Thursday 25 September 2014

CSOs Losing the War against Poverty and Climate Change?

In the last 40 years an explosion of growth in civil society has been witnessed. Currently there are up to 4 million charities in India, 1,5 million in the US 81,000 international NGOs and networks, 90% of them launched since 1975. This should be music to our ears, yet Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, CIVICUS secretary-general, openly expresses concerns in a letter published in the Guardian. According to him, the institutionalisation and professionalisation that has accompanied this exponential growth has some serious downsides, stressing the corporatisation and bureaucratisation of CSOs. In this letter he discusses the need to re-energise and rediscover civil society and to make sure CSOs evolve “to be more open, agile and accountable to those they seek to serve”.

Read the full article here.

Source: Balkan Civil Society Development Network

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