Reports that more than £28bn of UK taxpayers’ money may have reached terrorists, hostile states, organised crime networks and other hostile actors through public funding channels, including aid payments, should not be treated as an isolated scandal (For the full story). They should force a wider question about how public money moves across borders, who receives it, and what forms of power it strengthens.
This question matters beyond national security. It also matters for civil society funding.
Civil society is often treated as a counterweight to state power, political repression, and social inequality. In donor language, it is frequently imagined as the space where accountability, rights, feminist politics, community voice, and public participation can be protected when formal political systems fail.
Yet this assumption requires much closer scrutiny.
Across parts of the Middle East and North Africa, a difficult but necessary question is becoming harder to avoid: what happens when large civil society organisations are not independent sites of accountability, but politically embedded institutions with their own forms of coercive power?
This is not a marginal concern. It affects how donor funding is distributed, how public money is used, how consultants and smaller organisations are treated, and how safeguarding risks are identified or concealed. It also affects the credibility of feminist, rights-based, and development work more broadly.
The issue is not simply that civil society operates in politically constrained environments. That has long been the case. The deeper concern is that some of the most powerful organisations in the sector may themselves be closely aligned with ruling parties, state structures, elite networks, or dominant political factions. In such contexts, civil society does not merely face power. It may reproduce it.
The problem of political capture
Political capture occurs when organisations that are expected to serve public, community, or rights-based purposes become structurally dependent on, aligned with, or accountable to political interests that compromise their independence.
This does not always appear as open party membership or formal state control. It may appear through leadership networks, access to ministries, proximity to ruling parties, donor gatekeeping, family influence, security relationships, or reputational dominance within a sector. It may also appear through who is protected, who is silenced, who receives funding, and who is excluded from opportunity.
In some settings, large civil society organisations become known informally as “the sharks”: institutions with disproportionate access to funding, political cover, donor trust, and sectoral influence. Their public language may be feminist, rights-based, or participatory. Their internal and external practices, however, may be hierarchical, coercive, extractive, or exclusionary.
This contradiction matters.
A feminist organisation cannot be assessed only by the language it uses. A rights-based organisation cannot be judged only by the frameworks it cites. A civil society organisation cannot be treated as independent simply because it is legally registered outside government.
The question is not what an organisation says it stands for. The question is how it exercises power.
When feminist language protects unequal power
This issue is especially sensitive in feminist and women’s rights spaces, where political legitimacy is often built around histories of struggle, representation, and advocacy. Many feminist organisations in the region have played important roles in advancing legal reform, public debate, and protection frameworks. That history should not be dismissed.
But it should not place organisations beyond scrutiny.
In some contexts, major feminist organisations are led by figures closely affiliated with ruling parties, state institutions, or elite political networks. In others, the problem appears through what is sometimes described as state feminism: a form of institutionalised gender advocacy that advances certain women’s rights agendas while remaining compatible with authoritarian governance, donor priorities, or elite control.
The risk is not only ideological. It is organisational.
When feminist legitimacy is combined with political access, donor confidence, and weak accountability, it can become very difficult for staff, consultants, survivors, smaller organisations, or community actors to challenge misconduct. Those who raise concerns may be dismissed as disruptive, ungrateful, unprofessional, disloyal, or politically motivated. In highly networked societies, the consequences can extend beyond the workplace.
This is where safeguarding becomes central.
Safeguarding risk is not limited to sexual misconduct
Safeguarding is still too often reduced to sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment. These risks are critical, but they are not the whole picture. Safeguarding is also about the abuse of power, coercion, retaliation, intimidation, exploitation, and institutional conditions that make harm possible.
In politically captured organisations, safeguarding risks may be intensified by several factors:
- fear of retaliation;
- blurred boundaries between organisational authority and political influence;
- the use of reputation or access to silence dissent;
- informal coercion through families, communities, or professional networks;
- financial exploitation of junior consultants, staff, or smaller partners;
- weak complaint mechanisms;
- donor reluctance to challenge “strategic” local partners;
- the absence of independent investigation routes.
These risks are not incidental. They are produced by the structure of power around the organisation.
A consultant who is pressured to accept unlawful deductions from their fees is not only facing a contractual problem. A junior professional who is coerced through family or political networks is not only experiencing poor management. A smaller organisation that is forced into unfair partnership terms is not only dealing with a difficult collaborator.
These are governance and safeguarding concerns.
They reveal how institutional power can be used to extract money, labour, silence, loyalty, or compliance from people with less protection.
Donor funding and the public money question
There is also a donor accountability issue that cannot be avoided. Much international civil society funding comes from taxpayers in donor countries. It is often justified as support for rights, democracy, gender justice, protection, development, or community resilience.
If that money is channelled to organisations that are politically aligned, coercive, or structurally unaccountable, then donors are not simply making a technical funding error. They may be reinforcing the very systems of power they claim to challenge.
This is particularly troubling when donors continue funding large organisations because they are familiar, administratively capable, English-speaking, politically connected, or considered “safe” partners. In practice, the organisations most able to satisfy donor compliance requirements may also be the organisations most insulated from local accountability.
The result is a distorted civil society economy.
Large organisations become repeat recipients of funding. Smaller organisations, independent consultants, survivor-led initiatives, grassroots groups, and politically unaffiliated actors are pushed to the margins. Those who challenge the system may be labelled difficult or risky. Those who comply are rewarded with access.
