CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation has launched the ninth edition of its State of Civil Society Report, which focuses on the main trends from 2019 about, from and for civil society, drawing on 50 interviews with civil society activists, leaders and experts, as well as CIVICUS’s ongoing research, analysis and advocacy programmes.
As the report’s overview section makes clear, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated, accelerated and further exposed crucial global challenges that came to the fore in 2019: restricted civic and democratic freedoms, economic policies that fail most people, widespread exclusion, limited international cooperation and a failure to follow the science and act on the global emergency of climate change.
The report calls for civil society to be recognised as crucial partners in the struggle to build a better post-pandemic world. It suggests that the experiences of civil society strategies deployed and many successes won in 2019, as detailed in the report’s pages, can guide a way out of the crisis and help resolve the profound economic, social and political problems that preceded the pandemic.
The report covers five key areas in which civil society was active in 2019:
- Civil society action climate crisis;
- Collective action triggered by economic injustice;
- Challenging exclusion and claiming rights;
- The state of democratic freedoms;
- Civil society at the international level.
We invite you to read the 2020 CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report here: https://www.civicus.org/index.php/state-of-civil-society-report-2020 .
