Civil Society Interventions Research Articles

Evolution of disaster risk governance and its implication to resilience building in Nepal

The concept of disaster risk governance has evolved in line with international trends in the face of various challenges, such as sustainable development, climate change, and urbanization. Nepal, a country prone to natural disasters, has a history of disaster risk governance. The 2015 Earthquake caused extensive damage, but disaster risk governance in Nepal was re-established as reconstruction progressed. Ratification of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR) was also adopted in 2015, and the establishment of a federal system on a new constitution was promulgated in the same year, decentralized responsibility for disaster risk management from the center to the regions. This paper attempts to identify the evolution of disaster risk governance in Nepal, considering the above background and the impact of civil society interventions and technological advances in the disaster risk reduction field.

Our Stories: Cartography of a Conflict

This photo-essay, entitled 'Our Stories: Cartography of a Conflict', is born from the fieldwork carried out in the scope of the research 'Past, Present and Future in the Voice of Women and Girls Affected by the Conflict in Cabo Delgado: A Feminist Analysis', as a way of naming and disseminating the diversity of voices of displaced women, and broadening the visibility of their stories, which have very often been reduced to statistics. The aim of this article is to share their perceptions and demands, their stories and journeys in search of security and possible horizons for their re-existence. This photo-essay shows that women displaced and affected by the conflict need to be named, singularised in their aspirations, needs and struggles. Their life stories are the reason for this work. It is their pain and resilience, their desires, their invisible and visible powers, their strategies for rebuilding their lives, families and communities that we want to make known. Their voices need to be heard, read, understood and placed at the centre of all governmental and civil society interventions for reconstruction, humanitarian response and peacebuilding in Cabo Delgado. Each woman participating in this photo-essay has chosen to share her story and her face, and has decided how to be photographed and represented, with the desire that somehow their trajectories become sources of direct knowledge to guide the paths to Peace in the province. They want to be known and recognised in their dignity, in their determination and perseverance, as well as in their deepest needs. The story of each woman shared in this article is a local and national reference to build a nonviolent future in Mozambique.

CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATION AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, A STUDY OF ENUGU NORTH SENATORIAL DISTRICT OF ENUGU STATE. NIGERIA (2007-2019)

Civil society organization and community development A study of Enugu north senatorial district of Enugu State (2007-2019). This study adopted three specific objectives: to ascertain the contributions of civil society organization to community road infrastructural development, to establish the linkage between civil society interventions and availability of potable water supply, and to examine the effect of civil society organizations activities in the improvement of community primary healthcare in Enugu North Senatorial District, Diffusion of innovation theory is the theoretical framework of analysis. Survey design utilized with population of 1,660,000 and sample size of 400. Data generated from primary and secondary sources. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis and hypotheses were tested with chi-square with the aid of SPSS. The major findings are; civil society organization does contribute positively to community road infrastructural development, there is linkage between civil society organization and availability of potable water supply in Enugu north senatorial district and civil society organization’s activities in Enugu north senatorial district did improve community primary healthcare significantly in Enugu north senatorial district. This study concludes that the citizens and other stakeholders are enjoined to advance the course of CSO’s activities towards community development for the betterment of the communities, states and the society at large. It was recommended that public sector should make enabling laws that will guarantee further engagement of various CSOs as development driver of the state and government should sensitize the populace to be actively involved in most CSO’s programmes.

Impact of COVID-19 on Women’s Lives in India: Interventions by Civil Society Organisations

Women contribute to the economy through their undervalued and unpaid work. This involves hours of drudgery and hardship, especially for poor women, whose work involves not only household chores, but also as unpaid family labour in agricultural and other domestic work. Women have become the safety net for ensuring the wellbeing of the family during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ‘work from home’ policy increased the burden on poor women. The announcement of the sudden lockdown severely impacted the lives of women. The article examines the impact of the lockdown on women and their work, role of unions, and some of the civil society interventions.

Impact of COVID-19 on Women’s Lives in India: Interventions by Civil Society Organisations

Women contribute to the economy through their undervalued and unpaid work. This involves hours of drudgery and hardship, especially for poor women, whose work involves not only household chores, but also as unpaid family labour in agricultural and other domestic work. Women have become the safety net for ensuring the wellbeing of the family during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ‘work from home’ policy increased the burden on poor women. The announcement of the sudden lockdown severely impacted the lives of women. The article examines the impact of the lockdown on women and their work, role of unions, and some of the civil society interventions.

