Winning And Sustaining Space For Civil Society In Semi-authoritarian Settings: What Works And What Doesn’t Work - the Case Of Uganda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, the world has witnessed significant changes in global and national polities. These changes, which include the re-emergence of semi-authoritarian regimes have had a substantial effect on the space for civil society advocacy. In Uganda, there has been an undulation between the promising eras of democratization in the 1990s to low days of oppressive legislations and institutions since 2005. What these changes dictate is that stakeholders working within and outside of the state ought not only to change their approach and strategies to cope with the changes in the rules of engagement but also win and sustain their operating space. This paper explores strategies employed by civil society actors to win and sustain space for operation in Uganda’s semi-authoritarian setting. The analysis is situated in Uganda’s Semi-Dominant Neo-Patrimonial Space, characterized by patronage and party dominance. Two case studies from civil society advocacy have been explored to delineate key lessons for civil society advocacy across the world. The case studies are presented in periodized interactions between the state and NGOs in order to contrast the outcomes of different strategies which predominated in different eras. The evidence presented shows that where civil society organizations and actors used more collaborative strategies and techniques in their advocacy, they achieved advocacy results and goals. One the other hand, where civil society engaged through less collaborative and confrontational strategies, they did not achieve results. It follows from the analysis therefore that in semi-authoritarian political settings, where civil society is relatively powerless, change cannot be achieved in ways that are contradictory and conflictual to the interests of a dominant regime. As such, incremental collaborative changes are more preferable and more effective than confrontational change options. The scope and extent of incremental changes would be larger the more collaborative is the civil society engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".