All development stakeholders agree: civil society should play an important role in attaining sustainable development, and in cooperation for those goals. More than five years before the deadline of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is timely and necessary to ask: how is civil society?

Seeking to answer this question, the CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE), civil society’s international platform for effective development cooperation, launches its latest report this August titled “Civil Society Enabling Environment & Effective Development Cooperation: CSO Reports for the Global Partnership’s Fourth Monitoring Round 2023-2026.”

The report is part of CPDE’s efforts to jumpstart and catalyze CSOs’ engagement with the Fourth Monitoring Round (4MR) of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC), the main multi-stakeholder platform for effective development cooperation. The 4MR is GPEDC’s monitoring tool that aims to track stakeholders’ delivery of commitments to development cooperation for sustainable development.

The report draws from country reports submitted by CSO focal points in eight countries across regions from the Global South. Most of these countries are lower middle income, have repressed civic spaces, are considered partly free with regard to human rights and freedoms, and are recipients of more than USD 1,000 million in development cooperation financing.

The country reports come from Indonesia, the Philippines, Honduras, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Nepal. The CPDE report situates these country reports in the context of development effectiveness principles; the state of development cooperation, civic space and democracy in the world; and the outcome of the GPEDC’s Third Monitoring Round (3MR) in 2018.

The report shows that governments, development partners and CSOs have carried out basic actions to enhance CSO enabling environment, but more needs to be done in the areas of CSO engagement by governments, development effectiveness of CSOs, development partners’ support for CSOs, and legal and regulatory frameworks on civil society.

The country reports that discussed private sector engagement for development cooperation show that governments and development partners lack inclusive engagement with CSOs on the matter, while governments also lack inclusive engagement with trade unions and CSOs.

Findings from the country reports in the collection largely indicate continuity with the findings on CSO enabling environment and private sector engagement for development cooperation made by the 3MR in 2018, as reflected by both GPEDC and CPDE reports on the monitoring round.

The CPDE report concludes with many recommendations, and generally urges governments, development partners, CSOs and their development stakeholders to take the 4MR as an opportunity to renew their commitment to effective development cooperation principles, as enshrined in the Busan Principles of 2011 among other documents.

Ultimately, the CPDE report calls on all development stakeholders to reaffirm and deepen their commitment to development cooperation as a unique resource for advancing development, to sustainable development itself as a goal for the people and the planet, and to civil society as a development actor in its own right, with unique contributions to attaining sustainable development.

The “Civil Society Enabling Environment & Effective Development Cooperation: CSO Reports for the Global Partnership’s Fourth Monitoring Round 2023-2026” is now available for download. Spanish and French translations will be published soon. 

For correspondence, email roaap_secretariat@realityofaid.org.