Reimagining civil society collaborations in development. Starting from the South

Collaborations between civil society organizations (CSOs) in development are a subject of ongoing critical debate, addressing questions such as how to advance transformative change, make development inclusive, deal with changing civic space, and localize civil society action. In this book, we take the imagination as an important route for producing new possibilities and directions. To capture productive imaginings of how to do development differently, we explore CSOs and their collaborations from the starting point that Southern CSOs are agents seeking to act from their own agendas and understandings of what is possible and desirable. Against this backdrop, from the perspective of ‘starting from the South’, the book seeks to answer three intertwined questions. First, focusing on roles, we ask how to reimagine who can do what in CSO collaborations when we start from the perspectives of Southern CSOs and acknowledge their agency. Second, exploring relations, we address the question of who matters and how, attempting to distance ourselves from the North–South binary. Third, looking at processes, we ask what new collaborations would look like if ‘starting from the South’ were more prevalent. Chapters addressing these three questions are grouped into five sections focusing on diverse perspectives related to the overall theme of starting from the South: ‘reclaiming the lead’, ‘displacing the North–South dyad’, ‘asking Southern-centred questions’, ‘learning new roles for the North’, and ‘choosing new starting points for collaboration’. A concluding chapter reviews the main insights emerging from the five sections of the book. It also discusses an agenda for further exploration, research, design, and experimentation concerning reimagining civil society collaborations in development in order to ‘start from the South’. Research and the work of practitioners are integrated here, as they will need to feed into each other to advance the fundamental transformations called for in this book.