At a time when uneven power dynamics are high on development actors'
agenda, this book will be an important contribution to researchers and
practitioners working on innovation in development and civil society.
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 take 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. 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 in 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-centers Civil Society collaborations in development,
offering Southern-centred ways of understanding and developing
relations, roles, and processes, in theory and practice.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http:
//www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0
license. Funded by Wageningen University.
