Of citizens and taxes: A global scan of civil society work on taxation

In the last two decades, civil society engagement with taxation issues has grown by leaps and bounds, particularly in lower-income countries. This growth can be linked to global policy shifts since the beginning of the millennium—e.g. the UN’s agendas on Financing for Development and on the Sustainable Development Goals—focused on empowering these countries to raise additional resources to finance and direct their own development, and to an increasing focus by international NGOs on the negative impact of the international tax system on lower-income countries.

As the International Budget Partnership (IBP) embarks on a new Tax Equity Initiative, this was a good moment to take a detailed look at the emerging field of civil society engagement with domestic tax issues, to understand its broad features and the challenges that it faces. That report is available here along with a dataset of 171 organisations across 66 countries with information on what types of work they are engaged in, what types of tax issues they work on, if they are part of any international or regional networks and their main publications on tax from recent years.