ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of civil society organisations in gathering and disseminating information about the problems faced by their communities, including state or corporate crimes or harms. Although all the groups in the study played this role to some extent, they varied greatly in the extent to which they engaged systematically in information-gathering, and particularly in the degree of rigour with which they checked information to ensure its accuracy and, in some cases, its authenticity in giving voice to the views and experiences of the oppressed. No evidence was found that any of the groups we studied engaged deliberately or recklessly in misinformation, but there is no doubt that this is a feature of some civil society activity, notably in Myanmar.
The chapter contrasts the ‘outward-facing’ activities of civil society, in which organisations ‘put information out’ through the media, political campaigns and transnational civil society, and ‘inward facing’ activities, concerned with ‘taking information in’ to and by the communities it directly concerns. There is a great deal of variation in the balance between these types of activity – between disseminating information to national and global audiences and using it as a way to develop political and legal consciousness within the communities the organisation serves. In Tunisia and Turkey, civil society was effective in collecting and disseminating information, but ‘taking in’ information appeared relatively unimportant. In Burma, Colombia and Kenya, some groups consciously tried to combine the two activities. In Papua New Guinea, ‘taking in’ dominates the interviews to a striking degree. The way in which such ‘inward-facing’ activities relate to political struggles over land and the environment is explored further in Chapter 7.
