Citizen action matters!

reflections from an IDS/ISS expert meeting

Tags: Worldwide , Knowledge Platform
Additional tags: Civic driven change civil society building

Citizen engagement matters! That’s the three word conclusion from 10 years of research by the IDS Citizenship development research centre. Word of warning: Citizen action also sometimes backfires. Yet, the evidence from more than 150 case studies overwhelmingly demonstrates how citizen action makes a difference in processes on democratic development. Interestingly, the findings do not hold for stable contexts but also in fragile settings, topic for discussion in the remainder of this blog.

On the 21^st of March, IDS and ISS joined forces with 30 experts from NGOs, academia and the policy field for a reflection on citizen action in fragile settings. The findings of the citizenship DRC, ongoing IDS research and emerging insights from the Hivos/ISS Civil Society Building (CSB) Knowledge Programme served as a basis for discussion.

‘Seeing like a citizen’ formed the mantra of the research approach: looking upward an outward through citizen eyes to learn about how rights are claimed and how ordinary people interact with context and the institutions that affect their lives. This approach resonates strongly with Civic Driven Change (CDC) – the conceptual framework that the CSB Knowledge Programme is increasingly working with. Hence, sufficient reason to share and compare.

This weblog can’t do justice to the whole discussion. Instead it highlights 4 points.

-The DRC research findings clearly illustrate the importance of ‘intermediary results’ – stronger citizenship and participation practices that lead to enhanced confidence, and organizational skills. Associational activity and social movements play a more important role here, than formal participatory spaces (eg. in decentralization/poverty monitoring etc.)

-While this will be crystal clear already for most aid practitioners, these research findings add significant weight to an evidence base that, to date, has been very thin. It also questions current priorities of main western donors, which tend to focus on strengthening formal participatory ‘invited’ spaces at the cost of the ‘slower’ community development work. The findings provide ample ground and facts for re-igniting this debate.

-Remarkably, the positive findings hold for both fragile and stable contexts. That is, even in contexts marked by violence and turbulence, citizen action can make a difference. Research in violent environments exacerbates the need for opening up the traditional citizen-state relationship to a more horizontal notion. How citizens relate to each other, local elites, militias etc. often matters more than their position vis-à-vis the state. This has been an important shift in the last 4 years of the research programme that strongly resonates with the ‘process’ focus of the Civil Society Building Knowledge programme

-Despite the abundance of case-study material, relatively little guidance is provided for processes of ‘aided change’. Beyond the tentative conclusion that in some cases, aid may matter and the importance of context and power analysis, the role of outside actors remains somewhat under-analysed. Civic action for national policy change seems most effective when social movements work alongside specialist civic organizations. Succesful civic action also seems to depend on effective framing of issues and objectives to mobilize broad constituencies. These two findings resonate with studies from the Civil Society Building Knowledge programme on Mobilizing Social Justice in South Africa and on the dynamics of social movements.

In his comments, dr. Kees Biekart acknowledged the rich amount of research material and the importance of the findings. Going forward, it might be worth reflecting on the theoretical implications of the many case studies. Also, dr. Biekart noted a geographical bias towards more developed contexts Africa and Asia and an ‘aid bias’ in terms of framing many of the results in an ‘aid/donor’ framework. One notable difference with the civic-driven-change framework is the sector-bound view of the citizen whereas CDC looks at civic agency and energy, whilst moving away from what it calls ‘the sector trap’.

Spaces for further research, as highlighted by the IDS team, include more indepth research of horizontal notions of citizenship in fragile settings. Also we need to understand more about ‘unruly’ politics and patterns of collective action from the local to the global. This last point may include reflections on the aid chain, which one of the key areas of work of the Hivos/ISS Civil Society Building Knowledge Programme.

The concluding book launch served to present the latest two books in the ZED-book series on ‘claiming citizenship’, featuring also co-authors dr. Jun Borras and dr. Rosalba Icaza. Manuela Monteiro, director of Hivos, reflected on the contributions of the Citizenship DRC and expressed a wish for more research and more joint knowledge events in the future.