that we have is a very, very, very long model. And I think that is mentioned. To change an institute, to do a revolution it happens rapidly. To change an institution it takes a huge amount of time. And that's why usually revolution repeats and repeats and repeats until the institution is set up, right? So we have also to be ready of this very long engagement and we have to be ready with the WDR show as going back to bloodbath and going back to better situation and back to bloodbath. And we need to remain engaged as far as all this is going, which is another. Finally, the last element that I think is very important is this thing of nonviolent civic action because this is yes, we all want nonviolent civic action but when you look at how many change have happened in the world historically it's been based a lot on violence because that's through violence that society really transform and change. So we hope we move out of that progressively but we also projecting, I mean when I go in a country and I project, I'm a French person, I project the French revolution, my God. There was a lot of blood there, right? It was not all beautiful. And actually really interesting when you look at the French revolution we think that we were there to eliminate the aristocrat which we realized not that we didn't but we were actually there to create a central state the one that we really killed with all the regional groups that wanted more autonomy in Marseille, in Brittany and all that and we were actually creating very centralized institutions that are part of our reality but it's through blood. So how do you control the movement when the society does not have a history of nonviolence as maybe India has or some other places have or Tibet has? It's very, very difficult and you have to be to accept that at some point your movement will become violent. Now with all this, are we ready to really support social movement in the way you're saying? I would say yes but do we have the institution, the parliaments, the authorizing environment that would let us doing that? I don't know but I think we need to be very, very conscious as far as we're going. Now last point, in terms of if you approach this problem of civic engagement with this idea of state and institution I think if you really want to make a change in the country it's really important to see the different areas where you need to make change and as much as it's important to I think support civic movement, it's also very important to make as much pressure on the government as you can on the elements that would allow the civic action to sort of a grip on the state. So for example, all the initiative of budget transparency I think are very, very good initiative. It's not too frightening for many states but it's really important, right? Publish your budget, publish your budget of your healthcare because then it gives to civil society the elements that they need to take to be able to argue and push. So I think you need to really work with the two of them. Also there's another big question is do you have those sweeping change in society in the sense that we call civil society without a middle class? I mean when you look at the story of change and major social change leading to democracy it's really middle class that have a brought it and I think that's a big issue. How are we pushing class societal change when you don't really have a middle class that is there that have the interest? But then we need to support the instruments of the middle class like trade unions, a lot of those institution traders association, a lot of those very local institution that actually are not always threatening for the state because actually state maybe be state members are part of them, right? But they are very important slowly as you develop the middle class. So that's my comments. That's very helpful, thanks so much Alexander. I wasn't going to mention anything specific about the research that I've done on nonviolent movements but you set me up a little bit with your comment. So this whole idea of violence and the need for violence to contribute to successful revolutions, fortunately, fortunately the data shows that that's not true, that in fact historically most successful revolutions have been nonviolent compared to violent and there doesn't need to be a cultural predisposition to nonviolence or anything like that that these movements have emerged all over the world including places that have used that have been involved in violent war. So that's actually hopeful and that over time since 1900 and we collected a lot of data on this, over time not only has the prevalence of nonviolent movements increased but their efficacy is increased including against the toughest opponents. So just a one small response to that. So thank you so much to the full panel. This was a really rich set of presentations. Now we have, we decided that if it's okay with you all we'll go a few minutes over since we started about 10 minutes late. So we've got about 15 minutes for questions. So I think folks have microphones so just raise your hand and we'll get you a microphone. Thanks. Hi, thank you so much to all the panelists for a really wonderful presentation. My name is Cara George I'm with Monics International and so many of you touched on parts of the question I wanna ask but maybe you can elaborate a bit further on the importance of selecting the right groups with whom to work and how would your recommendations be for the process of doing so from a donor or implementer perspective? Okay. Just someone I wanna take you a little bit. All right, why don't we take three questions and then we'll respond to those. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Mike. I was encouraged by the remarks because I think if you look at the need for if it's a nonlinear world and you need nonviolent discipline these are hard to figure out but connecting deals I think it's if you actually behave nonlinearly and support only those nonviolent groups you make a lot of headway and USAID has done this. So to me it's more of a long-term focus rather than a short-term. It's more relationships than projects let's say and you see your NGOs who've been USAID NGOs been in country a long time when they know the scene they can quickly identify new social movement players and then you won't give a grant until you've really sussed out are they nonviolent and you can help them with training if in fact they need strengthening on that. So I just wanted to hear a little bit more from any of the panelists on what some real possibilities are with supporting disciplined nonviolent movements and I'm Mike Starr-Senich with IRG. Why don't we get orange in the back? Hi, Nick Demeter, Melancholy International Development Professional. Mostly from reading Ben Ramalingham's Eight on the Edge of Chaos. If you guys have picked that one up I'm hoping there's a happy ending there but it's not starting off well. So what Neil was saying about community philanthropy and bad strategy naughty about looking for cost share from civil society beneficiaries. In my experience there's often a rush to support and sustain a rush to support and then often a rush to sustain so we want to get them the resources they need but also to see them do this work on their own. So what the book I just mentioned calls doing the wrong thing writer. How do we know we're not doing the wrong thing writer? Since a lot of these movements turn into umbrella advocacy groups to continue the cause that they came about such as the documentary India's Daughter which makes me even more melancholy. Two questions, do we have any idea how movements of how often or how likely these movements turn into something more official or formal? And secondly, are the NGOs saying anything about reporting requirements besides the fact they don't want to have reporting requirements? You mentioned flexible financing and less reporting for smaller grants but are the NGOs looking at asking for the support and is it being given to them? Okay, so first one was criteria when selecting or engaging with local civic actors. The second one was how to support the capacities of these groups that are involved in nonviolent movements. Third one, how do we know we're not doing the wrong thing? Data on movements or non-traditional actors that turn into NGOs or traditional civil society and what are NGOs specifically asking for? So now do you want to kick this off? Yeah, so I'll take the first one because in doing it for two and a half years there were actually patterns. So the first thing is that you have to network. These are not the groups that are gonna knock on your door. They're not necessarily gonna send you an email. They're not gonna ask. Most of them are actually not bothered because they know what's entailed in the reporting, the accounting, and it's a totally different structure of engagement. So you have to network and reach out yourself. The second thing is that when you do meet them they have a very clear sense of mission. Like they know exactly what they wanna do. They're very clear. They don't sit there and ask, so what are you funding? They say, this is what we wanna do. Take it or leave it. And probably we're gonna find a way to do it anyways. It's very clear based on the history and their budget request. So over time have they focused on the same thing, on the same issue. If they're saying they're doing everything from governance to education to health, that's a problem. And the nature of their budget request. They won't think to ask for things. It's just you'll see in their budget it's very different. They won't be asking for a lot of admin. Usually the leaders of these groups don't ask for salaries. Typically they're usually pretty embarrassed to ask for salaries. And there have been times when I've been like, you know, if you have to survive it's okay if we give you like $300 a month or something. In the local context or 500, whatever. But so they have very original ideas because they are responding to the context. They're not exposed to the sector that's doing this work. You will see on one hand the same ideas coming up over and over again. Youth training comes up a lot. People want to go out there and train people then give them a little bit of seed funding to go do something. And you'll see this over and over again. And then you have youth groups who have these like really original and sometimes crazy ideas that you don't know if they're gonna work or not, but they just seem motivated enough that it just might. And this happened many times that we picked a crazy idea and it was enormously successful. And then finally local legitimacy which is demonstrated through an ability to mobilize volunteers. They sustain on volunteers and local financing. They've usually never received donor funding and they're not primarily interested in it but they're there somehow in front of you. And Safi, do you want to talk about the ideas we had about the capacity building or how to support these groups? Or? Sure. Or whichever part you wanted to do this. Whatever. I also want to just answer both of the questions about how do we do this and how are we doing this currently that just