Introduction to Civil Society Building

23/06/2008 In Hivos’ vision, strengthening civil society is at the core of social transformation. Over the last 15 years, Hivos has defined its strategy in this respect as ‘civil society building’ (CSB). The main drive is to facilitate or enable endogenous processes of association among citizens in the South and linking and mobilising support for these processes at the global and national levels.

Background & Objectives

23/06/2008 Hivos and the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) have been working together since 2005 in a joint effort to contribute to the debate on Civil Society Building (CSB). At the core of this collaboration is the interaction between practitioners and researchers to facilitate knowledge development, dissemination and application. This process – also called knowledge integration – has the potential to be of enormous value to the development sector involved in CSB. Both organisations have the ambition...

Guiding Questions

23/06/2008 The Knowledge Programme will focus on the following three main questions. 1. How can we understand the dynamics of civil society formation and the role of local actors in this process? 2. How do external actors contribute to this process? 3. How does civil society building as a process contribute to structural changes in unequal power balances in society?By focusing on these three questions, the Programme will especially take the issues of gender, authority and leadership, innovation, an...

Methodology

23/06/2008 The Knowledge Programme aims to contribute to an ongoing, iterative process of knowledge integration, including three important elements: (1) knowledge production (research and transformation of existing knowledge) (2) knowledge dissemination (outreach and capacity building) (3) knowledge application (utilisation for societal problem-solving).The following sections will briefly explain the activities based on both research and practice. It will also describe how knowledge will be transform...