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Welcome to the website of the Hivos Knowledge Programme. The platform for knowledge development on issues imperative to the global development sector. How to understand and innovate support for civil society building, how to promote pluralism in times of growing intolerance, how to adapt to rapid changes such as the globalisation of markets? The development sector needs new knowledge, and more specifically, appropriate knowledge to tackle specific knowledge gaps. This programme aims at developing knowledge on issues central to the work of civil society organisations and for the development sector at large. The main themes are: Civil Society Building, Promoting Pluralism, Civil Society in West Asia, Small Producer Agency in the Globalized Market and Digital Natives with a Cause?
Avatar meets the Amazon: how to support indigenous movements?
Movies can prove to be a powerful tool to raise awareness for a certain cause. Recently the buzz around blockbuster Avatar is being used by environmental, indigenous and human rights organizations to create global media attention for their struggle. In Avatar the indigenous Na’vi people fight to save their land and traditional way of living on planet Pandora from human beings who want to destroy it to extract minerals for energy supply on planet Earth. The story in Avatar is based on fiction...
Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
In the new year, 2010, one of the most startling stories was of mass suicides. About 50,000 people were affected. Legal cases were filed. The interwebz were abuzz with the tale of how they did it. There was talk about a website that was responsible for this. The blogosphere went into a frenzy discussing the ‘new lease of life’ that these suicides provided. Videos of people caught in the act found their way onto popular video distributing spaces. And for everybody who talked about it, it was...
Launch Publication Beyond Orthodox Approaches
Within the framework of Knowledge Programme Civil Society in West Asia, Hivos in collaboration with NIMD ad University of Amsterdam, will launch on 26 March 2010 the policy paper ‘Beyond Orthodox Approaches, Assessing Opportunities for Democratic Support in the Middle East and North Africa. The launch will take place at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This publication aims to explore what role - if any - external organisations, such as Hivos and NIMD, can play to further demo...
Book on Value Chain Finance
In large parts of the world, small-scale farmers, traders and processors are constrained in their business operations due to a lack of finance. Farmers want to be paid immediately, but traders do not have the ready cash to buy their produce. Traders need working capital so they can buy and transport produce, but lack the collateral to get loans. Processors cannot get the money they need to buy equipment or ensure a steady supply of inputs.
New project on Social Security in India
The Long Road to Social Security: Assessing and Monitoring the Implementation of Social Security for the Working Poor in India's Informal Economy is a knowledge project on social security provisions for workers in the informal sector of the economy in India. This project is a cooperation between the Amsterdam School for Social science Research, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, India, and Hivos. The project focuses on monitoring the implementation of minimal welfare provision...
Instruments for Promoting Pluralism
Pro-pluralism activists in Indonesia tend to be too elitist and limit themselves to intellectual discussions, Farid Wajidi argues. In this working paper, he suggests that the pluralism movement needs to develop new strategies that could also reach common people, youth in particular. As an example, he describes the efforts of the NGO LKiS to create youth communities where high school students can personally experience pluralism instead of only talking about it.
The Hidden Dimension of the Secular.
Humanists should reconsider their often anti-religious stance, argue Henk Manschot and Caroline Suransky, researchers of the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme at the University for Humanistics. There is a special relationship between modernity, secularism and humanism. However, the project of modernity has increasingly come under siege. Therefore, modern humanism too is challenged to rethink its own relationship with modernity and secularism.
Rethinking the Secular
Religious difference has been posited as a crucial factor in international conflicts and increasingly challenges existing political settlements that define the relationship between the state and religion. Considering the ways in which politics and religion currently intersect one may argue that religion has become an increasingly important consideration in global politics. In this paper, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im discusses his ideas on Islam and the secular state as presented during the Plura...
Imitation of the West'? Civil society in the Arab world
On Thursday 28 January 2010, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi declared in a televised address to the General People's Congress that the idea of civil society "is a bourgeois culture and an imitation of the West that has no place here [in Libya]" . Gaddafi's statement last week drew particular media attention because it came on the eve of a proposal due to be announced by his son, Saif al-Islam, which would have permitted the creation of NGOs. Gaddafi's comments were grounded in Lib...
Claims to Success: ICT based Advocacy for the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa
How can the internet be used to promote the advocacy efforts by civil society organizations? In this paper, Caroline Kemp reflects on this question by examining the Solidarity for Women’s Rights Coalition (SOAWR) and their work towards promoting the Protocol for Women’s rights in Africa. The African Union adopted this protocol in 2005, but to date the ratification, popularization and implementation by member-states has been a slow process. SOAWR been instrumental in civic efforts to promote...