Local-Global Citizen Engagements

Treatment Action Campaigners (Photo from PANOS)

Much work and policy debate (including much of our earlier DRC work) focuses on citizenship and participation in national and local contexts. Yet increasingly this is inadequate. International processes and initiatives are proliferating, some reflected in specific international institutions and conventions, others taking the shape of less orchestrated, but nonetheless powerful, discourses and frameworks. Encouraged by global flows of people, aid and finance, these international processes shape the possibilities for, limits of and autonomy of state action in many ways.

The work of this DRC will ask how citizens perceive and engage with global processes and in turn, what impact global processes actually have on the meanings and practices of citizenship, given their locations in diverse historical and cultural settings.

This research programme is convened by John Gaventa and Rajesh Tandon. The local settings for the research include the partner countries of India, South Africa, Brazil and Nigeria, with additional work in the Gambia, Kenya, Argentina and possibly Sudan or Angola.

Key questions

• What alliances and identities are linking citizens from the local to the global and from the global to the local?

• How are citizens engaging with global institutions and how do global institutions affect local forms of engagement?

• What difference do these new forms of local-global engagement make to the emergence of new identities of transnational or global citizenship, to the formation of new kinds of alliances and intermediary organisations, and to practices and policies of global institutions?

List of projects by partner

Latest Publications

NEW WORKING PAPER SERIES

Global Engagements with Global Assessments: The Case of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development by Ian Scoones (2008), IDS Working Paper 313

Science and Citizens: Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement

Leach, Melissa, Scoones, Ian and Wynne, B., (2005), London: Zed Books

This book is available from the IDS Bookshop

News and Events

Citizenship DRC Planning Workshop, 30 November-1 December 2005, University of Sussex, Brighton

This two day workshop was for researchers who presented a proposal for the next round. The aim of this meeting was to discuss and elaborate the future research themes of the Citizenship DRC and to plan the work plan for the next two years.