Writeshop on Civil Society at Crossroads

To enable the sharing of findings from a year-long initiative – Civil Society at Crossroads (http://www.pria.org/civil-society-at-crossroads-) – in a systematic and comparable manner, PRIA hosted its first-ever writeshop. The writeshop was held from 20-24 August 2012 and was attended by representatives from the different organisations who are part of the initiative.

Civil Society at Crossroads is a platform of practitioners aimed at creating and sharing knowledge on and about civil society around the world that would be helpful to both practitioners and policy makers alike. Over the past year, practitioners from CDRA (South Africa), EASUN (Tanzania), INTRAC (UK), PSO (The Netherlands), ICD (Uruguay) and PRIA (India) have debated and discussed stories and experiences about the changing face of civil society.

The four day writeshop began with the sharing of two kinds of stories: stories of citizens’ “eruptions” and that of the larger country level story of civil society in all its manifestations.

The citizen eruption stories which were presented included the Chilean student’s movement; the LGBT movement and Equal Marriage and Gender Identity Laws in Argentina; citizens’ action against forceful land acquisition in Cambodia; KRL Mania, Internet Based Consumer Movement of the Electric Railways Users in Indonesia; the anti-corruption movement in India; the movement to legalize abortion in Uruguay; citizen organization and action in Greece; the 20th July mass demonstrations in Malawi and the Kampala City Traders’ (KACITA) Strike Action in Uganda.

The debate and discussion around the stories were related to the relevance of the story in its particular context, the problems/issues it addressed, what was done to address the problem, by whom and for how long, what was the response of the state and other stakeholders, and what implications these citizen eruptions have on civil society (in that country and in general).

The country level stories – of South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Russia, UK and the Netherlands – recounted the significant economic, political, social developments in that country (or region) over the past 20-25 years; changing key trends (economic, urbanization, new public policies); changing composition, roles and relationships of civil society with other stakeholders in that country; and the shifting resource base and “funding crisis” civil society is facing globally.

The next two days of the writeshop aimed at “sense making” and finalizing themes under which key learnings could be synthesized from different perspectives. The framework and guidelines for the thematic papers were also outlined, before individual writers were given solo time to write the documents. The process allowed for simultaneous feedback and comments from peers, based on which the drafts were revised. Each thematic document was presented in a plenary in the final session of the four day workshop.

To share the emerging global findings, provoke reflections on the global findings and country case studies, and to generate further ideas about the future implications on civil society a two-hour public seminar was held on 24 August afternoon in which members from other civil society organisations participated.