resilience

This companion reflection to the Feminist Resilience Toolkit brings Cambodian feminist perspectives into wider debates on resilience, ecosystem shift, and civil society transformation. Against the backdrop of shrinking civic space, funding precarity, and organizational exhaustion, the text explores resilience not as mere survival, but as a political and collective practice grounded in care, solidarity, and transformative agency. By connecting global feminist debates with locally grounded experiences from Cambodia, the companion text contributes a critical Global South perspective to ongoing conversations on funding justice, movement resilience, and the future of civil society ecosystems.

Focusing on the concrete institutional pressures currently facing Cambodian civil society organisations, this article examines shrinking funding landscapes, operational fragmentation, and emerging ecosystem approaches. It highlights collaboration, shared infrastructures, AI-supported adaptation, and public trust as key dimensions of future civic resilience.

This companion reflection introduces a practical fundraising guide developed by AWID and Justice Funders through the lens of ecosystem-oriented civic resilience. Rather than treating fundraising purely as a technical exercise, the text explores how locally rooted, collaborative, and partially informal forms of organizing can strengthen long-term sustainability, autonomy, and adaptive capacity in rapidly changing funding environments.