The Evolution of Civil Society at Mercy Corps

I have been asked to share a few thoughts about my vision for civil society. Let me start with a few caveats.

First, a civil society vision is so rooted in core human rights principles, so drawn from social justice and social change work, and so linked to the collective human experience of aiming to build a better world that any organizational vision should be way more than the thoughts of any individual; here titles have no relevance.

Second, civil society itself has become such an overused concept, has come to mean so many things that it risks meaning nothing.

With those caveats out of the way, here is what I think.

Within Mercy Corps, civil society roots us in three fundamental insights. First, all good, effective relief and development work is in a primary sense rooted in human rights. This can and most often should lead to so-called "rights based" approaches and program strategies - but not always. Sometimes, there are competing rights, which is why rights do not always and everywhere trump. But they are a great place to begin.

Second, civil society is important because it clearly asserts that individuals need to think and act not just as community members, but as citizens...and that communities need to connect themselves with appropriate levels of government. So for Mercy Corps, we always need to be empowering community
members to act as citizens, and we need to connect our work to government policy formulation.

Thirdly, civil society teaches us that communities function best, that countries function best, when there are healthy relationships among government, the private sector, and the civic sector (which includes religious institutions).

We have identified three principles that make these relationships healthy: participation, accountability and peaceful change.

When you think about civil society in this way, you see it in its proper light in the MeryCorps world - that is, not as a distinct program strategy (like health or microenterprise, for example), but as a theory of change for everything we do, regardless of the specific program strategy or intervention.

And this brings the vision back to the mission: mobilizing individuals and communities (in participatory, accountable and peaceful ways) to build secure, just and productive societies.

Written by Neal Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps CEO