Exploring and Reorienting the Debate on the Legitimacy of Civil Society Advocacy

Understanding and assessing the legitimacy of civil society advocacy is important given its critical role as a form of development intervention. However, this legitimacy has been left implicit in much study on civil society legitimacy, and its study has been skewed towards a limited set of aspects. In this article, we identify key themes in the debate on civil society legitimacy and show how advocacy legitimacy has been addressed. We also discuss the extent to which research on advocacy legitimacy in the development context has yielded specific insights. We identify key learnings emerging from these literatures as well as limitations and knowledge gaps. We position the papers in this issue in relation to the existing literature and present key innovative elements and insights emerging from them.