Working Paper Series: Citizen Engagements in a Globalising Work
Social Summit for Peoples' Integration
From the Local to the Global, and All Parts in Between
Around the world, globalisation, changes in governance and emerging trans-national social movements are creating new spaces and opportunities for citizen engagement. Indeed, some would argue that citizenship itself is being de-linked from territorial boundaries, as power is becoming more multi-layered and multi-scaled, and governance increasingly involves both state and non-state actors, which often are transnational.
One of the research programmes of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, the Working Group on Citizen Engagements in a Globalising World explores the significance of these changes to poor and disenfranchised citizens. In particular, the group’s work explores how of the diffusion of power and governance resulting from globalisation gives rise to new meanings and identities of citizenship and new forms and formations of citizen action. The research programme is asking questions across local-national-regional scales related to
- The dynamics of mobilisation, paying particular attention to new forms and tensions of alliance -building and claim-making;
- The politics of intermediation around representation, legitimacy, accountability;
- The politics of knowledge around framing issues, the power to frame, dynamics of contestation across forms of expertise and ways of knowing; and
- The dynamics and processes of inclusion and exclusion to ask examine who gains and who loses.
Transnational Citizen Action
The group’s work is a unique contribution to a vast literature on transnational citizen action in the way in which each project examines the vertical links from the local to the global from a citizen’s perspective, looking up and out from the site of everyday struggles. And while much normative and conceptual literature examines the concept of global citizenship, few studies of the theme are actually grounded in empirical study of concrete cases that illustrate how global reconfigurations of power affect citizens’ own perceptions of their rights and how to claim them.
The group is made up of 15 researchers carrying out field projects in India, South Africa, Nigeria, Philippines, Kenya, The Gambia, Brazil and South Africa, as well as other cross-national projects in Latin America and Africa. The projects examine new forms of citizen engagement across a number of sectors, including the environment, trade, education, livelihoods, health and HIV/AIDS, work and occupational disease, agriculture and land - and across different types of engagement, ranging from transnational campaigns and social movements, to participation of citizens in new institutionally designed fora.
Download the working papers by scrolling to the top of the column at the right.
Download the Working Papers
Hybrid Activism: Paths of Globalisation in the Brazilian Environmental Movement by Angela Alonso (2009), IDS Working Paper 332.
'Show me the Evidence': Mobilisation, Citizenship and Risk in Asbestos Issues by Linda Waldman (2009), IDS Working Paper 329.
Democratising Trade Politics in the Americas: Insights from the Women's, Environmental and Labour Movements by Rosalba Icaza, Peter Newell and Marcelo Saguier (2009), IDS Working Paper 328.
Spanning Citizenship Spaces Through Transnational Coalitions: The Case of the Global Campaign for Education by John Gaventa and Marj Mayo (2009), IDS Working Paper 327.
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.
Mobilising and Mediating Global Medicine and Health Citizenship: the Politics of AIDS Knowledge Production in Rural South Africa by Steven Robins, (2009), IDS Working Paper 324.
Transnational Agrarian Movements Struggling for Land and Citizenship Rights by Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco (2009), IDS Working Paper 323.
AIDS, Citizenship and Global Funding: A Gambian Case Study by Rebecca Cassidy and Melissa Leach (2009), IDS Working Paper 325.