Civil Society Innovation and Populism in a Digital Era Published

CSOs are innovators, testing new approaches to both traditional and emerging problems. One of today’s issues creating an unprecedented challenge to civil society is the rise of populist leaders and their pervasive rhetoric, in different parts of the world. Populists have been adept at winning hearts and minds and creating or mining divisions in society, based on fear and hatred. This undermines the progressive values and ideals of inclusion, equality, diversity and respect for human rights advanced by CSOs working on social and environmental justice and sustainable development (the focus for this report). These CSOs either pose an existential threat to the anti-plural, anti-debate and supposedly unstable environments which populists promote, or are attacked by them as representing illegitimate “elite” or “intermediary” positions. Read more here.

Source: ICS Centre