Citizenship narratives in the absence of good governance; Voices of the working poor in Bangladesh

a new IDS working paper by Naila Kabeer and Ariful Hoque Kabir

Tags: Asia, Worldwide, Civil Society Building

How does the interaction between the poor and civil society organizations effect perceptions of and possibilities for citizenship? Naila Kabeer and Afirul hoque interviewed 70 citizens from rural and urban Bangladesh, belonging to the so called ‘working poor’. Their voices are the backbone of a fascinating IDS working paper which offers plenty of food for thought.

The premise is that in the absence of good governance, the poor struggle to acquire citizenship, roughly defined as ‘the capacity to question, aspire and organize in order to transcend communities of birth’. In many of the less developed nations, the poor are confined to the prevailing system of domination, hence their ‘communities of birth’ come to equal ‘communities of fate’ in which the (unjust) social order is reproduced and democratization is hampered. The main hypothesis of the paper is to explore the extent to which chosen forms of associations, or ‘communities of choice’ shape the capacity of the working poor to think and act like citizens. Interested in what the working poor themselves have to say? download the paper here and/or read the summary below