Alliance Of NGOs Research Articles

SERVICES PROVIDED BY THE CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS IN THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA IN SUPPORTING THE UKRAINIAN REFUGEES

The article presents the analysis of a part of results of the sociological study „Mapping the efforts of Alliance of Active NGOs in the field of Child and Family Social Protection members and other NGOs supporting Ukrainian refugees in the Republic of Moldova”, the purpose of which was to map the efforts of civil society organizations, especially those members of the Alliance of Active NGOs in the field of Child and Family Social Protection in providing support to Ukrainian refugees in the Republic of Moldova. The data collection took place between June and July 2022, by applying a methodology in a combined design through quantitative research methods (survey by questionnaire administered online and by telephone) and qualitative research methods (individual interview, focus group, documentary analysis). The quantitative research sample comprised 100 civil society organizations selected from a total of 204 organizations. The qualitative research involved 11 individual interviews and two focus group discussions with representatives of the national civil society from different areas of the country. The study highlighted a special involvement of civil society in the management of the refugee crisis, with a variety of services being provided, both at the border crossing points and at the place of residence in the Republic of Moldova. The development and provision of services by the vast majority of civil society organizations has been based on the needs of refugees. The need for a minimum package of services for refugees is one of the conclusions of the sociological study.

Narrating Crisis and Continuity in Migration Debates in the Visegrád States

Narrating Crisis and Continuity in Migration Debates in the Visegrád States

Slovenia: Political Developments and Data in 2021

AbstractSlovenia faced a further backsliding in democracy/autocratisation process in 2021 as well as a hung National Assembly. Still, the minority government was stable and managed to pass many laws, largely due to the support of MPs from DeSUS, who often even acted against the will of the party's central bodies. However, one law was challenged by voters at referendum. An alliance of NGOs was able to attract 46 per cent of voters to the polls, with the outcome that amendments to the law on water were overwhelmingly rejected. The government encountered several public protests, including violent ones, and despite the public's huge disappointment – only around a mere 20 per cent of voters assessed the government's work as (very) positive in 2021 and just 14 per cent believed that Slovenia was going in the right direction – the opposition was unable to bring pressure to bear to force early elections to be held.

Uncovering Social Sustainability in Housing Systems through the Lens of Institutional Capital: A Study of Two Housing Alliances in Vienna, Austria

This paper analyzes social sustainability in the context of urban housing through the lens of institutional capital. It examines how civil society housing actors co-construct bottom-linked governance arrangements by interacting endogenously with peers and exogenously with institutional actors, such as public housing agencies and elected officials, in order to steer, as housing alliances, socially sustainable residential developments. The paper thus offers an answer to the following two research questions: (1) What are internal governance features that characterize such civil society housing alliances? (2) What are their strategies of interaction with institutional actors in order to promote social sustainability and thus counter exclusionary patterns in urban housing systems? Empirical evidences are drawn from two civil society housing alliances in Austria, ‘BAWO’ (a national alliance of homelessness NGOs) and the ‘Initiative Collaborative Building & Living’. During three research stays in Vienna between 2014 and 2020, data was collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with leaders and members of housing alliances, interviews with key institutional stakeholders and web research. By reflecting on the institutional and relational character of the two housing alliances and digging out their potential and limitations in promoting different elements of social sustainability, our paper concludes that social sustainability in housing systems can be realized when it is set as a societal ambition sufficiently politicized by major parties involved in housing systems (housing alliances, governmental authorities of all ideological backgrounds, large non-profit housing developers) that collectively guarantee housing affordability and socio-spatial equity for all.

International norms and the politics of sexuality education in Nigeria

BackgroundProponents have promoted sexuality education as a means of empowering adolescents, yet it has been thwarted in many low and middle-income countries. Nigeria represents an exception. Despite social opposition, the government in 1999 unexpectedly approved sexuality education policy. Since then, implementation has advanced, although efficacy has differed across states. We draw on theory concerning international norm diffusion to understand Nigerian policy development.ResultsWe find that a confluence of international and national norms and interests shaped policy outcomes, including concern over HIV/AIDS. A central dynamic was an alliance of domestic NGOs and international donors pressing the Nigerian government to act.ConclusionsWe argue that theory on international norms can be applied to understand policy dynamics across a variety of health and population areas, finding value in approaches that integrate rather than juxtapose consideration of (1) international and national influences; (2) long and short-term perspectives on policy change; and (3) norms and interests.

