civil society – C4D Network

Trust Conference 2019

November 13, 2019

Trust Conference is the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s flagship annual event and a world-leading human rights forum. Held in the heart of London each year, the conference brings together some 600 delegates from diverse sectors representing more than 60 countries.

Day one will address creating a fairer economic system for those left behind, with a focus on modern slavery, women and girls, radicalisation, and the human impact of climate change. Day two will look at closing civil society space, exploring the relationship between tech and human rights, as well as news and democracy. Both days will feature grass-roots voices from around the world, and showcase some of the most innovative solutions to the challenges we’ll be discussing.

Premium Delegate Rate: £956+VAT (20% discount included).

Standard Delegate Rate: £595+VAT ( 20% discount included).

Charities and NGOs: £445+VAT (20% discount included).

Understanding Transition VII Conference: Voices of the voiceless – New challenges of mobilization and citizen engagement (Bucharest, Romania)

September 11, 2019

The “Voices of the voiceless: New challenges of mobilization and citizen engagement” international conference is the 7^th edition of the Understanding Transition conferences held byFJSC (University of Bucharest) and the Lumière University Lyon 2.

Participating, sharing, mobilizing and interactivity have become essential strategies to shaping citizen engagement and a collaborative construction of knowledge. Digital platforms allow citizens to turn into the new power-holders through online empowerment, thus becoming active prosumers of knowledge production. Sharing knowledge is important in digital citizenship and the various forms of transmitting knowledge depend on the affordances of online channels. Organizations have been trying to reduce the communication and/or democratic deficit by using e-platforms as communicative spaces where a dialogue-based public engagement prevail by involving citizens in the process of decision-making of social, cultural, economic, or political issues (Phillips, Carvalho, Doyle, 2012).

Besides this co-production of meaning where a collaborative perspective is dominant, people use organizational and civil society online outlets as sites of cyber-activism. The “netizens” (Franklin, 2010) have become important members of a civic engagement community by having a collective identity, a common bond, and the same grievances concerning a political, social, educational or cultural issue.

This international conference is an ideal opportunity for experienced researchers, young researchers and PhD students to share their scientific work in an interdisciplinary context and to take part in the debates over various approaches and case studies related to dialogic turn, participatory democracy, and the latest forms of citizen engagement and mobilization.

Click here for further information.

Choosing and engaging with citizen-generated data: A guide (Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, 2018)

March 17, 2019

This guide is designed for governments, international organizations, and others interested in developing, engaging with and supporting CGD initiatives. It presents a list of distinction criteria between CGD methods, highlights the benefits and pitfalls of CGD, and provides a basis for strategic engagement with CGD. The guide draws from an analytical framework presented in the report Advancing sustainability together? Citizen-generated data and the Sustainable Development Goals. The analytical framework revolves around three aspects: workflows to generate data; participation; and data’s fitness for purpose. The report illustrates these nuances through several case studies and a discussion of how CGD can support implementation and monitoring of the SDGs.

Each section of the guide is accompanied by CGD examples. The guide summarizes experiences from extensive research, and draws inspiration from existing toolkits to recommend civic technologies, as well as the many existing toolkits for participatory mapping, citizen sensing, citizen science and other data-related activities. You can find a list of the tools that inspired us at the end.

Click here for full guide.

International Conference: Claiming Civic Space Together (Copenhagen, Denmark)

March 4, 2019

Global Focus and members are excited to invite civil society actors, governments and the private sector from around the world to the two-day international conference: “Claiming Civic Space Together – Joint strategies to ensure development and humanitarian action” on 4-5 March 2019 in Copenhagen.

The aim of the conference is to bring together civil society from different parts of the world that experience different forms of civic space restrictions, as well as private sector actors and governments, to identify tangible strategies to protect and enhance civic space globally.

Thematic tracks, linking civic space to various aspects of the SDG agenda, will be a point of departure, however the key element is to find strategies and solutions across themes, areas and sectors to ensure civic space globally and acknowledge the importance of civic space to carry out development and humanitarian work worldwide.

Click here for full details.

Blood, Sweat and Tears: Community Redress Strategies and their Effectiveness in Mitigating the Impacts of Extractives and Related Infrastructure Projects in South Africa: 2008-2018 (Natural Justice, 2019)

February 20, 2019

“Blood, Sweat and Tears” was developed based on research conducted on communities’ responses to mining and the extractive industries in South Africa. The report tracks strategies used by communities (and their civil society partners and others) to challenge components of these developments and operations and mitigate the impacts that the communities experience – impacts that range from water contamination, erosion and dust, to displacements and disrupted livelihoods.

The research finds that although litigation was the preferred strategy in the past, communities are increasingly mobilising around other strategies, including social audits, petitions, compliance monitoring, community trainings, public campaigns etc.

Click here for full report.