Resilient Roots is a CIVICUS initiative working to promote and enhance the constituent accountability of civil society organisations, including CIVICUS itself. During the 2.5 year pilot phase beginning in 2018, CIVICUS supported 14 civil society organisations from around the world to design and implement year-long pilot projects aiming to increase accountability to their primary constituents (the individuals and communities that the organisation was created to serve and support). 

Towards the end of the project, we started working CIVICUS to design and roll out a methodology for testing the central Resilient Roots hypothesis – that civil society organisations which are more accountable to their primary constituents are more resilient to civic space-related threats. We found that while we cannot confidently say that more primary constituent accountability always leads to more resilience, we can say that the two are connected.

In order to evaluate the relationship between accountability and resilience for the 14 national project partners, our mixed-methods analysis relied on the results of survey data collected in two waves from primary constituents and staff and volunteers about the organisations’ accountability, as well as on interview results and a set of additional sources of information. The influence of the state of civic space in the country as reported by the CIVICUS Monitor was also analysed.

The full report, as well as a summary of our methodology, findings, and recommendations and two case studies illustrating how the relationship between accountability and resilience plays out in the real worldis available for download following the link below.