Venezuela

From 2009-2010 the Civil Society Index (CSI) was implemented in Venzuela by SINERGIA, with local partnerships with the Development Efficiency Forum and the Association and NGOs Networks Articulation Board in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Coding and Decoding Civil Society

The report shows low civic participation and low impact of civil society on public policies and public attitudes. It also finds that the external context does not favour the development of civil society, with a significant number of CSOs forced to coexist within a restrictive legal framework and facing governmental practices that limit their autonomy. On the plus side, it finds that civil society has had a positive influence on the extension of social rights, and enjoys much stronger trust and public legitimacy compared to state agencies, the media and political parties. It concludes that this legitimacy offers a major opportunity for civil society’s development.

Recommendations from the report suggest that the first priority is to create a dialogue platform to diffuse polarisation. This dialogue must include political parties and CSOs as well as the rest of civil society, and other sectors such as business, academia donors and sectors with different ideologies, both locally and nationally. Another priority is to recover interpersonal trust and civic spiritedness by enhancing the scope of values training programmes, and to fight against clientelism, upholding the right to participate in public spheres and to access state resources without relinquishing autonomy. Fostering civic engagement will, it suggests, involve organising a broad campaign informing of the rights granted by the Constitution, so as to arouse citizen consciousness about the need to join actively in their promotion.

Venezuela, as one of the six countries from Latin America that implemented the CSI, has partnered with the other five countries to create a work team that will exchange the results of the project as a means for regional knowledge sharing.

CSI Country Reports in Venezuela