Emotionalising the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: on the civil society engagements of Israeli mental health professionals in response to the Palestinian uprisings

This article explores how Israeli mental health practitioners emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by intervening in the public sphere. Based on a close reading of texts produced by two Israeli civil society associations of psy-professionals – Imut and Natal – we analyse and compare two languages of emotion that they developed in response to two Palestinian uprisings, the First Intifada of 1987–93 and the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000–05. This allows us to point to differences and similarities in the ways these two associations articulated, conceptualised and represented emotions that they attributed to the Israeli-Jewish collective. Imut voiced a critical and openly political response to the outbreak of the First Intifada, while Natal adopted an ostensibly apolitical position that affirmed mainstream Israeli politics in response to the Al Aqsa Intifada. Though they differed in their politics, both Imut and Natal emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a dual fashion. They depicted emotions as forces (a) whose dynamics have to be understood in order to grapple with the conflict, and (b) whose detrimental effects have to be controlled through proper management. Thus, both associations portrayed emotions as an instrument for understanding the political situation and as a powerful tool to achieve social and political aims. Though both Imut and Natal emotionalised the conflict in their civil society interventions, neither of them depoliticised it. Rather, they transposed the psychological from the individual to the social level, thus embedding it in a dialectic in which the politicisation of the psychological leads to a non-reductionist emotionalisation of the political.

Between Prefigurative Politics and Collaborative Governance: Vernacular Humanitarianism in the Migration Movements of 2015

The article discusses the civic engagement of humanitarian assistance to refugees during the migration movements of 2015. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of an event of voluntary aid for refugees, I examine how the activities can be understood as a civil society intervention in the political event of “the long summer of migration.” I argue that the voluntary refugee relief of 2015 should be conceived as “vernacular humanitarianism.” As such, the participants carried out activities of self-organized prefigurative politics, in which they experimented with the materialization and realization of their ideas about social relationships, community and the treatment of refugees, while they were simultaneously entangled in arrangements of collaborative governance, where they contributed to the local authorities’ migration management.

Coordinating Nigeria's micronutrient deficiency control programs is necessary to prevent deficiencies and toxicity risks.

Nigeria has an alarming prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies that has persisted over decades. National Micronutrient Deficiency Control (MNDC) guidelines describe several interventions to address the issue. This study identified and described currently implemented interventions, assessed coverage and coordination of the interventions, and considered the risk of overdosage and gaps. Methods included reviews of policy and program documents, key informant interviews, market, and pharmacy visits. The study found that an array of MNDC interventions were being implemented, including public health supplementation, mandatory fortification, point-of-use fortification, biofortification, promotion of dietary diversity, voluntary fortification, and ad hoc individual supplement use. Insufficient coordination existed for government, private, and civil society interventions within the health sector and between health and other sectors. Dosages of micronutrients supplied by different interventions were set independently of each other and target populations overlapped. Inadequate implementation of various interventions appeared to reduce the risk of excessive micronutrient intakes, but increased the risk of deficiencies. The risk of excessive intakes will likely increase with improved implementation and scale-up. There is a need to develop effective coordination structures for MNDC in Nigeria that will critically examine the landscape, decide modalities for different interventions, and ensure that both deficiencies and risk of excessive intakes are minimized.

Securing the future of US agriculture: The case for investing in new entry sustainable farmers

Sustainable agriculture is among the most urgently needed work in the United States, for at least three reasons: we face an environmental crisis, a health crisis, and a rural economic crisis. Addressing these pressing crises through sustainability transition will require growing our agricultural workforce: both because the current farm population is aging, and because sustainable agriculture is knowledge-intensive work that substitutes experiential knowledge of farm ecosystems for harmful industrial inputs. Given its social value, sustainable agriculture ought to be a welcoming profession. But at present, US agriculture is decidedly unwelcoming for nearly all who work in it – and it puts new entry and sustainable farmers at a distinct disadvantage. In this paper, we first examine why it is so hard to enter and succeed in sustainable farming. We find that new entrants struggle to gain critical access, assets, and assistance, encountering substantial barriers that stand between them and the land, capital, markets, equipment, water, labor, and training and technical assistance they need to succeed. Secondly, we review promising policy and civil society interventions targeted at addressing these barriers, nearly all of which have already been piloted at the local and state levels or through modest public funding. These interventions are most effective, we find, when they are linked up through robustly governed networks to provide “wraparound” coverage for new entry sustainable farmers. Such networks can help patch together complementary sources of support (e.g. federal, state, local, NGO, cooperative) and synergistically address multiple barriers at once. Finally, we propose additional interventions that are more aspirational today, but that could offer important pathways to support new sustainable farmers in the longer term.

