Diagram - Title reads 'Dominant narratives attacking civil society.'

Safeguarding Civic Space: Harnessing Narrative Change to Restore Public Trust in Civil Society Organisations

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Introduction

A guide by the International Center for Policy Advocacy ICPA to empower actors to defend and promote civic rights effectively, plus 10 practical lessons for proactive narrative change.

Introduction to the Guide

In an era of shrinking civic space, civil society organisations (CSOs) find themselves under immense pressure, contending with a barrage of legal measures and narrative attacks aimed at undermining and vilifying them.

Against this backdrop of democratic backsliding, our guide serves as a proactive resource, to move past commenting on the erosion of democracy to empowering actors to defend and promote civic rights effectively.

Crafted from first-hand experience and extensive research, our guide offers 10 practical lessons for proactive narrative change.

Drawing from successful campaigns around the globe, including in-depth insights from a locally-led CSO coalition in Kazakhstan and efforts to counter ‘foreign agents’ laws in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan, these lessons provide actionable strategies to restore trust in CSOs with sceptical middle audiences.

Safeguarding Civic Space Guide

This resource is intended to support CSOs and allies working to support and safeguard civic space and democracy.

More specifically, it aims to support those directly involved in designing and leading public advocacy and narrative change campaigns to engage the more sceptical segments of the public, i.e. those who can tip the balance in whether measures to shrink civic space go ahead.

It is worth noting that these lessons and insights, having first assessed safety concerns, can also be applied in more authoritarian states, as leaders in such contexts are very concerned with maintaining public support. Hence, we hope the practice and guidelines in this resource will have a broad reach, relevance and use.

Overview of the Guide

The lessons and practice in this resource have been developed from extensive empirically-tested narrative change campaigning experience with a coalition in the challenging environment of Kazakhstan.

This work was led by a local coalition and focused on a narrative change campaign called #Azamabol (#GoodCitizen), which proved that storytelling and messaging based on shared unfiying values can significantly shift attitudes in the positive on CSOs. In addition, we conducted primary research on campaigns that successfully fought back proposals to introduce so-called ‘foreign agents’ laws in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan in the mid-2010’s, and analysed published case studies of civic space campaigning from 31 other countries. (See Section 6 for more on the case specifics). It is worth noting that as we finalise this work, the situation in Kyrgyzstan has changed for the worse and a foreign agents law very similar to the one discussed in the case study was passed in April 2024.

At the broader level, we open this guide by explaining the idea of civic space, how it shrinks and the common responses (See Section 2).

As our main focus is on narrative change, we have also put together a frame map of the most common attack narratives used in attempts to shrink civic space (See Section 3).

We hope that this can help all partners to recognise the relatively predictable playbook of narrative attacks to inform responses. In addition, we have also developed a proposal for a proactive preventive strategy to keep proposals to shrink civic space off the agenda (See Section 5).

In fact, the change noted above in Kyrgyzstan over the last decade where restrictive legal proposals go off the agenda and then back on under changing politics/circumstances, provides strong backing to consider such preventative measures.

At the more practical campaigning level, we have developed 10 lessons that we found to be key to an effective narrative change response (See Section 4). In each lesson, we open with an accessible explanation of the lesson in ‘Essence’ and ‘Insight’ sections.

We then illustrate the real-life application of the lesson in the campaign cases we have worked on and/or analysed. Lastly, we provide key guidance on applying the lesson in practice (and what you can get wrong) in an ‘Action’ section.

These 10 lessons combined provide guidance on a tried and tested proactive narrative change approach that can be used as a preventive measure on its own or can complement legal, policy and diplomatic levers which together serve to protect civic space.

Behind each lesson, there is a wealth of further insight, and we provide links throughout to our Reframing Migration Narratives Toolkit and Strategic Communications Knowledge Base, as well as many other resources and sources.

Contents

10 Core Lessons for Narrative Change Practice

Here is a brief summary of the lessons with Actions to take. For more see the full resource links below.

Lesson 1 – Take back the agenda to ‘change the weather’

Create and drive a new narrative space on civil society to change the debate, and ultimately favourably change attitudes, rather than staying stuck in countering existing anti-CSO narratives.

Action

Start well before a crisis as a pre-emptive strike

It’s relatively easy to identify the kind of political leadership that would attempt to shrink civic space. So, even if they are not currently in government, you can basically be sure that attacks on CSOs will be embedded in their political agenda.

A close monitoring of political discourse, parties’ manifestos, events etc. should be enough to see the threat posed, build support and get started working on safeguarding and promoting public trust in the sector.

