BCSDN is proud to announce the publication of its 2025 Research in Focus report, The Missing Lens: Rethinking the Enabling Environment for Gender Equality and Civil Society in the Western Balkans. Authored by Simona Mladenovska, the report applies a critical, gender-sensitive lens to the long-standing Monitoring Matrix (MM) methodology, revealing a critical tension at the heart of the Western Balkans’ civic space.
While all six Western Balkan countries maintain formal legal and constitutional frameworks guaranteeing freedoms of association, assembly, and expression, the report finds that the operational reality for organizations working on gender equality, women’s rights, feminist activism, and LGBTIQ+ issues is significantly more restrictive and hostile than for the broader civil society sector.
The findings expose a civic space that is “conditional, uneven, and often hostile”, perpetuated by deeply entrenched patriarchal power structures and the rapid expansion of coordinated anti-gender mobilization.
Key Findings of The Missing Lens Report
The report synthesizes the specific challenges faced by gender CSOs across the three pillars of the Enabling Environment: Basic Legal Guarantees, Financial Viability, and State-CSO Cooperation.
1. Intensified Backlash and High-Risk Participation What began as sporadic backlash has evolved into highly organized, transnational anti-gender movements that draw on religious, nationalist, and global conservative networks. These actors systematically deploy a wide range of tactics, including:
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Smear Campaigns and Disinformation to delegitimize and silence feminist and LGBTIQ+ groups.
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Sexualized Harassment, Online Vilification, and Physical Intimidation, which have become normalized and turned civic participation into a high-risk activity, particularly for women human rights defenders (HRDs).
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Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are increasingly used to intimidate investigative journalists and media organizations, curtailing media freedom.
Formal protections for freedom of assembly and expression are inconsistently enforced, with law enforcement responses to opposition against gender-focused demonstrations often being passive or sluggish.
2. Symbolic, Conditional State Cooperation Cooperation between state institutions and gender CSOs is formalized through various mechanisms (councils, working groups) but remains largely performative. These structures often serve to demonstrate compliance with donor and EU reporting requirements rather than enabling genuine co-creation or shared decision-making. The engagement is often limited and conditional, tolerated only when CSOs’ work is deemed depoliticized or aligned with political interests.
3. Fragmented Financial Viability Gender-focused CSOs overwhelmingly depend on short-term, project-based international donor funding. Public funding is scarce, inconsistently allocated, and frequently influenced by ideological biases, disproportionately affecting small-scale, rural, and women-led organizations. This financial precarity severely constrains long-term sustainability and the ability to provide sustained services or advocacy.
Recommendations: A Call for Transformative Change
The report concludes that a truly enabling environment requires urgent action to address the intersecting political, financial, and cultural barriers that restrict the autonomy of gender CSOs. A gender-responsive civic space is presented not as an isolated goal, but as a core precondition for democratic resilience in the Western Balkans.
BCSDN calls on governments, state institutions, and the international community to prioritize the following recommendations:
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Protection of Civic Freedoms and HRDs: Fully enforce legal guarantees, implement specialized protection mechanisms, and ensure all threats and violence against women HRDs, activists, and journalists are promptly investigated to combat impunity.
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Sustainable and Transparent Funding: Establish predictable, multi-year core funding models from public and donor sources to safeguard the financial sustainability of gender CSOs, prioritizing women-led and marginalized group organizations.
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Meaningful State-CSO Cooperation: Institutionalize structured and genuine cooperation that leads to substantive policy changes and budgetary incorporation, moving consultation beyond symbolic gestures.
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Dismantle Patriarchal Norms: Actively address and dismantle the deeply rooted patriarchal structures reflected in state institutions and public discourse, ensuring institutions cease reproducing gender inequalities.
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Gender Mainstreaming in EU Integration: Systematically integrate gender perspectives across all policy sectors and EU accession-related reforms, actively engaging gender-specialized CSOs in policy monitoring and evaluation.
Read the Full Report: The Missing Lens: Rethinking the Enabling Environment for Gender Equality and Civil Society in the Western Balkans (2025) is available for download here.