Being called “skilled”: a multi-scalar approach of migrant doctors’ recognition

This article highlights the way the specific configuration of migrants’ skills relies on the relation between admission and inclusion policies, which involves several actors, time-frames and a multi-scalar integrative approach. It builds on a qualitative study which reports different scales of analysis for enhancing different actors participating in the recognition process of being called “skilled”. The study investigates how the “skilled migration” category is socio-institutionally constructed and how it corresponds to a recognition process that interplays with different scales (macro, meso and micro scales) and the corresponding actors (regulatory actors, civil society organisations and migrants). The main argument of this article is that the regulatory framework (e.g. admission policies, academic institutions’ procedures, professional bodies’ rules), organised civil society interventions and networks of power are key factors for the development of an “ascribed qualified migrant” into a de facto “achieved skilled professional”, and therefore the recognition of migrants as visible – and valued – “skilled professionals”.

The narrative assemblage of civil society interventions into refugee and asylum policy debates in the UK

This article explores how pro-refugee civil society organisations discursively navigate the challenges of influencing policy in contexts that are largely hostile to their perspective, and the tensions implicit in doing so. It draws on rich documentary data to present an analysis of the policy narratives of seven case study organisations in the UK. Through this analysis, the article argues that these narratives form an ‘assemblage’ of discursive conformity to and contestation of the dominant construction of the policy problem, with the organisations concurrently positioned both as experts in the field and as facilitating expert knowledge transfer from refugees themselves. It is through this assemblage that the organisations negotiate the dilemmas arising from their largely adversarial positioning in the policy debate.

Factors affecting temporary labour migration for seasonal work: a review

PurposeSeasonal labour migration is a common form of temporary migration where the work of the migrant labour depends on seasonal conditions and is performed only during that period of year. This paper aims to identify the factors and subfactors of temporary labour migration from the existing literature.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on an extensive review of the literature on temporary labour migration. Studies done from 1990 to 2016 were considered for review. The literatures from research articles, book chapters, working papers, conference papers and field-based project reports from various disciplines, like economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and management studies were reviewed for critically analysing various factors affecting seasonal labour migration.FindingsA total of five key factors and 60 subfactors of temporary labour migration were documented from previous studies. The findings of the study are organized under five thematic segments: economic factors, social factors, environmental factors, policy-related factors and psychological factors New aspects of seasonal migration were identified such as “role of labour contractors ”, “inter-generational mobility”, “social networks”, “grassroot politics”, “migrant’s relationship with the agents”, “labour registration process”, “market intervention” and “civil society intervention” after consultation with the subject experts and field study.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper restricts itself to include aspects of temporary labour migration. Only the factors and subfactors affecting temporary migration are taken into purview. Further the findings of the paper can be empirically tested to know the significance of each factor and subfactor.Practical implicationsThe paper has implications for better understanding of the temporary labour migration process in different context by focussing extensively on the factors of migration. The factors identified can be empirically tested in regional and local context, which would provide effective insights for policy formulation for the welfare and protection of the migrant workers.Originality/valueThe paper fulfils an identified need to provide a holistic review for understanding and documenting various factors and subfactors that affect the process of temporary labour migration.

Reflexões sobre as Ações da Sociedade Civil na Construção do PNE 2014/2024

Resumo: Apoiando-se em conceitos como democracia e participação social, este texto discute a incidência da sociedade civil na construção do PNE 2014/2024, a partir da atuação da Campanha Nacional pelo Direito à Educação. Para tanto, descrevem-se aspectos da realização da CONAE/2010, apresentam-se elementos das tramitações do texto oficial no Congresso Nacional e relatam-se as ações da Campanha ao longo de cada uma dessas fases. Ao final destacam-se os limites das intervenções da sociedade civil, a fragilidade dos mecanismos de participação e a desproporção entre os esforços mobilizados e as alterações efetivadas, elementos que podem asfixiar os estímulos à futuras participações.

Responses to Child Sacrifice in Uganda

This paper reflects on the various interventions and responses that were mounted in response to the problem of child sacrifice. The paper asks and seeks answers to three basic questions: What were the civil society and government responses to the problem of child sacrifice? How were the civil society and government interventions implemented, coordinated, funded, and monitored? How adequate and sustainable were the interventions initiated?

Can Civil Society Overcome Government Failure in Africa?

