Key Takeaways from The Good Lobby Webinar: How Civil Society Can Reclaim a Voice in Puzzling Times

14/10/2025

We are under attack from multiple fronts: Civic space is shrinking through restrictive laws targeting NGOs working on migration, human rights, and environmental justice. Financial sustainability is precarious as politicised funding and anti-NGO rhetoric drain our resources. Digital surveillance, coordinated harassment campaigns, and SLAPP suits silence dissent. Physical attacks on defenders have escalated – we’ve seen journalists and activists intimidated, threatened, and murdered. And in some member states, the rule of law itself is eroding, undermining the freedoms we depend on.

These interconnected challenges make our work more difficult than ever before.

But more fundamentally, they demand we recognise a profound shift: For decades, civil society operated under assumptions of progress – that rights, once won, would hold; that democratic norms would deepen; that civic space would expand. That trajectory has reversed. We are no longer in an era of advancement. We are in an era of defence and preservation.

This requires us to rethink power fundamentally. The old playbook – public consultations, advocacy, awareness-raising, appealing to institutions we assumed were reasonable – proves insufficient when those institutions are captured, or dismantled, and we are delegitimised. Power isn’t just shifting; it’s being actively reconcentrated and weaponised against us.

We need new strategies for survival: Developing funding models less vulnerable to political pressure. Creating transnational solidarity. Mastering defensive legal tactics. And honestly assessing which battles we can win, and which require strategic retreat to preserve our capacity for the future.

How do we preserve democratic infrastructure during a democratic winter, so something remains when conditions shift?

That should be our mission now – not glamorous, but essential. We hold the line.

For this, we encourage the strategic, re-purposed use of the many avenues of participation available to civil society across Europe, from access to documents to petitions to the EU Parliament and ECIs, and the embrace of more informal tactics and strategies.

Our latest ECI Save Your Right Save Your Flights secured us access to the ongoing legislative negotiation of the revised EU Passengers’ Rights Regulation, having been invited by the MEP Rapporteur and engaging with all negotiators. This would have never happened without starting off an ECI. Are you ready to embrace this mindset? Leverage and repurpose existing tools to push back and potentially advance your cause.

Our latest webinar provided practical examples of how to repurpose tools we’ve seldom used in the past – adapting what we have for the challenges we now face.