The Dutch ‘Dialogue and Dissent’ framework to support civic space in Zimbabwe

The ‘Dialogue and Dissent’ programme represents the Netherlands government’s guiding principles in supporting Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the Global South. The frame-work envisages strengthening the capacity of civil society organizations in lobbying and advocacy as comparatively more transformative than support for service delivery initiatives. Here I investigate how the policy framework engages with civic space (limitations) under restrictive environments and with a particular focus on Zimbabwe. The policy script provides an outline involving international advocacy pathways as well as localized efforts embedded within the activities of partners. However, a qualitative interviewing process involving the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it’s embassy in Zimbabwe, Dutch NGOs and a selection of Zimbabwean civil society actors, established that not everything within the script contributes to the cause and is reflective of the practice in Zimbabwe. Some of the pathways construed to be addressing the closing space do not necessarily do so but rather simply represent the partners’ resilience or ways of surviving in an unfavorable environment, and this perhaps explains the Dutch government’s own admission that the situation is actually getting much worse in many of those areas in which the policy framework is being implemented. I come to a cautious conclusion that the policy in its current state is yet to illustrate a convincing means to counter the threats to civic space in Zimbabwe and that this gap between the script and the empirics mirror structural policy oversights on the underlying assumptions and particularly the working environment under authoritarian regimes.