Context for Civil Society in 2025
Civil Society in 2025:
A Changing, Constrained and Fragmented Landscape
Civil society in 2025 operates in an environment shaped by political turbulence, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change. The pressure on civic actors has intensified, yet the scale and form of these pressures differ significantly by region. What is consistent, however, is the growing interdependence between civil society and digital infrastructure. Activists, advocates, service providers and social movements now rely heavily on platforms and technologies that they do not control. This reliance exposes them to new forms of vulnerability at the very moment when public leadership from civil society is most needed.
This section highlights several insights and findings from the CIVICUS Monitor, the World Economic Forum, Access Now, Freedom House, the OECD and regional digital rights organisations. The goal here is not to produce a comprehensive analysis, but to outline the key conditions that shape why alternative, participatory and community owned digital infrastructures matter.
Many of the themes below consistently surfaced across sessions and breakout discussions at International Civil Society Week, MozFest, Web Summit and recent digital sovereignty gatherings in Berlin and France.
> 1.1 Shrinking civic space
According to the CIVICUS Monitor 2024 to 2025 update, only 3 percent of the global population live in countries classified as open civic space. More than 80 percent live in contexts that are considered obstructed, repressed or completely closed.
► Source: https://monitor.civicus.org
Across every region, there has been an increase in:
- restrictions on protests and assemblies
- excessive use of force or criminalisation
- arbitrary content moderation orders
- legal actions against media and activists
- digital surveillance of human rights defenders
Freedom House’s 2025 Freedom on the Net report found that internet freedom declined in 26 countries and improved in only 9, continuing a 14 year downward trend.
► Source: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net
These patterns indicate that civic freedoms are increasingly shaped by digital conditions. When online spaces are restricted or manipulated, offline civic space narrows as well.
> 1.2 Reliance on a fragile digital infrastructure
Most civil society organisations operate through commercial platforms and cloud services whose governance, algorithms and business models are outside their influence. The transition to remote working and digital organising during the pandemic deepened this dependency.
Several recent studies point to increasing operational vulnerability:
- Researchers from Oxford Internet Institute and Carnegie Endowment (2024-2025) note that the concentration of key internet services in a handful of companies raises systemic risk for public interest work.
► Source: https://carnegieendowment.org - Algorithmic changes made by major platforms in 2024 without public notice led to sudden drops in reach for many civic groups, particularly in the Global South, as documented by Global Voices and SMEX.
► Sources: https://globalvoices.org and https://smex.org
This fragility is structural. Civil society’s digital backbone currently depends on infrastructures that prioritise profit, scale and data extraction. These incentives often run counter to the needs of movements, communities or human rights defenders.
> 1.3 Information disorder, Gen AI media and eroding trust
Generative AI has transformed the information environment. According to the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2025, misinformation and disinformation are ranked as a significant global risk over the next two year horizon.
► Source: https://reports.weforum.org
New patterns include:
- realistic audio and video impersonations
- targeted influence campaigns during elections
- fabricated civil society statements or forged evidence
- confusion over authentic organisational communication
- amplified harassment and coordinated online attacks
In 2024 and early 2025, more than 40 national elections saw serious incidents of deepfake based misinformation, according to research by the Brookings Institution and the European Digital Media Observatory.
► Sources: https://www.brookings.edu and https://edmo.eu
Civil society organisations face a dual challenge. They must defend communities against manipulation while navigating the same polluted information systems to advocate and coordinate their own work.
> 1.4 Climate related and geopolitical disruptions to infrastructure
Climate change increasingly affects digital systems. Floods, extreme heat, wildfires and storms are impacting data centres, undersea cables and power grids. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and ITU highlight that climate related outages are rising in frequency and are projected to increase further between 2025 and 2030.
► Sources: https://www.undrr.org and https://www.itu.int
In parallel, geopolitical tension has led to:
- targeted throttling or shutdowns of the internet
- cross border data access restrictions
- cyber attacks on civil society organisations and human rights networks
- the emergence of parallel digital ecosystems shaped by national security priorities
- Information warfare at scale
Access Now documented 283 internet shutdowns in 2023 and notes that 2024 and early 2025 continue this trend, with shutdowns linked to elections, protests and emergencies.
► Source: https://www.accessnow.org
These disruptions disproportionately affect activists and organisations that rely on digital tools for coordination and safety.
> 1.5 Regulatory fragmentation and the rise of competing digital spheres
A growing number of governments and regional blocs are developing autonomous digital strategies, including national cloud systems, sovereign AI frameworks and data localisation rules. This has resulted in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.
Examples include:
- The European Union’s Data Governance Act and AI Act
- India’s Digital Public Infrastructure strategy
- Brazil’s emerging sovereign AI agenda
- China’s strict data localisation rules
- African Union work on cross border data governance (2024 to 2025)
Although there are several aspects to these frameworks that are welcome, this fragmentation creates operational uncertainty for NGOs. Cross border collaboration becomes more complex, compliance burdens increase and organisations face divergent standards around privacy, data storage and AI transparency.