This brief reflects on how Accountability Lab responded in practice in 2025 during the year following the  Democracy, Rights and Governance (DRG) aid cuts. It documents a set of choices made under constraint—about where to act, how to stay connected, and what capacities mattered most when familiar assumptions no longer held.

What follows distills a small set of postures and practices that proved consequential when conditions tightened. They are offered not as a model to replicate, but as grounded signals drawn from lived experience about how democratic work is sustained when clarity, funding, and institutional stability cannot be assumed.

How we met the moment

We write from a dual position. In response to the shifting landscape, Accountability Lab (AL) leaned into several under-populated spaces over the last year—launching Civic Strength Partners, a Non-Residential Fellowship, Wayfinders  and Weavers’ Workshop, among others—to meet practical demands while keeping an ear to the ground. At the same time, we observed the field through surveys, conversations, and engagements, while navigating disruption alongside partners.

Working translocally—with sustained relationships in specific contexts and connections across regions—shaped how we understood both the opportunities and the tensions of the moment. This experience clarified a set of postures and capabilities that seemed to matter most when conditions tightened across diverse settings. We summarize them below not as a model, but as principles of what we see as valuable going forwards in people and organizational partners. In 2025, more than ever, this required acting with the best available wisdom despite a lack of clarity. Some approaches worked; others did not; some were abandoned. The common thread was intentionally staying “unfrozen”—adjusting how we engaged, relying on relationships and judgment built over time, and accepting uncertainty that would previously have been difficult to name openly.

Commons first

We approached the moment as one defined by collective-action problems. The priority was stewarding and pooling resources toward connective infrastructure that could solve shared challenges, rather than optimizing for individual organizational survival alone. The integrity of the DRG ecosystem relies on the health and viability of all of its members. As AL Co-CEO Jean Scrimgeour has shared, organizations have a responsibility to be “generous in creating space for as many peers and partners as possible to survive” to safeguard their own longevity. For  AL this posture aligned the Lab’s actions with its ecosystem-facing mandate and trajectory.

Civic Strength Partners (CSP) offers one illustration of partners, Accountability Lab, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture and Digital Public’s approach in 2025. CSP supports organizations at moments of transition—pivots, partnerships, mergers, or closures—not by prescribing solutions, but by helping them surface and legitimize a wider range of viable futures. Acting as a connector and catalyst, CSP links organizations to ecosystem assets such as peer experience, specialized expertise, and resourcing options, enabling decisions that would otherwise remain invisible or politically risky. Over time, this contributes to a shared civic scaffolding—a relational and knowledge commons that supports adaptation and transition in the public interest.

Realism without resignation

We held multiple truths at once: conditions worsened in many places; civil society actors faced real shifts and losses; and purposeful action remained possible through recombination of what we had, reprioritization, and collective effort. This attitude is constitutive of our and many colleagues’ lived experience, enabling us to pragmatically seize the windows of opportunity that co-exist with the polycrisis – or as Yuen Yuen Ang calls the polytunity.

The Senior Non-Resident Fellowship emerged in 2025 as a response to a specific gap created by the aid cuts: experienced practitioners and thinkers navigating the repercussions of funding exits often lost not only resources, but institutional anchoring and access to shared platforms. The Fellowship was designed to provide an organizational home during a period of disruption—formal affiliation without extraction—allowing Fellows to remain rooted in their own work while staying connected to a global accountability and governance ecosystem. AL Co-CEO Blair Glencorse says that while the fellowship provides a life raft to highly-skilled practitioners in the field, it’s also becoming an incredible engine of new ideas and innovation at the Lab. Rather than functioning as a leadership program or capacity-building intervention, the Fellowship emphasizes trust-based collaboration and mutual contribution. Fellows pursue independent projects while contributing to shared learning, reflection, and advocacy, using AL’s network, convening spaces, and digital infrastructure as connective tissue. In a moment of contraction, this model prioritized continuity, dignity, and collective sense-making —supporting experienced actors to remain visible, engaged, and influential as the field recalibrated. 

