Testing the Resilient Roots Hypothesis
By CIVICUS and Accountable Now
September 18, 2020
The Resilient Roots initiative tests whether organisations who are more accountable and responsive to their roots – namely, their primary constituents – are more resilient against external threats.
The initiative is coordinated by CIVICUS and funded by the Ford Foundation. Technical and strategic support is provided by Keystone Accountability and Accountable Now, along with our regional partner for Latin America, Instituto de Comunicación y Desarrollo (ICD). An initial two-year pilot phase ran until the end of 2019.
Towards the end of the project, the Resilient Roots initiative started working with Triskuel Consulting 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.
A summary of our methodology, findings, and recommendations is available here. The in-depth statistical analysis used to create these outputs is also available in a full report.
Check out the two case studies which illustrate how the relationship between accountability and resilience plays out in the real world for two of the Resilient Roots national partners:
