We just published a new report about the state of digital civil society in Germany:
Digital Civil Society — A Maturing Field (PDF)
Published April 2024. Copyright Stiftung Mercator. Author Simon Höher, co-author Peter Bihr.
Over the last few months, with Stiftung Mercator‘s Centre for Digital Society and Simon Höher, we looked at the state of German digital civil society: How has the field been developing, what are some structural characteristics, along what development paths is it changing? We found lots of hopeful signs of a field that’s getting ever more professional, and identified a few pain points and opportunities for improvement — especially for how funders can support civil society in this space.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, and truly hope that the document will be useful for civil society, funders and policy makers.
Below, you’ll find the executive summary.
Executive Summary
This field study aims at understanding the current landscape and future developments of digital civil society in Germany, with a particular focus on policy-making and advocacy work. Conducted on behalf of Stiftung Mercator‘s Centre for Digital Society, this document examines the role of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in shaping digital policies by understanding how the ecosystems sees and describes itself. It delves into the challenges CSOs face today, and the opportunities and developments that are anticipated today. It is intended to inform and guide CSOs, funders and practitioners towards supporting a resilient and democratic digital policy ecosystem.
This work is rooted in Stiftung Mercator‘s commitment to a society characterised by openness to the world, solidarity and equal opportunities, and to the Centre for Digital Society’s mission to ensure that digital technologies in Germany and Europe to be developed and used in accordance with democratic rights and values. It aims to provide a point of reference that can serve as a future benchmark to understand the field’s development, successes, and persisting challenges, and could thus be a building block toward more evidence-based and impact-oriented grantmaking.
Key findings:
The civil society ecosystem in Germany has been maturing. This process can be observed along several dimensions:
- Diversification: The digital civil society ecosystem has become more diverse. On one hand, this means new actors from other policy fields and with different professional backgrounds are entering the field. On the other hand, digital rights organisations are increasingly starting to work across organisational or thematic borders.
- Evolving expertise & different roles emerging: As the public debate and the policy-making around digital rights issues advances, there is an increasing demand for actionable policy inputs and recommendations, for enforcement-focused work and in parts for pragmatic approaches (for example, issue-based coalition work with industry). At the same time, digital rights CSOs need to expand their existing professional skills, particularly to include strategic communication, campaigning, and a deepened understanding of (and access to) policy-making processes of digital policies. We can see different roles emerging within the ecosystem as some strategies work better for some organisations than for others.
- Strategic alliances and collaborative impact: As the digital civil society ecosystem matures, we see a marked trend towards forging strategic alliances, underscoring the power of collaboration over competition. This shift highlights the recognition that complex digital challenges require collective action, pooling resources, and shared expertise. It signifies a move away from isolated efforts towards a more unified approach, leveraging networked strength to amplify advocacy impact and drive systemic change in digital policy landscapes.
- Work towards a shared vision is slowly starting: CSOs have increasingly acknowledged the need of formulating positive and forward-looking visions to move from reactive to more proactive digital policy-making. Yet, to this point, a relatively small subset of actors are engaging in vision-building, with their initiatives frequently characterised by a narrow scope of focus. There is a demand for narratives that are not only comprehensive and inclusive but also embody a multifaceted approach. These narratives should serve as a beacon, offering both guidance and boundaries for actions in the immediate and more distant future.
Against this background, a set of recommendations for funders and foundations emerges:
- Provide dedicated funding for strategic collaboration, actively support coalition building and conflict resolution: To further increase impact, encourage CSOs to adopt a systemic perspective, focusing on building alliances and collaborative networks that span sectors and disciplines. This approach should aim not only at amplifying collective impact but also at fostering an ecosystem where knowledge, resources, and expertise are shared freely. Funders and policymakers are called to support initiatives that facilitate such collaboration, recognizing it as a cornerstone for driving meaningful and sustainable change in the digital society. With growing diversity across the field, funders should also prepare for possible conflicts of goals and priorities within the field and among potential grantee organisations. Funders should be aware of and prepared for this, and could potentially function as mediating and coordinating instances in the field.
- Prioritise skill development and professional growth: Invest in the professional growth of civil society actors, emphasising the importance of diversifying skills beyond technical expertise. This includes developing capacities in strategic communication, narrative building, policy analysis, and stakeholder engagement as well as new skills that are needed for the implementation phase of digital policies. Funding models must evolve to directly support these efforts, providing essential resources for training, workshops, and ongoing development of staff. Funders should keep in mind that not every organisation needs to develop every one of these capacities to the same degree. For instance, depending on their mission some organisations might do the groundwork on problem analysis and awareness raising that serves others as a basis for their own, more implementation focused work. Funders should look at the field from an ecosystem perspective, where different organisations play different roles.
- Innovate evaluation and impact measurement: Shift towards more dynamic and nuanced methods of evaluating the impact of digital civil society initiatives. De-emphasise traditional rigid quantitative metrics and move towards approaches that appreciate the complexity of digital transformation and its societal implications. Funders and CSOs alike should evolve their evaluation frameworks to build on discussions and joined understandings of visions, missions and theories of change. They should regularly reflect on working methods and approaches and the way they help in achieving their partners’ missions. This approach has not only the potential to provide a more accurate and actionable reflection of impact. It also encourages maturation and adaptability in advocacy strategies through demanding new levels of trust, transparency and honest reflection regarding power imbalances in the relationship between funders and grantees. In foundations, all departments, including administrations, should ideally be included in this process.
Picture credit: Clarote & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / AI Mural / CC-BY 4.0