The Resilient Civil Society Project

CSOs – e.g., NGOs, charities, citizen groups, unions, associations of professionals and businesses – play a key role in democracies. This essential function can be strained significantly during crises, which can inhibit CSOs’ political activities, disrupting their ability to mobilise members, engage in advocacy and lobbying, and attract funding. The challenge of bringing these activities back up to ‘full capacity’ may last well beyond the crisis, potentially producing bias in the participatory democracy process, in which only the strongest organisations are best-equipped to compete. Therefore, CSOs’ resilience amid crisis circumstances, viewed as their ability to survive crises and restore their representation capacity, is an essential element of a healthy participatory democracy. Interestingly, despite its importance, this phenomenon rarely has been studied.

The Resilient Civil Society Project (ReCiv) seeks to examine CSO resilience in times of crisis. 

With a survey-based analysis of CSOs’ activities in nine European countries and the EU, as well as a series of elite interviews and focus groups with CSO representatives in four countries, this project aims to answer the following research question: How does the European community of CSOs survive and adapt to different types of crises?

To answer this, the project will:

• construct a theoretical classification of diffuse (system-wide) and concentrated (sector-wide) crises

• analyse which CSOs are more likely to cease to exist or secure organisational maintenance

• analyse which organisational survival strategies CSOs employ and how these help secure organisational maintenance

• analyse whether and how government responses facilitate survival and resilience

• analyse which CSOs restore their political activities to pre-crisis capacity and how

With its outputs, ReCiv wishes to contribute to sustainable development goals of evaluating and improving the quality of participatory democracy (SDG 16.7) by offering a ‘health check’ of the CSO community in nine major Western European countries and the EU, as well as providing valuable practical lessons for policymakers and CSOs on how to protect participatory democracy in times of crisis. The project also will contribute the first longitudinal documentation of CSOs’ political activities to the literature, with an emphasis on the understudied and difficult-to-observe phenomenon of survival and resilience.

This project is funded by the Economic Social Research Council (UKRI) New Investigator Grant

To contact Dr Michele Crepaz, please visit the contact page