"Sic Vos Non Vobis" (For You, But Not Yours): The Struggle for Public Water in Italy

Against the background of global and Eurozone financial crises, as well as the austerity sweeping across Europe, the pressure for governments to privatize public services is immense. Efforts to combat this are ever more necessary. This article examines one such effort, the Italian Water Movements Forum (also called just "the Forum"), a broad alliance of trade unions, social movements, development NGOs and environmental groups, and its successful 2011 mobilization supporting a referendum against water privatization. The article seeks to answer two questions. First, how was the Forum able to bring together such a wide range of different groups into a successful campaign? Second, why, despite the overwhelming success in the referendum, was there only a partial implementation of the results?<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-5" title="Vol. 67, No. 5: October 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

The EU as a Promoter of Human Rights in Bilateral Trade Agreements: The Case of the Negotiations with Vietnam

This paper investigates the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on the harmonization of the actions concerning the foreign relations of the European Union (EU), with a focus on trade and human rights policies. It argues that an alliance of NGOs and economic interest groups promoting a human rights approach to external trade has found in the strengthened European Parliament an institutional channel for their demands. However, the creation of the European external action service as the EU’s diplomatic body and the separation of the negotiation tables concerning trade and human right have ultimately reduced the influence on European trade policy of both the European Parliament and stakeholders interested in human rights promotion. On the basis of the case study of the negotiations with Vietnam, this paper contributes to the literature on the EU as promoter of human rights through bilateral trade by discussing the internal constraints on its normative power.

Civil Society and Control of Corruption: Assessing Governance of Romanian Public Universities

This article investigates the public perception of corruption in Romanian higher education. It reviews the governance practices of public universities in Romania through a survey of governance practices organized by the Romanian Coalition for Clean Universities (CCU), an alliance of NGOs, professional associations and student and teacher unions. CCU systematically monitored and investigated 42 Romanian state universities during the academic years 2007-2009. The goal of the survey was to assess the Romanian public universities’ governance, checking for the integrity, fairness and ability to control corruption of their procedures. The methodology of the project will be explained in detail in the second part of this paper. In the first, we shall review the meanings, causes and consequences of corruption and bad governance in the field of education and the particular context of postcommunist Europe. In the third (and last) section the results of the survey and some lessons learned will be presented.

Global citizenship as show business: the cultural politics of Make Poverty History

Cultural politics and global citizenship ‘Make Poverty History’ was an extraordinary campaign: historically unprecedented, indeed impossible without the new structures of the emerging ‘cosmopolitanising state’, global in reach and yet national in focus. Studying the aims, means and achievements of Make Poverty History has much to teach us about the practical possibilities for a more cosmopolitan orientation to citizenship within and beyond national borders. As a campaign which took place not just through but in the media, investigating Make Poverty History is also important for media studies, enabling understanding of the importance of national media and popular culture to emergent possibilities of global citizenship. Make Poverty History is the name given to the UK branch of a global alliance of NGOs co-ordinated by the Global Call to Action against Poverty to put pressure on the leaders of the richest countries to achieve the concrete, measurable Millennium Development Goals they’d already signed up to achieving. The Global Call to Action against Poverty had different names in different countries: ONE in US, ‘Plus d’Excuses!’ in France, Maak Het Waar in the Netherlands and so on. Although, as we shall see, Make Poverty History was very carefully managed as a media campaign, it was also genuinely grassroots insofar as it was led by a coalition of over 500 NGOs which receive their funding from donations and membership. They ranged from the large, international NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children to smaller, often more radical organisations, like World Development Movement and Womankind. (Extract, 1st paragraph)

NGOs: A ‘New Class’ in International Relations

Nongovernmental organizations have attempted to take control of civil society, displacing traditional governing institutions. This serves the interests of the terrorists, warlords, and mafia dons, who benefit from weak central government, and hinders the West's ability to mobilize allies to participate in the war on terror. NGO leaders who are hostile to the nation-state itself seek to transform a voluntary system of participation in international organizations by sovereign member-states via a “power shift” to an unholy alliance of multinational corporations and NGOs. Since they do not possess the traditional sources of legitimacy enjoyed by nation-states, they seek to impose their will by financial or forceful means—for example, “sanctions” or “humanitarian intervention.” A new class of NGOs has thus emerged that is essentially opposed to the diplomatic, legal, and military measures required for dealing with civilizational conflict.

