Title:
People´s power : debating civic driven change
Authors:
Verkoren, W.
Year:
2008
Serial number:
11
Journal:
The Broker
Pages:
8
-
11
ISSN:
1874-2033
Language:
eng
Subject:
Social and Political Change
Keywords:
development policy
,
democratisation
,
participation
,
civil society
Abstract:
The Broker asked people all over the world to participate in a debate on civic driven change (CDC), one of the principles that guided Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This article summarizes their responses. Spurred by the need among Dutch aid organizations for new ideas to guide their practice, the CDC initiative brought together thinkers and practitioners to begin developing a new, bottom-up, citizen- and society-based approach to social change. The thinking was that development cooperation, or in a CDC-inspired term, ‘aided change’, needed an alternative to the practice of planned, linear and top-down interventions. The outputs so far include a book of eight essays written by the members of the core CDC group, and a seminar at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague on 15 October 2008, where the group discussed their ideas with around 180 participants, most of them Dutch development practitioners. The new approach calls for trust-based, open-ended support of civic agency, but still guided by values.
Organization:
The Broker
Category:
Policy
Right:
© 2008 IDP. This article has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.
Document type:
E-article
File:
137982.pdf