BCSDN is proud to announce that the study “Economic Value of the Non-Profit Sector in the Countries of the Western Balkans & Turkey” has been published. It was prepared by Dubravka Velat as part of the project “Balkan Civil Society Acquis – Strengthening the Advocacy and Monitoring Potential and Capacities of CSOs” with support from BCSDN members. This is the first study ever that gives an overview of the current situation with the non–profit sector-related data collection, analysis and presentation in seven countries: Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. It provides information on the quality and…
Author: anja
As the risks associated with growing labor market deregulation and flexibility are increasingly shifted towards individuals, an increasing number of people are likely to experience unemployment, which can result in declining mental health and well-being. This Third Sector Impact (TSI) working paper asks whether voluntary work can reduce the negative effects of unemployment on well-being. Drawing upon Latent Deprivation Theory, the Agency Restriction Approach and Beck’s vision of civil labor in multi-activity society, this article also examines the extent to which voluntary work and the unemployment benefits of countries can compensate for the loss in manifest and latent benefits associated…
BCSDN for the 7th consecutive year has analyzed how the European Commission has treated the issue of civil society development and assessed the progress made in the Enlargement countries within the Enlargement Strategy 2015 and the country Progress Reports recently being published. In brief, this year’s analysis shows the civil society has indeed become one of the key criteria for accession, and the Commission has put an increasing attention to the enabling environment for civil society development in the Enlargement countries through more systematic and unified monitoring methodologies. The biggest focus again is on the relations between public institutions and…
UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, Maina Kiai has joined with Ghent University’s Human Rights Centre to file a third party intervention in four cases before the European Court of Human Rights, which concern the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in Azerbaijan. At issue is the Court’s interpretation of Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. According to the submission, states are increasingly limiting the right to freedom of assembly using justifications such as ‘unauthorized assemblies’ or…
On 5th October, 2015 a seminar about the development of international guidance on a coherent set of financial reporting standards was held by CIPFA. Built upon a research conducted in 2014, the seminar addressed the issue of CSO financial management standards, highlighting that the lack of coherence in international standards for not-for-profit accounting contributes to the complexity of current donor requirements, which are costly to administer and yet fail to give the donors and other stakeholders the assurance they need. This seminar comes at a key moment as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which deals with the corporate for-profit…
On 2nd November, BCSDN team composed of Tanja Hafner Ademi and Milka Ivanovska Hadjievska presented the report Enabling Environment for Civil Society Development in the Black Sea Region: Towards a Regional Strategy for Cooperation at the 8th edition of the Black Sea NGO Forum held in Tbilisi, Georgia. This report has been commissioned by the Black Sea NGO Forum with the aim to assess the state of the enabling environment for civil society development in eight countries of the Black Sea region: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. The analytical framework was based on combination of its experience…
BCSDN is proud to present the report on the Enabling Environment for Civil Society Development for the Black Sea Region, assessing the state of the enabling environment in 8 countries of the Black Sea region: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. Commissioned by the Black Sea NGO Forum, the report, prepared by Tanja Hafner Ademi and Milka Ivanovska Hadjievska aims to support the development of a joint civil society strategy for action in the region. The report gathers and synthesizes proposals for strategic priorities of CSOs in the Black Sea countries via 3-month research including desktop research,…
The ‘big-bang enlargement’ of the EU has nurtured vivid debates among academics, practitioners and EU citizens about the consequences of ‘an ever larger Union’ for the EU’s integration capacity. Over the past two years MAXCAP has examined whether the Eastern enlargement of 2004 and 2007 has limited the EU’s internal capacity to enlarge further and its external capacity to support the political and economic integration of non-members. These questions have not lost relevance, quite to the contrary. Current internal and external challenges for the EU range from solving the refugee crisis to growing public contestation about EU politics, cumbersome accession…
Pandering to public opinion’s enlargement fatigue by ruling out any more EU newcomers before 2019 has sent confused political signals to Balkan candidate countries. Frank Schimmelfennig, Professor of European Politics at ETH Zurich, partner in the joint MAXCAP project, analyses the outcomes in an opinion published in the Europe’s World journal autumn 2015 issue. According to him, the biggest effort of all still has to come from a candidate country itself, and the EU needs to regain its consistency in the ways it encourages their progress. The opinion is available for download here. Source: MAXCAP
Civil society’s contributions to a nation’s wellbeing are just as important as those made by businesses, UN expert Maina Kiai told the UN General Assembly which took place on the 27th October in New York. He called on States to give the same level of respect and create enabling environments for civil society groups, just as they do for companies. Speaking during the presentation of his latest report, which compares the operating environments for commercial and civil society sectors worldwide, Kiai said that it was clear that businesses generally operate in better environments than non-profit entities – largely because States…