CSI-RA History & Origins
Since its beginnings CIVICUS has strived to make a significant contribution to understanding the evolution of civil society around the world and to building a knowledge base of civil society issues through civil society led and owned research. The first step towards achieving this was the compilation of civil society profiles from 60 countries around the world in the New Civic Atlas, published in 1997.
The Civil Society Index (CSI) was an effort to improve on this initial compilation and move towards a more rigorous and comparative framework of analysis that would allow lessons to be drawn across countries. CIVICUS, with financial assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Netherlands Organisation for International Development Cooperation (NOVIB) and the Commonwealth Foundation, began to design the CSI, which moved to its piloting phase in 2001. Two full phases were held between 2003 and 2006 and 2008 and 2011.
Informed by the most recent series of CSI findings, CIVICUS sees that in many countries CSOs exist in a state of heightened volatility, flux and disconnect, with the paradigms that shaped definitions of civil society and relations between state, market, media, civil society and other social actors in the late 20th century all coming into renewed questioning.
CIVICUS acknowledges that there is need for a more inclusive understanding of civil society in order to encompass all facets of participation, including those represented by new social and protest movements and online activists, that came to the fore in 2010 and beyond, and that can be seen to be playing a valuable role in promoting democracy, good governance, social justice and human rights beyond the spheres of markets or governments.
In response to this, in 2012 CIVICUS developed our new Civil Society Rapid Assessment tool, with the aim of better understanding and supporting the new forms and dynamics that are defining civil society in different contexts.
