lfrmsShifting the Power

Reimagining Civil Society Collaborations In Development: Starting From The South

Summary

This book directs attention to CSOs as drivers of development in various contexts that we refer to as the Global South. This book takes a transformative stance, reimagining roles, relations, and processes. It does so from five complementary angles:
(1) Southern CSOs reclaiming the lead,
(2) displacement of the North–South dyad,
(3) Southern-centred questions,
(4) new roles for Northern actors, and
(5) new starting points for collaboration.
The book relativizes international collaboration, asking INGOs, Northern CSOs, and their donors to follow Southern CSOs’ leads, recognizing their contextually geared perspectives, agendas, resources, capacities, and ways of working. Based on 19 empirically grounded chapters, the book also offers an agenda for further research, design, and experimentation.
Emphasizing the need to ‘Start from the South’ this book thus re-imagines and re-centres Civil Society collaborations in development, offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing relations, roles, and processes, in theory and practice.

Review by Wilde Ganzen

No less than 42 researchers have contributed to this impressive book (365 pages!). Its importance is that many of the 19 chapters are based on field research: having CSO members voice their opinions and needs concerning more helpful relationships with people and organisations from the North.
It requires a lot of reading, and our advice would be to be selective, and not to try to read all in one go. May be start with chapter 21, which is partly about the Change the Game initiative you are now consulting.

Keywords

Civil Society Organisations Community-led development CSO and funders Domestic resource mobilisation Donor relations Donors, international Learning resources Partnerships and networking Power shifting Shift The Power

Author: Margit van Wessel, Tiina Kontinen and Justice Nyigmah Bawole

Publisher/source/organization: Routledge

Place and year of issue: Oxon and New York 2023

Type: Book

Country/region: Worldwide

More information

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