We have learnt how to fund civil society. But have we learnt how to make it free?

Download Chris’ new paper, Can Civil Society Be Free at the End of the Value Chain? Money, Moral Power and the Unfreedom of Civil Society.

Chris Nkwatsibwe, Possible Now Stitching Fellow

For years, those of us working in civil society have become very good at asking a particular question: Where will the money come from? It is an understandable question. Perhaps an unavoidable one.

When a grant is ending, we look for another donor. When donors leave, we talk about diversification. When international funding becomes uncertain, we turn to domestic resource mobilization. We build fundraising strategies, pursue unrestricted income, explore social enterprise, court individual donors, discuss localization and experiment with new forms of finance.

I have spent enough of my own professional life in and around these conversations to know how necessary they are. But lately, another question has been bothering me. What if the problem is not only where civil society gets its money? What if the deeper problem is where civil society sits in the economy that produces that money in the first place? That question became the starting point for my Possible Now Stitching Fellowship paper, Can Civil Society Be Free at the End of the Value Chain? Money, Moral Power and the Unfreedom of Civil Society.

“What if the problem is not only where civil society gets its money? What if the deeper problem is where civil society sits in the economy that produces that money in the first place?”

There is a familiar picture of society that many of us carry around, often without thinking much about it. The state governs. The market produces. Civil society speaks, organizes, mobilizes, advocates, holds power accountable and imagines alternatives. And there is something appealing about this division. It gives civil society a distinctive moral and political role. We are not government. We are not business. We belong to that messy, creative space where people associate with one another, defend rights, organize communities, challenge injustice and make claims on power.

And history gives us every reason to take that power seriously. Labour movements, women’s movements, anti-colonial struggles, human rights movements and countless forms of community organizing have changed societies without owning corporations or commanding armies.

But moral power has a material problem. A movement may have the courage to confront injustice and still lack the resources to sustain the confrontation. An organization may have every legal right to criticize a government but still depend for its survival on a funding relationship that can disappear. Civic actors may imagine a radically different future while depending, for their continued existence, on institutions deeply invested in the present.

That tension has become harder for me to ignore. It is especially difficult to ignore now, when aid budgets are shrinking, civic space is tightening in many places, foreign funding is increasingly politically contested and philanthropic priorities are changing. Organizations that once thought in five-year strategies are sometimes thinking in six-month survival cycles. The instinctive response is to ask how civil society can become more sustainable. But I wonder whether sustainability is still a big enough question.

Consider where much of the money that sustains formal civil society actually comes from. Private philanthropy often begins much further upstream. Economic activity generates wealth. Wealth accumulates. Some of it eventually moves into foundations or philanthropic vehicles, and a portion then reaches civil society.

Development assistance takes a different route, but the underlying sequence is not entirely dissimilar. Economic activity produces taxable resources. Governments collect revenue. Political and bureaucratic institutions allocate some of it to development cooperation. Eventually, a portion reaches civil society organizations.

These pathways are far more complicated in reality. But something important becomes visible when we follow the money backwards. Civil society often enters the story after value has already been created, accumulated, owned and allocated. We have become remarkably sophisticated at competing for, receiving, managing and accounting for redistributed value. We have fundraising departments, partnership teams, grants managers, proposal writers, compliance systems, monitoring frameworks and entire professional vocabularies built around securing resources generated elsewhere.

“What we have developed much less seriously is an equivalent body of practice around creating, owning and governing value ourselves.”

What we have developed much less seriously is an equivalent body of practice around creating, owning and governing value ourselves. That asymmetry interests me. Not because redistribution is wrong. It isn’t. Taxation, philanthropy, development assistance and international solidarity have financed extraordinary public goods and struggles for justice. In many places, international solidarity remains indispensable.

The question is about power. Who creates the resources that make civic action possible? Who owns them before they reach civil society? Who decides when they become available? Who determines what is fundable? Who defines acceptable risk? And crucially, who can withdraw? Money is never only money. A resource relationship also distributes the power to say yes, to say no, and to walk away.  This led me to a distinction that became central to the paper. Sustainability asks whether an organization can continue. Material freedom asks whether it can disagree and still continue.

Imagine an organization with a generous ten-year grant from a single foundation. Its salaries are secure. Its programmes are fully funded. Its future looks predictable. By most conventional measures, it is financially sustainable. But if losing that single relationship could bring the organization to its knees, how free is it?

Now imagine a much smaller organization. Its annual income is modest, but it owns the building from which it works. It has a reserve. Its members contribute something. Perhaps it has a stake in a collectively governed asset that generates modest income. It may have less money, but perhaps it has something the larger organization does not: a greater ability to survive disagreement. That is what I mean by material freedom.

I am not suggesting that money produces courage. History is full of materially precarious movements that displayed extraordinary courage, just as it is full of wealthy institutions that remained silent when courage was required. The point is different. Freedom is exercised under material conditions. The ability to speak is one thing. The ability to survive the consequences of speaking is another. We may have become too good at surviving the system.