doesn't work. So managing small grants. I mean we've managed a number of grant programs for civil society organizations working on human rights and other issues. And typically where we start off with an idea what is it that we want to achieve in this country? And of course there's diagnostics that are fed into that and there's existing program that informs that. But then we come up with this fantastic idea of what types of human rights institutions, what are the goals we want to achieve and we launch the call for proposals or the request for proposals. There's often a really detailed terms of reference. You'd be lucky if you get through it in one sitting without falling asleep. And you're asking for an awful lot upfront in terms of investment from an organization to respond to that. To understand what it is that they want to do, how that fits in with you, how to tailor their language and their ideas to fit with your objectives. And that's not even talking about time frames. The average time frame from launching a request for proposals to receiving a small grant is probably about six months. I'd say much more for some of the institutions that I've worked for. So you're talking about missing the boat when it comes to key moments of political change. So we're not talking about small grants being a flexible instrument as they currently are for social movements. What was it you wanted me to do? I'll take it, it'll be really quickly. So on the like how to effectively support groups involved in nonviolent movements. And we talk about it a bit in the report. Again, what we found is that providing platforms and infrastructure for peer to peer learning is really important. And you're sitting next to Shaskha Birely who's written sort of the definitive book on civic campaigns against corruption. There's a whole chapter at the end about what external actors can do effectively to support these campaigns. And she hones in on how important, especially global self to global self learning was with the fifth pillar movement in India and right to information in India and Afghanistan social monitoring, Muslims for Human Rights in Kenya. And so that and so providing platforms and convening space for that is super important. And then capacity for strategic nonviolent action. I mean, and movement building. And there are at least three, I see three organizations at least in this room, whether it's RISE, whether it's International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, whether it's Nonviolence International. I don't know if I'm missing anybody here, but who are involved in this. So this type of work to help movements do strategic planning, to develop leadership skills, to know how to diversify and sequence nonviolent direct action tactics, how to combine direct action with negotiations. These are all skills that can be learned and they're critical skills for success and not very many organizations around the room, NDI sorry, are involved in this type of work. So these are two very specific examples. On the data one, Sarah, you're the data guru here. Do you happen to know that about percentage? The question was percentage of movement organizations that have evolved into NGOs, was that the question? Mr. Melancholy? The evolution of the movement organizations into NGOs, was that your question? What percentage? I can just respond and then let Sarah take it. But typically most of the organizations that you meet if you ask them how they started these NGOs, it'll be a group of concerned citizens about child poverty on the streets. And then so they do come together in this way, but as soon as they touch donor funding, they start following those agendas and that's where the organizational weakness starts coming in. In terms of management, you asked about management didn't you? As well? No? Okay. So I think we need to be a little bit more specific about what we mean by movement. Because I think a lot of times what you find there are collections of organizations that donors are already funding. And you really see this with the transparency and accountability movement, this open government. There are many, many organizations that are coming together that are being funded by donors, private, public and otherwise. And they're reflecting a very organic citizen demand for accountability. I think it's, we just have to be careful that there's this somehow either fetishized movements or that it's some separate thing from what it is we're already doing. Right, why don't we take another round of questions? In the black here. Thanks, I'm Clifford Bob from Duquesne University. I thought the report was really well done in the details, but I found the conclusion and I guess really the title puzzling based on what was in the report. And let me explain, so much of the report was really about the failures of civil society funding. You did a great job, I think, talking about that, especially Siddharth with her anecdote about CSOs being the least trusted sector in society. So much of the report was also about institutional challenges, which one of you, I think Maria, you also mentioned, figuring out who to support. And the very great difficulty of getting local knowledge of how to support people in particular countries. So much was in the report was about the downsides of actually giving support to movements, the possibility that you're going to divert them from their goals, they're gonna delegitimize them, you're gonna kill mobilization kind of along the lines that Mr. Mark mentioned about movement first, institutionalization second, which I think completely follows