Margit van Wessel
On February 6, the Spindle organized a Meetup of the Strategic Partnerships. The theme of the meeting was "Rethinking Ownership and Control within advocacy Partnerships". Staff of about 50 CSOs were present and reflected together. To prepare collective reflection, they were all asked to write down challenges their organization faces in organizing Southern ownership and control, and options to solve these challenges - with interesting results.
Our research focuses on the contextualized agency of Southern civil society organizations (CSOs) shaping their advocacy roles. We thereby seek to relate to the widespread aim of helping to make sure that development is owned by people and organizations ‘on the ground’. A long-term goal in the field of international development is to create conditions where responsibilities and leadership increasingly lie with Southern CSOs (Banks et al., 2015; Miller-Dawkins, 2017; Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2018; Goodman, 2016; Forsch, 2018). If Southern CSOs are to do more leading, their contexts, understandings, and ambitions must move more to the centre of programmes and collaborations. Our research can help donors and Northern CSOs to establish what that would mean in practice when it comes to fundamental questions regard-ing whom to work with, what to work for, how to collaborate, and what this implies for various actors’ roles.
Nandini Deo, Dorothea Hilhorst and Sunayana Ganguly (September 23, 2019)
We were fortunate to be part of a two-day workshop on civil society relations in India, organised in the framework of a research on advocacy in the Dutch co-financing programme. There were fascinating presentations of research on civil society and civic space with a loose connection to the Dutch development programme of ‘Dialogue and Dissent’. In the fantastic company of some of India’s most outstanding civil society activists and scholars, we discussed the diverse realities of organisational life in today’s India. Here are some take-aways…
Farhat Naz and Margit van Wessel (May 13, 2019)
The latest blog of the research programme ‘New roles of CSOs for inclusive development’, this time by Farhat Naz and Margit van Wessel from the research group Civil society advocacy collaborations in India. The research programme investigates the assumptions, solutions and problems underlying the civil society policy framework ‘Dialogue & Dissent’ of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Margit van Wessel and B Rajeshwari (January 29, 2019)
The research programme ‘New roles of CSOs for inclusive development’ investigates the assumptions, solutions and problems underlying the civil society policy framework ‘Dialogue & Dissent’ of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Currently, all the research groups are conducting the empirical part of their research. The ‘Assumptions blog’ provides insight into the fieldwork of the research groups – the researchers share their on-the-ground experiences through this blog. This time, Dr. B. Rajeshwari (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) and Dr. Margit van Wessel (Wageningen University & Research), part of the research group ‘Civil society advocacy collaborations in India’ share some things they have learnt.
