Resilient Roots
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Tester l'hypothèse du projet Racines Résilientes (Resilient Roots)
Vers la fin du projet, nous avons commencé à travailler avec Triskuel Consulting pour concevoir et mettre en place une méthodologie permettant de tester l'hypothèse centrale de Racines Résilientes (Resilient Roots) - selon laquelle les organisations de la société civile qui sont plus responsables devant leurs principaux mandants sont plus résistantes aux menaces liées à l'espace civique. Nous avons constaté que si nous ne pouvons pas affirmer avec certitude qu'une plus grande responsabilité des principaux constituants entraîne toujours une plus grande résilience, nous pouvons dire que les deux sont liés.
Un résumé de notre méthodologie, de nos conclusions et de nos recommandations est disponible ici.Deux études de cas illustrent également la manière dont la relation entre la responsabilité et la résilience se joue dans le monde réel pour deux des partenaires nationaux de Racines Résilientes (Resilient Roots) :
Étude de cas 1
L'analyse statistique approfondie utilisée pour créer ces résultats est également disponible dans un rapport complet (en anglais). -
Testing the Resilient Roots project central hypothesis
Towards the end of the project, we started working with Triskuel Consulting to design and roll out a methodology for testing the central Resilient Roots hypothesis - that civil society organisations which are more accountable to their primary constituents are more resilient to civic space-related threats. We found that while we cannot confidently say that more primary constituent accountability always leads to more resilience, we can say that the two are connected.
A summary of our methodology, findings, and recommendations is available here.
Two case studies also illustrate how the relationship between accountability and resilience plays out in the real world for two of the Resilient Roots national partners:
Case Study 1 The in-depth statistical analysis used to create these outputs is also available in a full report.
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The Three Dimensions of Accountability
The Resilient Roots (RR) initiative examines whether organisations who are accountable to their primary constituents, that is, the individuals and communities they support and serve, are better able to withstand external threats related to closing civic space. The Resilient Roots team believes that there are several ways to examine and measure changes in primary constituent accountability and, as a result, a cohort of 14 pilot partner NGOs were supported to design and implement accountability mechanisms suitable to their distinct contexts. Considering these diverse contexts and the various challenges each organisation faces, the accountability mechanisms used varied greatly.In an attempt to better understand the importance of accountability mechanisms in the work of the pilot partners, Resilient Roots will be presenting four case studies. The aim of this first case study is to provide a general overview and provide examples of the different primary constituent accountability mechanisms that have been implemented by the pilot partners.
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Thinking about how to measure your organisation’s accountability?
...then read on, because this blog post is for you!
by Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)
The Resilient Roots Accountability Initiative is working with 15 partners to help them design and rollout year-long accountability projects and document the factors which seem to help boost or hinder their accountability. We want to track changes in accountability over the course of the initiative, and to do so we need to measure our starting point!... But this proved to be much more complicated than we expected. Read on for some raw reflections about what we learned on the way!How to do an accountability baseline in a comprehensive, yet efficient and comparable way, you ask? Well, you make a survey. Or to be exact, you make two similar surveys that cover various aspects of accountability (such as voice, responsiveness, trust, communication, etc.), addressed to the core of any organisation: their primary constituents and their staff.
For the majority of questions, the accountability baseline survey used the Net Performance Analysis (NPA) methodology, which involves respondents choosing a score on a scale from 0 to 10, from “totally disagree” to “completely agree”. The NPA then helped us generate a single number for each question which allows for easy comparison across constituent groups, between organisations, and over time. Comprehensive and comparable: check!
The exact method used to administer these surveys varied from one organisation to the next (based on the age of respondents, access to the internet, geographical location, etc), and included a mix of in-person/over the phone interviews and online surveys via the web and mobile phone applications. To do this, Resilient Roots hired independent consultants in almost all pilot project countries to undertake the surveys in the local language, and help reduce bias in responses (as opposed to organisations carrying out these baselines themselves).
Questions were standardised across all pilot project organisations, but the language in the surveys was adapted by each partner to fit the local context, make it less NGO-sounding and more accessible to its constituents. Then came the (11!) translations, one of the most time-consuming parts of the baseline measurement process. If you have ever tried to use “accountability” in another language, then you know the struggle of having to find translation for a term that simply does not exist outside of the English-speaking world. Now add words like “primary constituents” and “resilience” to the mix, and you have a buzzwords soup for a survey.
We approached these steps on a case-by-case basis, which made it a very laborious and slow process. But we wanted this baseline to be a real shared effort between our partners and the Resilient Roots team, and here taking our time proved to be more rewarding than efficiency.
So, we managed to create and implement a baseline survey that was indeed comprehensive, replicable, and comparable, and (to a lesser extent) efficient… That is until we got to the data analysis part, where we quickly realised how overwhelming this phase would be. The single, most important lesson learned from this is to “start at the end”. If we had started by spending more time thinking about the analysis, what we wanted to do with this information and what systems (read: complex equations on excel or powerful programming languages like “R”) we needed to set up to help us get there, this would have saved us lots of time and effort!
And it did not stop there! Once we had some preliminary results, we then had to figure out how to share these findings with the pilot project organisations, in a constructive and learning-oriented manner. After much debating, the best we came up with was an eight-page report (we tried!) with follow up calls. Of most importance for us was to visualise the data without generalising the findings or missing the nuance the NPA can give. So after we graphed, and pie-charted, and density-plotted, disaggregated and tabled, I think we got there!
Yet, a big part about understanding the results of this baseline survey does not depend on how many pretty graphs you make, but how vulnerable and open you are to both good and bad feedback from the people you work with. More importantly, it is about making serious commitments to address and respond to the feedback you receive. Accountability is (to a large extent) about organisational culture and how we “practice” sustainable development. These changes take time, and as a sector we have lots of work to do on this front! For Resilient Roots and the pilot project organisations, this baseline was our point of departure for setting off on this journey.
In sum, this accountability baseline measurement has been truly illuminating – though quite challenging and a somewhat burdensome process. But we have learned a lot on the way and we will continue to improve and adapt our methodology based on these learnings. Now, we feel readier than ever to support these 15, very exciting accountability pilot projects organisations make the best out of their efforts to increase their primary constituent accountability!
If you think, “hmm this is interesting, I want to know more about this methodology” then you are in luck! During the Global Accountability Week taking place 12-16 November, we will publish a much more comprehensive guide about how your organisation can measure its own accountability baseline. Stay tuned!
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WATCH: Resilient Roots: Closing the feedback loop
Haga click aquí para la versión en español | cliquez ici pour la version française
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What does accountability mean to youth-led initiatives?
For the past three months, CIVICUS’ Resilient Roots project and Youth Action team have engaged youth-led initiatives to explore how they understand and practice accountability to their constituencies, i.e. the communities they serve and support.Youth leaders from 16 countries, focusing on various issues ranging from critical service provision and women empowerment to citizen engagement and human rights activism, attended these conversations. Despite different contexts, their definitions and experiences were similar. We documented some of these experiences and facilitated practical learning sessions to help them further strengthen their accountability approaches. This is an account of some of the core themes we learned from how they practise constituent accountability.
Access the full report and read their recommendations here.
We also spoke to youth leaders from India and South Africa about how they have been practicing accountability to their constituents. They have each done this by highlighting one of the three dimensions of constituent accountability: giving account (sharing information about who they are and what they do); taking account (continuously listening to and acting on feedback from their constituents); being held to account (including the role of constituents in organisational decision making).
