How it works
The EU System for an Enabling Environment is designed to document changes and shed light on critical trends in the enabling environment for civil society across 86 countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, the Americas and the Caribbean.
Through a series of actions encompassing monitoring at the national level, leading to the issue of early warnings which in turn inform timely support to groups in need, EU SEE supports civil society’s response in addressing challenges and opportunities within the enabling environment, proactively responding to legal and policy developments and other events that may impact their ability to operate.
Methodology
The Early Warning and Monitoring Mechanism is designed to enable civil society actors, the EU and the Flexible Support Mechanism (FSM) to anticipate and react to changes in the enabling environment – an environment where civil society can thrive, express itself freely and actively engage in shaping its context.
This CSO-led action-oriented mechanism gathers real-time information from a network of national partners who notify about events that affect or have the potential to affect the enabling environment for civil society, some of which can trigger an alert and consequently impulse advocacy actions to respond to early signs of restrictions.
Conversely, by promptly detecting signs of positive developments, local civil society actors make the most of potential windows of opportunity and support improvements in the enabling environment.
Early Warning Mechanism
At a core level, the mechanism works by gathering information through Network Members in 86 countries. This information-gathering work focuses on events that impact or could impact the enabling environment. The EU SEE consortium will then be tasked with compiling, verifying, and assessing these events to trigger alerts indicating changes to the enabling environment. Alerts can be triggered by a single high-impact event or a series of events suggesting a downward or upward trend in the enabling environment.
Country Focus Reports
These annual country reports compile and assess data on six key principles for the enabling environment:
- Respect and protection of fundamental freedoms
- Supportive legal and regulatory framework
- Accessible and sustainable resources
- Open and responsive State
- Supportive public culture and discourses on civil society
- Access to a secure digital environment*
By consolidating existing indicators and incorporating data collected by its network of Network Members, EU SEE establishes country scores to measure progress or regress in the different dimensions and determine positive or negative trends in the target countries. Additionally, qualitative analyses examine the country’s landscape to identify factors that may be playing a crucial role in fostering or hampering the enabling environment.
Enabling Environment Snapshot
To complement the Country Focus Reports and Early Warning Mechanism, EU SEE captures the current state of the enabling environment for civil society in each of the 86 countries in a concise, one-page ¨Enabling Environment Snapshot¨. Produced three times a year, these snapshots focus on recent trends, shifts and developments for the previous four months across the five enabling environment principles, as well as highlight challenges and opportunities. An arrow system provides a visual representation of the changes in the enabling environment based on the evaluation in the snapshots.
*For the Enabling Environment snapshots published in January 2025, the principle ‘Digital environment integrity and security‘ was not assessed. However, it will be included in the upcoming research outputs.
Acknowledgement
It’s important to acknowledge that while the six principles listed above provide a foundation, the enabling environment for civil society is influenced by additional factors not explicitly mentioned. These factors encompass essential components of a functioning democratic system, such as the rule of law, free and fair elections, political representation, and an open information space. Furthermore, external elements like conflicts, inequality and social cohesion (or lack thereof) can also significantly impact this environment. Through its monitoring efforts, the EWM gathers information on these aspects if they have the potential to influence the enabling environment. However, when evaluating the enabling environment in its country focus reports, EU SEE exclusively relies on its defined six principles, which are designed to offer a clear and measurable assessment of the conditions in which civil society evolves.