How to Measure a Civil Society
The HSE has joined the World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS), an influential independent organization which studies civil society. Irina Mersiyanova, Director of the HSE Centre for Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector Research (GRANS Centre), told us some more about this event.
- Irina Vladimirovna, GRANS Centre has monitored the state of civil society in Russia since 2006. What changes will the collaboration with CIVICUS bring?
- By joining CIVICUS we will become members of a world movement which helps to spread the knowledge of civil society and share experiences. Since 2001, CIVICUS has calculated the Civil Society Index (CSI) - it provides a picture of the situation concerning a citizen's rights and opportunities in each country. Previously, the Russian civil society was totally incomprehensible for the world community because of the lack of a database for comparative research of the civil society in Russia and other countries. Now we have gained full access to the methods that will allow us to gather information on all the 76 indicators which form the base for the CSI calculations, and also to exchange data with the 50 other countries participating in the project.
- Is this project in any way connected with the non-profit sector research which GRANS Centre conducts in cooperation with John Hopkins University?
- The Non-profit sector is only one part of the civil society's institutions. Apart from the role of non-profit organizations, many other indicators and indices are studied here, including the level of a population's involvement into the civil society procedures, as well as opinions of the interested parties and influential groups. There are just no alternatives to the CIVICUS study in terms of its scale and complexity.
- What is the difference between your research and the research that the "Strategy"Centre conducted in Saint Petersburg in 2003 - 2006?
- The research team which also included some HSE experts used an abridged form of the CIVICUS methodology and lacked a sufficient volume of empirical information to use an original resource for every indicator. Some of the indicators were resourced by secondary data, i.e. research that was conducted throughout the world including Russia, but this data was not the most recent and could be absolutely trusted, which I, as a researcher, consider essential when assessing the state of the civil society on a national scale. This time, every indicator will be based on our own data, which we have obtained as part of our civil society monitoring since 2006. By the way, we didn't start the empirical studies as soon as we joined. In fact, we had been preparing for two years to enter this worldwide movement;we conducted research first in order to get acquainted with the dynamics of the existing processes. And now, 70 out of 76 indicators will be calculated on the basis of our own research. The rest of them will be based on other sources, for example, World Bank materials.
- How representative will be the results?
- In fact, some time ago the level of trust in CSI was not very high, and that's why CIVICUS experts overhauled their methodology:they created a unified set of research tools for all the countries, so that the researchers could enter their data into the same templates and could encode them in the same way. I think that today's assessment system allows suitable comparing of data between different countries.
- Who are the project participants on behalf of the GRANS Centre?
- Members of the HSE staff, students, and our external partners without whom the monitoring just would not happen. The "Obschestvennoye Mnenie"(‘Public Opinion') Foundation gathers information for our tool set, programmes and questionnaires. The ‘Market Up'Company does a huge job gathering information from non-profit, non-governmental organizations in Russia. This research is unprecedented since we have put in place a system with principles of sampling which allowed us, for the first time in this country, to achieve a genuine representativeness of polls in non-profit organizations'studies. And one more partner is the Public Opinion Research Centre ‘Glas Naroda'(‘The Voice of the People'). We have been collaborating with this organisation for three years. The list of our colleagues and partners could go on and on....
- What are the practical results of the project?
- The research papers will be published in Russian and English, and the whole database will be passed to CIVICUS, where a new global inter-country report on civil society development is now being prepared. As an attachment to the final report, recommendations will be given on the development of the civil society in Russia. Moreover, every year we provide the Russian Public Chamber with a large amount of material for its report on the state of the civil society in the country. I believe that the results of our current research will also become a part of it.
Sergey Stepanischev, HSE Web News Service