Can civil society be free at the end of the value chain? Money, moral power and the unfreedom of civil society
Civil society’s contemporary resource crisis cannot be understood only as a problem of insufficient or poorly distributed funding. It also reflects civil society’s structural location within the political economy of value: much of organized civil society depends on resources created, accumulated, owned and ultimately allocated elsewhere. This creates forms of material dependence that can constrain civic autonomy even where formal political freedoms remain.
This paper argues that the sector’s current financial crisis may be more than a funding problem: it may reveal a deeper problem in civil society’s location within the political economy of value. While contemporary responses emphasize diversification, localization and sustainability, these approaches rarely question civil society’s limited relationship with the creation, ownership and governance of economic value itself.
The paper develops the idea of material freedom to describe the capacity of civic actors to exercise independent judgement and sustain civic agency without any external resource holder possessing the power to make disagreement existential. It then asks whether civil society might move beyond being principally a recipient of redistributed value and participate more deliberately in forms of value creation and ownership designed to sustain civic agency. This is not an argument for turning NGOs into businesses. It is an inquiry into whether economic institutions, assets and resource relationships can be organized differently.
Author: Chris Nkwatsibwe, Possible Now Stitching Fellow
Published by: GFCF
Published: October 2026
