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On february 23, we launch the brand new book: Reimagining civil society collaborations in development. Starting from the South. Researchers and practitioners from the Global South and North developed this book. It connects directly with current debates on decolonizing development, locally led development, #Shiftthepower and localization! It re-centers Civil Society collaborations in development, offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing collaborations, in theory and practice. The book is funded Wageningen University and Partos, and thus free available.

05 januari 2023

While there is much discussion of localization, decolonization and ‘shifting power’ in civil society collaborations in development, the debate thus far centers on the aid system. This book directs attention to CSOs as drivers of development in various contexts that we refer to as the Global South. This book takes a transformative stance, reimagining roles, relations and processes. It does so from five complementary angles:

  1. Southern CSOs reclaiming the lead,
  2. Displacement of the North-South dyad,
  3. Southern-centred questions,
  4. New roles for Northern actors, and
  5. New starting points for collaboration.

19 empirically grounded chapters

The book relativizes international collaboration, asking INGOs, Northern CSOs, and their donors to follow Southern CSOs’ leads, recognizing their contextually geared perspectives, agendas, resources, capacities, and ways of working. Based on 19 empirically grounded chapters, the book also offers an agenda for further research, design, and experimentation.

Emphasizing the need to ‘Start from the South’ this book thus re-imagines and re-centres Civil Society collaborations in development, offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing relations, roles, and processes, in theory and practice.

Read the open acces version of the book

The Open Access version of this book, available at Taylor Francis, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Funded by Wageningen University and Partos.