Presenting this as a preventative longer-term intervention will help in building your coalition and get started on this communications work in quieter times.
→ See more on a proactive communications strategy in Section 5

Invest the time needed for the narrative and story development process

Before taking the work to scale, it’s a good idea to look at your work through the lens of the unifying narratives in your strategy (See Lesson 5) and start seeing stories in your everyday work, including with partners and beneficiaries of your work. In this way, you can build up a bank of stories to have at hand for use in campaigning. Many resources exist to provide guidance on process and practical tools, including our resources.

Lesson 2 – Map potential openings, not just the attack narratives

Conduct or commission mapping to identify potential narrative openings that can build public support, as well as mapping to understand the range of existing vilifying and attack narratives about CSOs.

Action

Expand the circle of your ask to ensure the positive is included

When commissioning an analysis, social listening or polling of current public attitudes, expand out the ask to go beyond just a focus on the debate around civic space.

Instead ask to understand the debate around CSOs, civic rights (assembly, association and free speech) and public participation. In this way, you’ll get the data on potential positive openings, as well as a picture of the negative attitudes.

Lesson 3 – The ‘movable middle’ are key to building support for CSOs at scale

It’s motivating to know that it IS possible to get a majority of the public on board to support civil society! And getting support from the persuadable majority in the middle can be the key to achieving attitude change at scale.

Action

Get access to or commission segmentation research to get a more nuanced and in-depth view of public attitudes

Having access to public opinion research which segments the public into groups based on similarity of attitude around democracy and civic action is key to understanding who to target, rather than having a generic and vague ‘general public’ or ‘majority’ as the stated target audience.

This more granular view of public opinion, in turn, helps identify the value appeals that might work with them. If it’s not already available, ask funders to support such analysis as a crucial foundation for an evidence-grounded public advocacy effort.

The resulting analysis can be used by many stakeholders once available, and committing to sharing and making such insights widely available among the sector is important.

Personify your target audiences to help develop resonant messages

Don’t leave your target audiences as research subjects; instead, think of who you know that is part of this segment, for example someone in your family, workplace or neighbourhood.

In our workshops, we ask campaigners to draw an example of the kind of person belonging to the target segment. These activities help to humanise your target middle audiences, and to understand their motivations and anxieties.

This is a key step in developing messages that have a good chance of resonating with your target audience, and as one CSO participant in Kazakhstan reported, this tool helped to always think of their target audience as real people, in their families and communities. See our toolkit for the steps in building a full narrative change strategy, including these elements.

Lesson 4 – Respond wisely to the reality that the public knows little about CSOs

A narrative change approach works well when targeting less informed sceptical audiences, as a starting point in emotionally engaging these audiences and slowly rebuilding their trust in CSOs and their work.

Action

Start where they are

There’s little point in being frustrated with the public for their lack of knowledge of the work of CSOs and of the civil society sector more broadly.

A key piece of advice we learned from seasoned UK campaigners is that it’s better to start where the audience are.

Through storytelling about CSOs built on resonant values, shared concerns and aspirations, you can develop awareness and trust, which then can lead to more interest, knowledge and possibly even uptake of civic education programmes.

Lesson 5 – Anchor narratives in unifying values

Action

Developing narratives around unifying values establishes a shared connection with target segments. Starting on common ground then serves as an emotionally smart bridge to open a conversation focused on building support for the work of civil society.

Define a resonant, overlapping and unifying value space for a campaign targeting specific middle segments

We and many of our partners use the following funnelling tool to guide this process of coming to a resonant messaging space. For guidance on conducting such a funnelling process, see our Reframing Migration Narratives Toolkit, including an easy to use template to complete your own positive values mapping.

Work from problem or issues to values

A second tool that has worked well for campaigners we’ve supported entails writing down the specific problems or issues faced, and then identifying the values associated with these issues that might be useful to leverage to engage the target audience.

This is an approach developed by Anat Shenker-Osorio and uses the example that was effective for the LGBTQ+ movement in many countries once it moved away from a discussion of rights in public campaigning towards embracing the values of family and commitment. She suggests replacing problems and embracing values as the basis of your argument.

Lesson 6 – Bring values to life through storytelling

Engaging storytelling is key to bringing the work of civil society to life for the general public around a set of shared values.