the major social science literature on how movements can be demobilized by outside support. And then so much in the report was also about how it's so difficult to measure success in terms of whether external funding actually makes a difference. And some of you said things like the groups we should support are the ones that are gonna launch anyway, the ones that don't need support. So how can we actually measure whether anything we're doing is actually working? So my question is why in that context do anything? Why should the international groups like USAID or any of our groups do anything? Because it seems like there's kind of this compulsion to do something, even if it may not work or it may in fact be counterproductive. It's compulsion in that sense, I think to basically follow our own agenda necessarily. Even if we say we're simply listening to a bunch of other groups that are out there or we're seeking them out, we're gonna almost necessarily, I think, follow our own agendas rather than what these other groups might actually wanna do. Okay, so I got, I captured that how do we measure the effectiveness of the external support to movements and why do anything if we could be delegitimizing? All right, we're gonna take about five or six and then we're gonna wrap. So maybe you there in the tie, pink, purple shirt. That wasn't very clear, was it? So while I can see why it probably wasn't a part of this report, I'd just be curious if you could speak a little bit about the private sector and what role they have in supporting civil society. Okay, great. The one in the back. Black shirt, yeah. Yes. Elizabeth. I was just curious while I appreciate the effort to redirect to social movements and kind of away from this possibly dysfunctional relationship that's been created, is there another way to go at the problem that is targeting the donor behavior themselves and kind of the culture of accountability and technocratism and really, it's always troubled me that donors have these really strong agendas that they are then putting out, this is what our request for proposal is and you have to meet that and it affects, it affects how organizations on the ground will, they'll follow the money. So there's there a role for targeting the donors themselves and the donor behavior. Great, got it. You and the, how about the red first? Yes, go ahead. I was wondering, in what way does creating accountability for these local movement groups to those that are giving them resources impact the effectiveness of their movements? Impact of effectiveness on local groups receiving support? Sorry. Yeah. I didn't get it. So does creating these structures for accountability impact how effective they are in their ultimate goals? Okay, got it. Jill, take one from you. Oh and you, fine, I'm sorry, I did promise you that's like the end switch. So I have a quick question. I wonder if there was a link between the NGOs that been funded by donors and those local actors. Did, was any like any effort was done or any kind of investigation for those funded that leads to the local actors? Do they notice that those people really exist? Do they interact? Do they overlap? Do they contradict? What are the exact roles for each one? Great, so that's a good question of if there's data on the linkage between the donor funded NGOs and the local communities or local civic groups. Why don't we take two more and then we're gonna answer all of them collectively? Yes, Jill. Okay, so my question is targeted specifically at Sarah which is a follow on to her broker organization, data organization, this NGO, social sciences organization similar to J-PAL. I get it, I understand that. That's actually a smart tactic when you have all the public opinion data for NGOs and civil society to grow stories around. Can we unpack that a little bit more specifically as it relates to the Peace Tech Lab that's under development here at USIP and the labs, the hubs that are under development at USAID. Using data for smart decisions on programming is a great thing. Great, and how to use locally derived data to support sort of movement development information. One more and then we're gonna answer them all together. Blue, please. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Alonzo-Hullifax from World Bank. I wanted to ask if you're gonna do a follow-up report, basically, that's my question, because I worked in communications for two years at ICT and basically this is a way to fund without funding because people can have a platform, they can talk in local contexts, they can get together and basically raise questions that they wouldn't be able to raise otherwise. So looking at communications, looking at transforming institutions, looking at transparency, I think these are ways to get around the kind of obstacle of funding. So in that idea, would you consider doing a follow-up report that basically targeted the ways in which funding civil society organizations would work? Great, that's a great question and I should just say on that funding point, I neglected to thank the South Central Asia team at USIP which actually funded this special report. So thank you to that team and contingent upon additional funding, we probably could do an extra report. But anyway, so why don't we go down the line, Neil, do you wanna just go down the road and answer whatever you want to? Okay. That's very agreeable. Clifford, why do anything, I think is one of the provocative questions. I guess we're invested here now and I guess the imperative is really if we're going to do something, let's do it in a smart way and be informed in