There is another uncomfortable possibility. The aid system did not simply finance civil society organizations. It helped shape the kinds of organizations we learned to build. We learned project cycles. We learned donor reporting. We learned log-frames, compliance, proposal development and monitoring. We built careers and institutional systems around navigating the architecture of aid. Much of that professionalization was necessary. Some of it greatly improved our organizations. But perhaps we became extraordinarily competent inhabitants of a particular system. Perhaps too competent.

“There is another uncomfortable possibility. The aid system did not simply finance civil society organizations. It helped shape the kinds of organizations we learned to build.”

An organization can become perfectly designed for a world that is disappearing. And if that is true, the contraction of traditional aid is not simply a financial emergency. It is also a crisis of institutional imagination. We know how to diversify donors. But do we know how to distribute ownership? We know how to calculate indirect cost recovery. But do we know how to build assets that can sustain civic action across generations? Do we know how to accumulate civic wealth? Those questions take us somewhere quite different from the usual sustainability conversation.

No, I am not saying NGOs should become businesses. This is where the argument can easily be misunderstood. If donor dependence constrains autonomy, the obvious answer might seem to be earn your own money. Start businesses. Sell services. Become entrepreneurial. I don’t think it is that simple. A donor can create dependence. So can a customer. So can an investor, creditor or volatile market. Revenue is not freedom simply because it is earned rather than granted.

In fact, civil society should be as curious about the power embedded in market money as it has become about the power embedded in donor money. An organization can escape one form of dependence only to acquire another. A social enterprise can generate unrestricted income while quietly pulling an organization away from the people or causes least able to pay. Financial independence can even insulate organizations from the very communities to whom they ought to be accountable.

“So the question is not how we make NGOs more like businesses, but rather: can civil society participate in creating and owning economic value without allowing accumulation to become its purpose?”

So the question is not how we make NGOs more like businesses, but rather: can civil society participate in creating and owning economic value without allowing accumulation to become its purpose? That’s the question I find much more interesting. And once we ask that, a much wider landscape comes into view. Cooperatives. Community foundations. Civic endowments. Solidarity funds. Worker ownership. Mission-locked enterprises. Community-owned infrastructure. Among others.

None offers a ready-made answer. All have their own histories, contradictions and possibilities. But together they disturb an assumption that I think civil society has lived with for too long: that economic life belongs principally to states and markets, while civil society’s role begins after value has been created.

What if it doesn’t have to? In my paper, I tentatively explore the idea of a civic economy. I don’t mean another name for social enterprise, nor an economy populated by especially virtuous businesses. I mean something more politically specific: economic institutions deliberately organized to help reproduce the material conditions of civic agency.

Could a community-owned asset finance organizing over generations? Could an endowment protect independent public-interest research? Could shared civic infrastructure lower the permanent cost of organizing? Could a solidarity fund make it possible for organizations to take risks they cannot take when every activity depends on prior external approval? Could forms of collective ownership support the livelihoods of people doing civic work without making their freedom contingent on the next project?

I don’t know. And increasingly, I think the not knowing also matters.

There is a temptation, particularly in development, to turn every interesting question into a model before we have understood the question properly. A new framework. A toolkit. A pilot. A set of best practices. I want to resist that. Cooperatives fail. Community institutions can be captured by elites. Social enterprises experience mission drift. Endowments can make organizations conservative. Domestic philanthropy can reproduce local inequality just as international philanthropy can reproduce global inequality. Ownership can liberate, but it can also concentrate power.

“There is no innocent money. So perhaps the task is not to discover the perfect financing model. Perhaps it is to ask better political questions of every resource model we encounter.”

There is no innocent money. So perhaps the task is not to discover the perfect financing model. Perhaps it is to ask better political questions of every resource model we encounter: Who owns the value created? Who governs it? Who can withdraw it? Who is accountable to whom? What new dependencies does it create? Does it enlarge the capacity to dissent? And, ultimately, who becomes more powerful because this arrangement exists?

Those questions take us beyond diversification. They take us towards the relationship between resources and freedom itself. My paper is therefore not a manifesto for a new civil society economy. It is an invitation to investigate a possibility.

Civil society has spent decades asking how to finance its work. Perhaps we now also need to ask how the material world on which that work depends is organized, and whether civic actors can have a more meaningful role in shaping it. Because if the institutions that defend civic freedom remain permanently at the end of the value chain, waiting for resources produced elsewhere, owned elsewhere and released according to priorities determined elsewhere, there may be limits to how autonomous they can ever become. The challenge is not to make civil society rich. It is to give civic freedom somewhere material to stand.

By: Chris Nkwatsibwe, Possible Now Stitching Fellow. Download Chris’ new paper, Can Civil Society Be Free at the End of the Value Chain? Money, Moral Power and the Unfreedom of Civil Society.