CIVICUS Civil Society Index unveiled

The all-bells-and-whistles, high-tech, interactive presentation of the CIVICUS Index on Civil Society was one of the scheduled highlights of the Assembly. While the technology certainly worked, it was probably not the best way to demonstrate the real potential of the Index.  

The Civil Society Index examines four dimensions of civil society – structure, space, values and impact. The results can be plotted in the form of a diamond.[1] It is not designed to provide accurate measurement but rather as a self-assessment tool to help civil society practitioners to gauge the health of civil society within their own countries and come up with viable agendas for action.

The Vancouver session aimed to achieve in half an hour what would normally take a workshop lasting a day and a half. Using hand-held electronic devices to give scores on a scale of 1 to 7, we started off by assessing the quality of the day’s lunch. This resulted in scores of between 4.36 and 4.85 for quality, quantity, presentation and social interaction, with presentation scoring highest.

We then got on to the real thing. The 390 delegates present answered a series of questions on civil society in their own countries. The results were aggregated to produce regional and global civil society diamonds. The major shortcoming of the exercise was that the highly aggregated results were necessarily bland and uninteresting. The range of scores – from 4.14 to 4.41 – was smaller than the range for lunch. The averages hid whatever more significant differences there might have been between – and even within – countries.

Real value of the Index

As delegates pointed out in the discussion that followed, the Index can be used at any level – local, regional, national – or for thematic subsectors of civil society, eg environmental NGOs. Used over time, it can measure trends in civil society development. Used in different communities in one country, it can highlight differences and uneven development. Pushpa Sundar of the Indian Centre for Philanthropy suggested that its greatest value is as an awareness-raising tool to be used at village level. ‘4.2 or 4.5 doesn’t really matter,’ she said.

Many people are highly sceptical of the Index, and it has been criticized for
being unwieldy and difficult to relate to, but in the 13 countries where it has been piloted it has clearly been found valuable as a way of starting to make the idea of civil society a concrete one.

One pilot country is the Ukraine. The misshapen diamond, with a high score for values (deriving from ‘the dominance of moral grounds and intentions, rather than the actual activities of civil society’[2]) and a low one for space (the legal, political and socio-cultural environment) is typical of transitional countries. According to Svitlana Kuts  of the Centre for Philanthropy in Kiev, the Index process ‘was the first time the issue of research and defining civil society was put on the agenda among donors, NGOs and government’. It clearly aroused considerable media interest. Five regional workshops ensured that region-specific characteristics were taken into account. The end result was a detailed picture of the strengths and weaknesses of civil society in the Ukraine and a set of recommendations for addressing the weaknesses in each area.

After the 13 country pilot, the next stage will be a  review and refinement of the methodology, based on an evaluation by Srilatha Batliwala, and a wider round of implementation in 25-30 countries starting in early 2002.

1 For more on the Index methodology, see the CIVICUS website at www.civicus.org.
See also Alliance, vol 5, no 4.
2 From Deepening the roots of civil society in Ukraine: Findings  from an innovative and participatory assessment project on the health of Ukrainian civil society.

For more information, visit the website at www.civicus.org. It includes special software to use for self-assessment. CIVICUS has also published a short handbook on using the Index called Assessing the Impact of Civil Society – see review in tihs issue.

EVENT 4th CIVICUS World Assembly
Date 19-23 August
Venue Vancouver, Canada
Theme Putting People at the Centre: Voluntary Action Shaping Social and Economic Change
Participants 731 delegates from 87 countries
Events Plenaries, mini-plenaries and around 70 workshops run by delegates