what we wanna do. I take the point and I'm really throughout this, there's a throughout the report, our recommendations that very strongly suggests it's not about the resources and in fact that there's, I was looking back through it is like the do no harm consideration is not, does not come out that strongly. It might have been mentioned but the idea meaning that this system is first a struggle to understand it and how does it respond to stimuli and the stimuli, oftentimes that would be negative would be let's throw a bunch of money into it and it will distort it. So I think there's something that said to and the recommendations first understand second that little smaller amounts of money or a deprioritization over a long and more consistent period might be the better pattern as opposed to what we tend to do which is overfund and do injections over time is sort of my reaction to that. And I'm for one very much thinking about how we would take that on board. Elizabeth, I think the idea is looking at donor behavior and trying to adapt it, that's a lifelong as a career bureaucrat and political appointee, whatever. We're always looking at the donor behavior and I think what's the value of this report is it really does very briefly and succinctly call out some of the things that we need to understand better and some things that are not helpful and it's not just calling out donors, it's really calling out our agents which become NGOs. I really wanna get back to the previous set of questions because I think I have an answer in terms of selecting the right groups, the non-linear nature and doing the wrong thing writer and it comes from really in this sphere there's something in what I guess is being known as complexity theory about how you understand your environment and I would say that systems approaches and complexity theory have a lot to offer development practitioners. One model talks about simple systems that it's like baking a cake. We know in development cause and effect or understand, cause and effect relationships are well understanding, you follow the recipe and you can have a very good expectation of a result. I don't think that's most development in the sector that we're talking about. There's a complicated domain which is sort of akin to a rocket launch which there are many systems of systems all of which the cause and effect are very well known but they interact with each other and they're quite complicated. Where we operate is what would be called the complex domain which we think we know cause and effect but it is dynamic and changing and that calls for deep subject matter expertise, local context and all of that and that's sort of where the main frame of development is and then the fourth area which I think is which they call chaos is really the unknown where cause and effect isn't known and I think this is about where the spot of where social movements exist that they learn, they have their own system of they evolve over time, they are disparate, they can be leaderless, they can move from issue to issue and so the theory it calls for rapid experimentation, small experiments, low investment, listening to the system, look for feedback loops until you understand better what those cause and effects and I know this is kind of high theory but to me it suggests a way of approaching these complicated or chaotic situations and if you look at the recommendations of the report this is what you're saying is it's often about relationships, it's about knowing the local context, it is de-emphasizing the resource injection to you understand, it's working with unusual suspects and it's highly experimental which means you raise your risk threshold and I think in terms of an orientation to how we move forward that's a very powerful way to kind of unpack the problem set. Great, Sarah? So what's interesting is there's an assumption and you mentioned it in terms of Pakistan that NGOs are not trusted what was, you can only actually know how people think about it by doing the large random sample survey work drawing ideally on focus groups to write the survey instrument and the problem is for whatever reason in the democracy, human rights, governance space we haven't developed this as a muscle memory it's not a kind of go-to obvious thing that people do and it's difficult there are not a lot of social scientists who are also in survey experts who are also in donor organizations there are a lot of donors who are resistant I will say A to My Time at USAID it's built into the DRG strategy to have survey data and learning and RCTs, randomized controlled trials but it's still complicated to do and the trick is then getting organizations finding the organizations that are actually interested in listening and responding and using the data so it's not as much that it's to challenge, the data can challenge our assumptions about who is legitimate, who's not but also what are the issues and how do you frame them? It's not to say that human rights organizations shouldn't work on very difficult or even marginalized issues it's that it's particularly there that you need to know how local populations think about an issue to be able to engage them I don't know enough about USIP's piece labs to be able to comment it might be something that others take on I'll stop there Thank you, Alexander? Just one point on this idea of this issue about the culture of the donors there's also something that we haven't discussed very much but it's the huge cost of the system of funding communities and funding movement at the present time especially in countries that are fragile so if you look at how much money gets into a community in Afghanistan versus what goes into all the layers of control and administration and all that you end up in some cases up to 20% for the community, 80% up so the question comes much more if we were just giving the money to the community and living, would it be more cost effective or not? And I think that's where the neoliberal meets the anarchists, right? And where the idea that let's bypass all those structures, right? And maybe we assume that the community will do wrong or the movement will do wrong but maybe we can have a few criteria and that's usually what is more easily done by large foundation because they don't have the same system of accountability I don't see that in bilateral aid or because of just the way it goes but I think we need to ask ourselves this question much, much more is this cost of working through those institution system and accountability and reporting and all that worth actually the quality of what we're doing in the field? Great point. Set off? Yeah, so I just wanted to pick up on a couple of things the first one was the issue about the private sector so I think that this is quite a complicated question in the social accountability sort of diagram of how social accountability works private sector is there some people put it, lump it in with civil society in general and some people see the private sector as slightly different I think what's becoming much more clear is that our characterization of the private sector as the bogeyman doesn't really stand up in the way in which we've been thinking about this and I'll give you two or three examples one is the way in which the private sector is stepping up to the plate in terms of technology that's being used by activists around the world so there are foundations, organizations that are actively working with software companies speaking with Google and others to see how they can use and apply technologies that will encrypt messages that will connect people across the types of restrictions that have been placed by government so there are some private actors who are already engaging with activists secondly the UN forum on business and human rights that took place earlier this year was at the end of last year there was a clear statement by business that they are ready to take on this challenge that they are not simply the human rights abusers but they are also those that in many cases are protecting human rights and stepping in where governments have stepped out and are creating the vacuum for these abuses that they are taking these rules on themselves and the third one is where we've actually seen the private sector engaged by donors, by governments in order to create parts of an opposition so for example in Syria the business community have been engaged with the opposition after a long time of actually being very allied with the regime to seeing what they can do to support the opposition the same thing is true in Syria so I think that it's a complicated situation I don't think we know exactly how what role the private sector is currently playing but there's clearly a lot of different avenues that this could go down secondly the question about I think your question of why do anything that the report seems to lay out a lot of challenges and first of all we wanted to peg those challenges before anyone else came to us to say well this is going to be really difficult so we wanted to say that we acknowledge that but so the first point is that we have to recognise that this is not we're not simply criticising we're not saying that we've been supporting NGOs and this is all wrong we've distorted all the incentives we're talking about social movements as an increasing phenomena to which we need to pay attention that's the first message what kind of attention does that come along with funding what type of support who plays I think these are still questions that we want to explore I also want to pick up on Sarah's point that there are organisations that have been doing this have been supporting the types of associations that we have been talking about aid has been doing this for a long time and I know that the problem with small batch artisanal data is that it looks like we've got a lot of quotes here that say that we really didn't know what we're doing but there were a lot of state department and USAID folks that we spoke to who said we're doing this under the radar we've been doing this for a long time we know how to do this but please don't raise this issue any higher because we don't have the institutional cover to support us to do that sorry Neil, maybe I shouldn't have said that so we didn't want to come here with the solutions we wanted to put out the problem the phenomena what we're doing to distort incentives in the traditional way we're doing it and then what can we do if anything at all to support this? I will defer my comments to my Maria Oh, wonderful No, I'm not going to offer anything more substantively I just want to thank once again the panellists it's been a wonderful conversation thank you all very much I also want to thank Amma Nadeem and Tina Hegedorn from the Academy who helped logistically to pull this together thanks to SCA again for supporting this and the music by the way that you heard when you were coming in was from an initiative called Freedom Beat www.freedombeat.org which focuses on the role of music in inspiring non-violent movements around the world so thank you all for coming out and we look forward to staying engaged with you on this I don't because I don't work for anyone okay