Action with reflection

We privileged movement and solution-orientation over redesign—building while navigating—while still creating space to pause, interrogate dilemmas, adapt, and share learning as conditions evolved.

The Global Aid Freeze Tracker illustrates how action and reflection can proceed together under uncertainty. Launched in response to the 2025 U.S. foreign assistance freeze, it created a rapid, collaborative mechanism to surface how funding disruptions were being experienced across contexts while events were still unfolding. Rather than waiting for stabilization or comprehensive evaluation, the Tracker made visible program interruptions, staffing losses, shifts in operating assumptions, and secondary effects across ecosystems as they emerged. By combining lightweight data collection with narrative evidence, the Tracker functioned as a sense-making asset rather than a post hoc assessment. Insights were shared iteratively, helping practitioners, funders, and intermediaries adjust in real time. The value lay not in definitive conclusions, but in enabling judgment under constraint—supporting learning, recalibration, and coordinated response when waiting for full clarity would have meant inaction.

Grounded muscle memory

Prior experience navigating crises, aid exits, chronic vulnerability, and political shocks proved decisive. Judgment formed through lived experience and accumulated evidence mattered more than waiting for perfect information.

The Weavers’ Workshop emerged from a recognition that many practitioners with deep crisis muscle memory remain largely invisible in forward-looking sector conversations. In 2025, Accountability Lab worked to more clearly name who these “invisible weavers” are, document the functions they perform across projects, portfolios, and fields, and explore what realistic support for their work might look like. Together with Accountability Lab–Mexico and the Latin American School of Community Law and Legal Empowerment, we tested a weaver-to-weaver dialogue format that built on prior regional experience. These exchanges created space for practitioners navigating fragmentation, political risk, and institutional constraint to surface dilemmas that formal coalition or organizational spaces often struggle to hold—particularly tensions between organizational imperatives and the lived realities of individuals working within them. The value of the space lay not in consensus, but in shared judgment and practical orientation under pressure. 

Translocal positioning

Sustained local relationships, combined with cross-regional perspective, enabled translation across the proximity gap between local realities and global decision-making that often continued to operate on different assumptions and timelines. This posture improves the circulation of intelligence across the system by translating between the bespoke ways local actors operate and the kinds of signals global decision-makers rely on—without collapsing one into the other.

The Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign reflects Accountability Lab’s translocal posture by centering organizations that have long specialized in core dimensions of democracy, rights, and governance work—often without sustained visibility or proximity to global strategy debates. Rather than presenting these groups as implementers or case studies, the initiative treats them as sources of practice-based knowledge with relevance beyond their immediate contexts.

By linking Wayfinders across regions, the initiative creates lateral connections through which experience, judgment, and adaptation can travel across political and institutional settings. Its value lies not in codifying models or prescribing approaches, but in closing the distance between sector-wide conversations about the future of democracy support and the lived realities of those who have been doing this work all along—often with limited resources, but deep contextual understanding.

These experiences illuminate how the DRG sector is sustained in practice—often in ways that differ from high-level narratives articulated in other moments. What mattered most was not novelty or technically optimal prescriptions, but the ability to act with what was available while staying connected—locally, globally, and across the space between. Insight emerged, and the likelihood of contributing to systemic resilience increased, not through a single pathway, but through navigating multiple imperfect options as conditions evolved.

Conclusion 

The past year reinforced a simple but demanding lesson: resilience in the DRG space is not produced by waiting for certainty, alignment, or ideal conditions. It is built through sustained relational capacity—the ability to stay connected, make political judgments with incomplete information, and adapt without fragmenting.

The practices described here reflect one organization’s attempt to remain useful under those conditions. They also point to a broader implication for the field: that democratic work endures less through singular interventions than through the maintenance of connective tissue that allows people, ideas, and resources to recombine as contexts shift.

As the sector continues to recalibrate, the question is not only what strategies to adopt, but what kinds of collective capacities we choose to keep alive, even when the ground beneath is unstable.

Florencia Guerzovich