In early March, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute released its seventh annual democracy report. The report updated the now repeated and discouraging litanies from previous reports. Democracy is backsliding. Closed autocracies outnumber liberal democracies, for the first time in more than two decades: 72 per cent of the world’s population live in ‘closed’ or ‘electoral’ democracies, while only 13 per cent live in liberal democracies.
Such trends have enormous implications for how citizens mobilise to hold authorities to account, especially in the face of increasing media censorship, closing space for civil society organisations, and increased repression. Yet, unlike some previous reports, this V-Dem report is not all bad news. Entitled ‘Defiance in the Face of Autocratization’ the report also shows hopeful signs of how citizens are pushing back against the odds to protect or reclaim democratic space.
Citizen action in challenging contexts
A special issue of Development Policy Review released this week explores further this theme of how citizens take social and political action in settings faced by trends of growing autocratisation and declining civic space. Edited by John Gaventa, Anuradha Joshi and Colin Anderson and based on the findings from the Action for Empowerment and Accountability research programme (A4EA), the nine articles in this journal suggest that even in the most challenging contexts citizens may mobilise for democratic accountability, but understanding how they do so is to be found by taking a ‘citizen-eye’ view and by recognising the importance of small steps as building blocks towards progress.
A five-year research programme running from 2016 to 2021, A4EA asked ‘how and under what conditions does citizen-led social and political action contribute to empowerment and accountability? What strategies are used and what are the outcomes?’ The focus was on what the issue calls ‘challenging contexts’, where little is known about how citizens make claims on authorities.
The research used a variety of methods for deeply grounded empirical understanding of what was actually happening on the ground in these settings. Of particular note was the ‘governance diaries’ approach, which gave a bottom-up view of how citizens perceive and engage with authorities.
The countries of particular focus included Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan, which, Anuradha Joshi notes in her article, share similarities: substantial pockets of ongoing violence, authoritarianism, and a history of military rule and colonialism. Joshi argues that ‘fundamental to difficult contexts is a weak state and the prevalence of non-state actors vying for power’. Drawing on a unique civil society observatory approach, the article by Rosie McGee explores further the trends of closing civic space, especially under Covid, including the article by Rosie McGee explores further the trends of closing civic space, especially under Covid, including ‘suppression of dissent, centralisation of executive power, curtailment of press freedoms, and tightened regulation of civic space, including online space’.
Strategies of civic action
Yet despite the challenges, the research found multiple strategies of civic action. In his article, John Gaventa outlines this action ranging from the hidden to the more overt, the informal to the more formal. It included for example cultural resistance (such as protest songs,) social movements, NGO-led advocacy, and political participation. Alternatively, indirect claim making was also used, involving the reliance on networks of intermediaries – village heads, or family members – to intercede on the claimant’s behalf. The importance of networking has parallels to the research process itself, where the collaborative relationships and trust built up amongst A4EA programme partners was a significant ingredient to its success.
Crafting solutions below the radar was also one of the more hidden strategies identified, which involved relying on oneself or community for instance via savings groups, or burial societies. The strategy comes from a norm of fear of not causing trouble in these difficult contexts, or of low expectations from the state; however, we can see strategies similar to this becoming more common in stable settings, e.g., the increasing use of food banks and crowdfunding for mutual aid and support.
Small steps
The research also showed that increased tightening of civic space can itself trigger new action. For example, over the course of the programme, while Nigeria continued to face tightening civic space, it also witnessed the #End SARS movement as well as regular fuel protests. Some of these protests have led to more sustained social movements such as Bring Back Our Girls (#BBOG) protesting the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, which together with #EndSARS has ignited a more politically active youth in Nigeria in the recent elections. Other outcomes seen were increased visibility and agency particularly among women protestors, e.g. in Mozambique where women campaigning for safer roads saw the President visiting their community. Other practical responses were identified in the case of #BBOG which achieved some movement from the Nigerian government on security issues. Although these outcomes may not be significant in themselves, as Colin Anderson notes they are the first steps that ‘send signals that some kind of accountability relations exist’.
The key messages coming from the A4EA research are about the importance of recognising the small and local. Small gains have the potential, as the introduction notes, ‘to become significant building blocks for more systemic change by nurturing a culture of accountability between citizens and sources of authority’. And local is important both because that is the space which offers the most opportunity for achieving these small gains, but also because it is there that research can find more clarity on what is at stake – what claims citizens prioritise. Donors and NGOs also have their role in helping to create spaces where citizens are enabled to ask the difficult questions. But these spaces have to be carefully managed – particularly in these difficult contexts where foreign intervention is increasingly viewed with distrust as we have seen most recently in Georgia – but also because they need to be aware of the interactive effects their work is having between different programmes of work.
