Civil Society Organisations Providing Social Services in Iraq: Geographical Distribution, Organisational Structure and Accountability Patterns Post-2003

This thesis addresses Iraq’s transforming civil society organisational landscape and how civil society organisations (CSOs) address social disadvantage in this landscape. It focusses specifically on CSO anti-poverty and social service provision initiatives. Investigating three aspects of the CSO landscape: geographical distribution, organisational structure and accountability patterns, it provides an original multifaceted examination of how and why CSOs address disadvantage in the context of Iraq, a country with high levels of poverty, underdeveloped social policies and a heavy reliance on international donors. Utilising three separate data sources, the thesis examines the external and internal factors that affect CSO social service provision. Firstly, through regression analysis comparing official CSO register data with official socioeconomic indicators at a district level, the thesis examines how poverty affects where CSOs form. Secondly, utilising the results from a survey administered specifically for the thesis, it examines the relationships between CSOs’ organisational structure and their social service approaches. Furthermore, it analyses what contributing factors lead to CSO formation in districts with extreme poverty. Finally, through survey results, the thesis determines CSO accountability patterns towards their various stakeholders using cluster analysis and examines the factors that lead to increased accountability to service recipients. The results of the analysis show that CSOs tend to form near government administrative centres and not in districts with high deprivation. Furthermore, though CSOs adopt human rights terminology, this does not seem to affect their social service approaches. In this sense, CSOs engaged in social service provision mostly engage in cash and in-kind transfers and do not adopt advocacy as a strategy. At the same time, funding from international and nongovernmental organisations in the form of grants demonstrate positive effects on addressing social disadvantage. Finally, many CSOs in Iraq prioritise the demands of service recipients over other stakeholders suggesting that CSOs can address social disadvantage in a manner that places their recipients at the centre of their social service missions. Together, these findings have important implications on how CSOs may fill a specific niche of social service provision not only in Iraq’s transforming social policy environment but globally within the context of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 17, partnerships for the goals.