Learning Professional Ethics—An International Perspective

This report addresses work done at the 4th Worldwide Conference of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE), held at Cordoba, in 2006. GAJE, established in 1996, is an international alliance of legal educators and NGOs concerned with promoting issues of social justice through legal and community education.

The rise and rise of Eurep-GAP: European re(invention) of colonial food relations?

This article examines the development and potential consequences of the emergence of the new fruit and vegetable audit system EurepGAP. Emerging in 1999, EurepGAP brought together an alliance of retailers, producers, science and NGOs to provide a comprehensive ‘super audit’ of food safety and environmental sustainability in European supply chains. The article examines the context in which EurepGAP emerged; the particular audit technologies and their key consequences; and the broad alliance of interests that has provided significant legitimacy for the new system. In particular, EurepGAP is examined as a particularly powerful form of new ‘audit culture’. Close examination reveals the highly Euro-centric vision of EurepGAP and the potential consequences of this as a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion for fruit and vegetable suppliers to Europe. The New Zealand kiwifruit industry is used to demonstrate the powers of inclusion created by EurepGAP. Leveraging upon 150 years of ecological and social construction of the New Zealand farmscape, the Zespri kiwifruit has become a powerful exemplar of the ‘right’ kind of food product for Europe. By implication, EurepGAP has created a narrow gate for entry in front of many other less well-situated suppliers of fruit and vegetables to the European marketplace.

Time to Get Real

Last year saw the passing of the Communications Act, a measure which is likely to change the face of broadcasting in Britain quite as drastically, perhaps even more so, than the Broadcasting Act 1990. The enactment of this particular piece of legislation was the culmination of a lengthy process which kicked off in 1998 with the publication of the Green Paper Regulating Communications, which was followed in 2000 by the White Paper A New Future for Communications. The Draft Communications Bill was published in 2002; this was then subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee of the two Houses, chaired by David Puttnam, which published its report later in the year. As a result, the Bill was partially re-drafted; it was then presented to Parliament, which passed it in 2003. As someone who was involved, at that time as a media journalist, in the battles around the Broadcasting Bill in the late 1980s, I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu (or, rather, deja lu), when Regulating Communications appeared in 1998. Now, though, I was back in academia, but still equally concerned with matters of media policy and regulation, and keen to involve myself in the processes of consultation and lobbying which I knew lay ahead. However, over the next five years, it was not primarily as an academic that I found myself involved but, rather, as the Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and thus, in turn, as part of a loose alliance of NGOs and trade unions opposed to the Bill’s neo-liberal thrust. Fellow media academics were conspicuously thin on the ground, and of the tiny handful who poured enormous effort into trying to influence the Bill’s contents, the majority, in my view, did their most effective work under the auspices of bodies such as the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, the Campaign for Quality Television and the Third World and Environment Broadcasting Project. And now it’s consultation time yet again, with the run-up to BBC charter renewal and Ofcom consulting in all directions. Once more the

Women and Community Forests in Orissa: Rights and Management

In Orissa a large number of villages have been protecting and managing state forests lands as a common resource through elaborate community arrangements. Rural communities involved in forest management have also been demanding secure rights over these forests. Vasundhara and Sanhati, an alliance of NGOs in Orissa, recently facilitated a broad-based consultation process with village people and NGOs on the issue of community rights over forests. This discussion brought forth the intricacies involved in operational details relating to community rights over forests, and how women's concerns and priorities tend to get marginalised in these debates. This paper tries to capture the discussion and debate on community rights over forests. It reflects on how women define their relationship with forests, how this is in contradiction with the 'rights regime' and the property-based view of forests from which it emanates, and how this could lead to conflicts over non-timber forest produce.