Government failures are widespread in Africa. Symptoms include absentee teachers, leakage of public funds, monopolized trucking, and employment-restricting regulations. Can civil society do anything about these failures? Will external donor support to civil society help? The authors argue that the challenge for civil society is to improve government functioning by strengthening political incentives - the underlying cause of government failure - rather than bypassing or supplanting the state. This paper reviews the available evidence on civil society interventions from this perspective. Although the current increase in political competition and extensive citizen engagement in Africa seems to create the potential for civil society influence, the authors find that there are large knowledge gaps regarding what works, where, and how. Some rigorous evaluations find significant impacts of civil society involvement on development outcomes, but these studies typically pay insufficient attention to the mechanisms. For example, are impacts due to overcoming government failure or to changing private household behavior, leaving the wasteful allocation of public resources untouched? The authors conclude that donor support to civil society should take an approach of learning by doing through ongoing experimentation backed by rigorous, data-based evaluations of the mechanisms of impact.

Constructing civil society: an intervention for building peace?

This article addresses the issue of support to civil society in peacebuilding missions and engages with the debate about the propriety of social modelling promoted and trialled in fragile, war-torn states. It is the case that programmes of intervention invariably fail to empower post-war populations to challenge governments, and that they distort and confuse relations between the two. This is problematic because civilian counterbalance to government excess is a central tenet of democracy, and democracy is considered fundamental for the sustainability of peaceful societies and is promoted in post-conflict reconstruction. This article draws from data collected during field work in Sierra Leone to provide some deeper insights into the issues of legitimacy and efficacy in post-war civil society interventions. The article speaks to the concern that constructing civil society through post-conflict interventions inverts the relationship between state and citizens, and advocates for a reconceptualisation of the process.

From invited to uninvited participation (and back?): rethinking civil society engagement in technology assessment and development

In recent years, citizens’ and civil society engagement with science and technology has become almost synonymous with participation in institutionally organized formats of participatory technology assessment (pTA) such as consensus conferences or stakeholder dialogues. Contrary to this view, it is argued in the article that beyond these standardized models of “invited” participation, there exist various forms of “uninvited” and independent civil society engagement, which frequently not only have more significant impact but are profoundly democratically legitimate as well. Using the two examples of patient associations and environmental and consumer organizations in the field of nanotechnology, it is illustrated that interest-based civil society interventions do play an important role in the polycentric governance of science and technology. In conclusion, some implications for the activities of TA institutions and the design of novel TA procedures are outlined.

From Protest to Proposal: The Contentious Politics of the Nicaraguan Anti‐Water Privatisation Social Movement

The Bolivian ‘water wars' of 2000 cast the international spotlight on civil society interventions aimed at reversing neoliberal economic agendas. However, few studies have examined the ways in which activists move from protest to proactive policy formation in these cases of ‘contentious politics'. Drawing on extensive field research, I argue that the Nicaraguan anti‐water privatisation social movement has expanded the contours of Nicaraguan democracy in two ways: (a) through improving the inclusiveness and accountability of existing representative institutions of government, including policy‐making processes, and (b) through creating extra‐institutional democratic spaces and practices.

Protecting Pakistan's health during the global economic crisis

The world is facing an unprecedented global economic crisis, with many countries needing to reconsider their level of health care spending. This paper explores the many consequences of the global economic turndown on Pakistan's health, including reduced government and donor spending and increased poverty with the consequent diversion of funds away from health. Nevertheless, these challenges may provide opportunities not only to mitigate the adverse effects of the economic crisis but also to institute some much-needed reforms that may not receive political support during more affluent times. Our suggestions focus on setting priorities based on the national disease burden, prioritizing prevention interventions, demanding results, curbing corruption, experimenting with innovative funding mechanisms, advocating for increased funding by presenting health spending as an investment rather than an expense and by selected recourse to civil society interventions and philanthropy to bridge the gap between available and needed resources.

Challenging the Digital Gatekeepers: International Policy Initiatives for Free Expression

AbstractCan civil society interventions preserve openness on the Internet? Dr. Hintz presents an array of examples of successful policy advocacy for free and open communications, from both within and without formal structures. These are analyzed to show the technical, social, and political responses in resisting enclosures and restrictions on digital communications. The strategies, characteristics, and conditions of successful communications policy activism are laid out. The development of new legal proposals and legislative frameworks, along with participation in their construction, has been especially effective. While a broader collaborative approach has yet to emerge, civil society initiatives have in some cases successfully challenged attempts to curtail online communication, and initiated change towards more open communication environments.