By Clarisse Sih and Bibbi Abruzzini, Forus, EU SEE consortium partner
Every year, EU SEE country focus reports do more than diagnose the state of the enabling environment around the world. Country by country, we collect something rarer: a record of what civil society itself believes needs to change and who should be doing the changing by documenting civil society’s perspective on what constitutes an enabling environment, outlining the reforms and actions required to support effective, independent, and sustainable civil society work. Taken together, these recommendations provide a practical reform agenda, led by global civil society’s actual wishes.
A new analytical report from EU SEE has systematised 1,218 recommendations from 54 country focus reports published in 2025, covering more than 70% of EU SEE countries. The result is the clearest picture yet of what civil society is actually demanding from governments, donors, and other stakeholders. It also challenges some common assumptions about where the struggle for an enabling environment is being fought most intensely, revealing a more complex landscape of both persistent obstacles and emerging opportunities.
Funding reform, not only freedom, dominates the agenda
The single most addressed enabling principle across all 1,218 recommendations is not, as many might expect, the protection of fundamental freedoms. It is the need for accessible and sustainable resources, appearing in 38.3% of recommendations, ahead of civic freedoms at 27.4%. The cluster of resource access, funding reform and donor governments appear together 191 times across 51 of the 54 reports. In a moment of global aid retrenchment, civil society’s most urgent and most actionable ask is for donors to change how they fund, not simply how much.
Civil society is calling for a shift away from short term, project based grants toward multi-year, flexible, core funding that covers institutional costs. It is calling for funding to reach grassroots, rural and marginalised organisations directly, rather than concentrating in capital cities and large national NGOs. And it is calling for a serious simplification of the administrative and reporting burden that many smaller and politically constrained organisations simply cannot absorb. The ask is to put civil society itself in the driving seat.
We all have a role to play when it comes to an enabling environment for civil society
Across much of the world, civil society has spent decades building technical expertise, organisational systems, and professional skills—often through donor-funded programmes. Yet too often these capacities have been shaped around compliance with external requirements rather than around locally defined priorities and strategies. Recommendations for stronger governance, collective action, and institutional resilience reflect an effort to reclaim and apply existing capacities more effectively. The challenge is to create the conditions in which civil society knowledge, leadership, and agency can be fully exercised.
The logic is straightforward: organisational credibility depends on systems robust enough to withstand scrutiny and a fragmented sector is more vulnerable to repression than a coordinated one.
As an additional pattern, legal and regulatory reform directed at national governments, and a fuller picture of the reform agenda comes into focus. Donors are being asked to change how they fund. Civil society is being asked to strengthen itself. States are being asked to replace discretionary, opaque registration and oversight regimes with systems that are declaratory, time-bound and proportionate.
Legal repressions and the protection gap
Alongside the funding agenda, a consistent and urgent demand runs through the database for the repeal or amendment of laws that criminalise expression, assembly and association, paired with calls to establish or strengthen protection mechanisms for defenders and journalists: protection units, rapid-response protocols, anti-SLAPP measures and an end to surveillance and digital repression. This cluster, concentrated overwhelmingly on national governments and parliaments, suggests that in many of the contexts EU SEE monitors, the legal framework itself has become the primary instrument of restrictions to the enabling environment for civil society, rather than simply a backdrop to it. To the contrary, these laws should be there to guarantee and protect the enabling environment for civil society.
Digital security: a structural gap, not a training need
Digital security and privacy emerged as an additional concentrated thematic cluster in the recommendations; and the framing actually matters. The demand is overwhelmingly for building civil society’s own digital security capacity, not as a one-off training exercise but as a recurring, fundable need, alongside legal frameworks that constrain state and non-state surveillance. As cybersecurity legislation is increasingly weaponized to restrict the enabling environment for civil society, and online smear campaigns make public legitimacy an explicitly digital battlefield, the report argues this needs to be treated as core, ongoing infrastructure for civil society, not an occasional add-on.
Patterns of influence and regional fingerprints
The recommendations reveal a clear picture of where civil society believes change can be most effectively driven. Governments, donors, and civil society organisations themselves dominate the landscape of proposed actions, while some potentially influential actors appear far less frequently. The judiciary, an institution whose core function is to adjudicate exactly the rights at stake in restrictions to the enabling environment, is named as a target actor in only 2% of all recommendations. The private sector appears in just 1%, despite the growing role of corporate surveillance technology, lobbying and legal threats in shrinking enabling environments globally. This does not mean these actors are absent from civil society engagement. Organisations work with courts through litigation and judicial processes to defend civic freedoms, and engage with businesses through advocacy, partnerships, and accountability efforts. However, in some contexts, direct engagement with the private sector may carry risks, particularly where companies are linked to security actors, SLAPPs, or other forms of intimidation. The limited presence of these actors in the recommendations therefore offers insights for advocacy, influence mapping and future analysis.
While all four regions converge on prioritising resources and civic freedoms, their strategies diverge sharply. Africa is the most legislatively focused region, with parliament named in nearly one in five recommendations targeting security forces. The Americas and the Caribbean take a markedly different approach, they are the least focused on legal reform of any region, and instead prioritise civic education, narrative work and protection mechanisms for defenders, channelled significantly through multilateral and inter-American institutions. Asia and the Pacific pair national legal reform with the highest share of international and diplomatic advocacy of any region, frequently asking for civic space conditions to be raised in bilateral dialogues and tied to aid conditionality. The SWANA findings point to a distinct focus on the effectiveness of resource delivery. Recommendations emphasise the need not only for funding, but for funding that civil society can realistically access and use, free from administrative and regulatory barriers that can unintentionally restrict legitimate civic action.
What this means for the future of an enabling environment for civil society
The report offers a roadmap pushing the donor community toward more flexible funding; in treating digital security as permanent infrastructure rather than episodic training; in bringing the judiciary and private sector into a conversation that has so far largely bypassed them; and in recognising that the slow work of rebuilding public trust in civil society may be as essential, if chronically underfunded, as any legal reform. The Early Warning Mechanism, central to the work of the EU SEE, has a clear role to play here too, both in catching the political windows where legal reform becomes possible, and in tracking the digital threats that are evolving faster than civil society’s current capacity to resist them.
The message from the data resonates: civil society is not asking only for solidarity in moments of crisis. It is asking for the structural conditions that make independent civic action possible.