Action

Nowadays, there are many good resources on effective storytelling for campaign work — the work of Marshall Ganz and Humans of New York have been particularly influential for our work. From our hands-on experience, four key principles to guide effective storytelling for civic space work are:

  • Show, not tell
    Values need an affective/emotional response, not a cognitive one. So, it’s better to avoid the ‘talking head’ explanation to camera of CSO work; rather, it’s more effective to show the work in action in a dynamic and personal way.
  • Problem – Solution – Hope
    Engaging stories need suspense. Having a protagonist face and then overcome a challenge and then resolve the story to a hopeful future of shared aspirations works well to keep audiences engaged. The Assel video from the Kazakh #Azamatbol (#GoodCitizen) campaign is a good illustration of this movement.
  • Authentic 1st person voice
    The people who actually overcame a challenge will always be the most convincing for the target audience, rather than their story being told second hand. Try to move beyond the facts of the story when interviewing protagonists; rather, seek to understand their hopes and fears through the experience, and share those insights in the story that’s made public.
    An important note: It’s paramount to respect that the extent to which protagonists want to share their story and this has to be determined with their full consent. The safety of protagonists must be maintained as the top priority.
  • Balance resonance and dissonance
    Build the story with the right amount of resonance in shared values, and also dissonance in which something unexpected happens and works to get audiences to question and reconsider their current position on an issue. This then serves as the bridge to a discussion of your issues. Landing on this moment of what we call ‘constructive confusion’ is important in the process to shifting attitudes.

Lesson 7 – Lead with a ‘wedge issue’ already on the agenda

It can be very helpful to frame a campaign around pressing issues of concern for the public — so-called ‘wedge issues’ — as they can serve as an effective entry point to a discussion on civic action and rights, which can otherwise be quite abstract and meta for the general public.

Action

Keep looking for wedge opportunities that can legitimately be connected to the work of CSOs

One of the Kazakh campaigners we supported reported that they were able to use a case of harassment of a woman on public transport that got a lot of publicity to show the key role of CSOs in supporting victims. Through this connection that made sense as a good fit with the work of the CSO in question, the organisation was able to
keep this issue on the agenda through a targeted campaign.

Lesson 8 – Consider messaging on the value of the civil society sector

It is worth weighing up whether to take a pragmatic approach of messaging on the value of the civil society sector and what’s at stake economically through restrictions on the work of CSOs.

Action

Invest in collecting the sectoral data

Continuously collecting data about the contribution of the whole civil society sector in your country does require commitment, and also involves doing the required analysis. So, if you decide to pursue this approach, this work needs to be factored into manpower. It’s a worthwhile investment to be able to have this data on hand for quick usage, and it’s important to remember that the data can also be used to proactively drive your message, not just in a time of crisis. This may be more suitable and realistic work for CSO coalitions who come under threat, rather than an individual organisation.

Work on accessible presentation of the data

It is important to invest in good visual presentation to support the ease of communicating your main message about the value and contribution of the sector.

Lesson 9 – Engage strategic messengers beyond your base of allies

Build partnerships to engage unusual allies trusted by your target audience in the role of campaign messengers and spokespeople — they can help in overcoming existing scepticism towards CSOs.

Action

Make partnership building a task in the campaign team from day one

In our experience, campaign teams have tended to focus their efforts on messages and content with the partnership work left for later and often being a last-minute rush, rather than a key pillar of the strategy.

Given the core role that the rebuilding of trust plays in civic space campaigns and the important role of a broad-based coalition in achieving that goal, we recommend having someone or a team (if you can afford it) working to bring partners on board from day one.

See our ’10 keys for mobilising strategic communications coalitions’ resource for strategic and practical advice on doing this work.

Lesson 10 – Invest in message testing – don’t rely only on instincts!

As there’s so much at stake in attitude change campaigning work, it’s important to invest in empirically testing what is triggered by new narratives and communications content before sharing widely, rather than just trusting your instinct about what you think will work with middle audiences.

Action

Any testing is better than no testing
A wide range of material is commonly tested including pitches, top line narratives and messages, stories and protagonists, slogans and hashtags, visuals/memes, video material and website content. We have found it useful
to plan testing at two stages in campaign development:

  • Concept level
    Having identified a target audience/segment of the public and developed a messaging and pitching approach, and even some draft content, it is useful to see if the strategy is working before spending large amounts of money on content production.
  • Content level
    This is the more traditional understanding of when to test, i.e. once images, video and campaign content have been developed and the aim is to identify which content and messaging works better.

But if you can’t be so strategic for whatever reason, it is still important to remember that “any testing is better than no testing”, and we outline a range of methods we’ve used specifically for testing for narrative change campaigning in a concise resource.

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