Keep it secret, keep it safe? Protective opacity in civil society accountability under hostile conditions

• In Event: Civil society in restrictive environments

Abstract

Contemporary civil society organizations face ever more settings of a closing space. (Carothers & Brechenmacher, 2014). Even though we by now know a lot about this in terms of challenges to civil society receiving foreign donations (Bromley, Schofer, & Longhofer, 2020; Toepler, Zimmer, Fröhlich, & Obuch, 2020), we know less about the ensuing accountability challenges related to the reception of such funding. Despite some important work paving the way for these conundrums (Goncharenko & Khadaroo, 2020; Howell, Shang, & Fisher, 2019; Yasmin & Ghafran, 2019), we still lack studies that trace accountability under such circumstances not only of the receiving civil society organizations, but also of the foreign donors themselves, who also need to accommodate the potential repression facing their grantees.

Given this background, the paper aims to investigate how accountability practices of civil society organizations and their donors are shaped by hostile conditions. Drawing on an open coding (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013) of annual reports and associated documents issued by the civil society organization Inform (a pseudonym), operating for decades in a repressive society, and its foreign civil society donors, we analyze the changing form and substance of their accountability over fifteen years. The paper is based on all available annual reports and related documents by Inform’s main branches, as well as the corresponding annual reports of its foreign civil society donors, amounting to several thousand pages.

Against a backdrop of mounting organizational and individual persecution by an autocratic state, we show how first Inform’s donors and then Inform itself came to practice protective opacity, whereby publicly communicated representations of organizational activities and associates became ever more disembodied, distanced, and obscured. Unlike the tactics of NGOs to establish legitimacy in the early stages of operation (Neuberger, Kroezen, & Tracey, 2023), this observed response to the hostile environment and overt threat faced by individuals involved in Inform’s operations underpins a timely problematization of the legitimacy of hierarchical accountability demands placed on civil society organizations. The observation that donors, in many if not all cases, proactively engaged in practices of protective opacity when reporting their own involvement with Inform also nuances a dominant trope that donors are drivers of upward, hierarchical accountability that disrupts or undermines the activities of civil society organizations (e.g. Henderson & Lambert, 2018; O’Dwyer & Unerman, 2008). Instead of various forms of “accountability resistance” (Boomsma, 2023) to circumvent donor demands, we identify an interdependent chain of accountability, where key donors were quick to render Inform’s activities and associates increasingly opaque, trying to facilitate the operations of Inform in a hostile environment. We argue that this is a shielding tactic, to prevent public dissemination of identifying information and thwart potential state-sanctioned weaponization of such information.

References

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Authors

• Zhanna Kravchenko, Södertörn University

• Ebba Sjögren, Stockholm School of Economics

• Noomi Weinryb, Södertörn University