This creates a dangerous inversion: donor risk management may protect donors from reputational exposure while failing to protect the people most exposed to harm.
Corruption as relational and institutional practice
Corruption in civil society is often imagined narrowly: stolen funds, inflated invoices, procurement fraud, or financial misreporting. These forms matter. But corruption can also be relational and institutional.
It may appear when an organisation uses its political position to pressure consultants into accepting unfair payment terms. It may appear when powerful actors expect informal payments, deductions, loyalty, silence, or personal favours. It may appear when professional opportunities are mediated through factional affiliation or elite networks. It may appear when complaints disappear because the organisation is too politically useful to challenge.
This form of corruption is harder to audit because it does not always leave a clean financial trace. It lives in relationships, threats, dependencies, and informal power.
It also thrives where donors treat compliance paperwork as evidence of integrity.
An organisation can have policies, safeguarding documents, procurement procedures, anti-corruption clauses, and gender equality commitments while still operating through intimidation, coercion, exploitation, and political protection. The presence of a policy is not evidence of accountability. It is only evidence that a policy exists.
Why standard due diligence is not enough
Most donor due diligence processes are designed to assess administrative capacity, financial controls, policy compliance, legal registration, past performance, and reputational risk. These are necessary, but insufficient.
They often fail to ask more politically serious questions:
Who does this organisation answer to in practice?
What political networks protect it?
Who is afraid to challenge it?
How are consultants, junior staff, community members, and smaller partners treated?
What happens when someone refuses an unlawful request?
Are complaints handled independently, or are they contained internally?
Does the organisation’s public rights-based language match its internal governance culture?
What forms of retaliation are possible in this context?
These questions are not peripheral. They are central to responsible funding.
In politically charged environments, donor accountability requires political economy analysis, safeguarding analysis, and organisational diagnostics. It is not enough to ask whether an organisation can implement a grant. Donors must ask what kinds of power their funding strengthens.
The silence around powerful civil society actors
One reason this problem persists is that many people are afraid to speak about it.
Consultants may fear losing future work. Smaller organisations may fear exclusion from partnerships. Staff may fear retaliation. Survivors may fear disbelief or exposure. Donors may fear admitting that long-standing partners are compromised. Sector professionals may fear being accused of attacking civil society at a time when civic space is already under threat.
This silence is understandable. But it is also costly.
When critique is suppressed in the name of protecting civil society, the people most harmed by civil society organisations are left with nowhere to go. The sector becomes more concerned with preserving its image than addressing its own abuses of power.
This is not accountability. It is institutional self-protection.
A serious defence of civil society cannot mean defending every organisation that uses civil society language. It must mean protecting the conditions that make independent, ethical, accountable civic work possible.
Towards a more responsible donor practice
The answer is not to abandon civil society funding. Nor is it to treat all large organisations with suspicion. The answer is to develop more politically literate, safeguarding-informed, and accountable funding practice.
This requires donors to move beyond procedural comfort.
First, donors need to assess political capture as part of due diligence. This should include leadership affiliations, informal power networks, state proximity, factional alignment, and patterns of exclusion.
Second, donors need independent feedback mechanisms that do not rely on the funded organisation to report on itself. Consultants, staff, smaller partners, and community actors must have safe routes to raise concerns.
Third, safeguarding assessments must include coercion, retaliation, financial exploitation, abuse of authority, and political intimidation. These risks should not be treated as secondary to more familiar categories of misconduct.
Fourth, donors should review how funding concentration creates power. Repeatedly funding the same dominant organisations may be administratively convenient, but it can also deepen dependency, gatekeeping, and impunity.
Fifth, donors must take complaints about powerful partners seriously, even when those partners are politically useful, well-known, or publicly respected.
Finally, donors need to recognise that accountability cannot be outsourced to policies. It has to be tested through practice.
Reclaiming civil society from institutional impunity
The purpose of this critique is not to weaken civil society. It is to take civil society seriously enough to hold it accountable.
Civil society organisations can be sites of courage, care, resistance, learning, and repair. They can also become sites of coercion, extraction, political brokerage, and harm. The task is not to preserve the myth of civil society innocence. The task is to build the conditions for civil society integrity.
This is where CTDC’s work is directly relevant. Through our consulting, research, and learning activities, we support donors, boards, NGOs, civil society organisations, and institutional partners to understand how power operates inside and around organisations.
CTDC provides:
- political analysis of organisational affiliations, elite networks, state proximity, factional influence, and donor dependency;
- relational analysis of how authority, fear, loyalty, reputation, kinship, and professional networks shape behaviour;
- power analysis of who can speak, who is silenced, who benefits, who is exposed to risk, and who controls access to resources;
- safeguarding analysis of coercion, retaliation, exploitation, harassment, abuse of authority, and weak reporting systems;
- governance and accountability diagnostics that examine whether policies, boards, complaints systems, and leadership practices actually protect people;
- research and evaluation insights that help donors and organisations understand not only what programmes deliver, but what forms of institutional power they reproduce.
Alongside this analysis, CTDC offers safeguarding policy development, diversity and inclusion audits, feminist organisational development consultancy, research and evaluation services for NGOs, organisational diagnostics, tailored training, and capability-building through CTDC Academy.
The issue is not whether civil society should be trusted.
The issue is whether trust is being earned, tested, and made accountable.
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