Civil-society organisations are doing more cross-border work than ever — and operating in a more difficult legal and political environment while doing it. This brief sets out where the gaps are and what a credible European response would look like.
Summary
Civil-society organisations across Europe are increasingly working across national borders — coordinating on rule-of-law monitoring, elections, disinformation, migration and minority rights. At the same time, the legal, financial and political environment they operate in has become measurably more restrictive in several member states.
This brief sets out three observations and three recommendations.
Observations
- Capacity is uneven. A small number of well-resourced organisations carry a disproportionate share of cross-border work, while smaller actors with deep local knowledge lack the structural funding to participate.
- Legal friction is rising. Foreign-funding registers, restrictive NGO laws and opaque licensing regimes are spreading beyond the cases that originally drew international attention.
- Coordination remains ad-hoc. Networks form around individual crises and dissolve when funding cycles end, leaving institutional memory thin.
Recommendations
- Multi-year, programmatic funding for cross-border civil-society work, decoupled from short project cycles.
- A standing European review mechanism for laws and administrative practices that affect freedom of association, with a clear remediation pathway.
- Shared infrastructure — secure communications, legal defence pools, joint research capacity — that smaller organisations can access without building it themselves.
Next steps
The Forum's working group on Civic Space will publish a longer report in the coming months, drawing on interviews with practitioners in twelve countries. This brief is intended as a starting point for that conversation.
