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Resilient Funders: How Funders Are Adapting To The Closing Space For Civil Society, Chris Allan, A. Scott Dupree

The Foundation Review

The closing space of civil society around the world over the last decades has created profound challenges for funders. Many analyses of how to respond to this reality focus on advocacy and promoting enabling policy environments. Few consider key practices of resilient funders that enable them to continue to operate under shifting political circumstances.

Increased adaptive capacity along three dimensions – varied procedures, multiple strategies, and an adaptive environment – promotes the flexibility to weather the shocks and stresses of tightening restrictions and increasing violence. Within those dimensions, funders are finding that three characteristics of resilience are especially critical: flexibility; …