The project to develop the legislative environment regulating civil and community work in Syria, supervised by the Nation Building Movement, has completed its last track, which is the legal track.​

The legal track constitutes the lifeblood of the project “Developing the legislative environment regulating civil and community work in Syria” implemented by the Nation Building Movement.​

The work included two sub-tracks:

• Guide track and development:
• • ((Guide to the Legislative Environment for Civil and Community Work in Syria)), which was launched since the beginning of the project, to go beyond the version we know as a legal reference guide that reviews the range of civil roles that the project advocates and classifies them within four chapters under which entities play these roles fall, far from stereotypes or those imposed on them by the context. These chapters are:

• • • Non-profit community civic work
    • Advocating for members' interests
    • Income-generating community civic work that includes cooperative community civic work and for-profit civic work
    • Participating in public affairs

The content of the guide establishes these roles and sheds light on the spaces provided by the legislative environment for these entities to provide their civil and societal intervention in accordance with the law in a way that serves the Syrian context. It is a path that was presented under the supervision, follow-up and work of a diverse group of legal experts whose work is characterized by a blend of experience between the legal field and civil effectiveness.

• Legal deepening track: The sub-track whose features shaped after producing the theory of change and presenting the guide and its chapters to the beneficiaries and targets (who are a wide segment exceeding 200 civil, community, and human rights activists and public affairs activists from all Syrian geographical and social backgrounds), as it formed a supportive track and a participatory space with specialists and activists to provide studied inputs capable of supporting the development path of the guide and a practical step in which we test the determinants that the project work concluded and develop them with the targets, which include ((existence and establishment - establishing the higher roles of civil society - independence - governance of civil work - partnership, participation and collaboration)).

A number of activities were carried out during this course:

1-  A workshop in September targeted 25 human rights activists and active civil society activists with the aim of conveying the skill and knowledge of reading legal texts and the methodology of analyzing and studying them.

2-  Selecting six pivotal laws that express the chapters of the guide and the roles they represent ((Non-Governmental Associations Law No. 93 of 1958 - Media Law No. (108) of 2011 - Chambers of Commerce Law No. (of 2020 - Cooperatives Law represented by Decree 317 - Local Administration Law: No. (107) of 2011 - Vocational Training Centers Law No. (33) of 2003))

3-  The workshop target group then divided into research groups to apply what they learned during the workshop to these laws. What they implemented included reading and analyzing the text and the social and historical context that produced it, exploring comparative experiences, and calibrating its materials against the determinants produced by the project.

4-  Six focus group discussions during November to support the work of the groups discussed content that came out of their work and hosted a group of experts to enrich the content and understand the groups.

5-  Completing the work of the groups to produce analytical papers that provide a civil reading of the texts of six pivotal laws through the intersection between the articles of each targeted legal text and the criteria of each of the determinants formulated to reach the vision.

Our road is long, but its features are beginning to become clear, with everyone’s efforts, towards an independent and effective civil society.