Civic Driven Change - A concise guide to the basics

Kees Biekart

Alan Fowler

April 2009

Civic Driven Change - A concise guide to the basics

This short booklet introduces new ideas about how civil society is taking charge in guiding development by taking key roles in society to respond to the most pressing issues the world faces such as poverty, injustice, conflict and environmental degradation. The authors highlight the special characteristics and elements of the approaches and problem-solving used and led by citizens.
A concise guide to the basics emerges from the initiative of an international core group of practitioners and critical analysts which came together to ask:
What would a citizen-centered story of change in society look like?
In the effort to share knowledge and stimulate discussion about civic action and drivers as a distict approach to social change within and beyond the aided-developmetn community, the guide aims at both provide the major characteristics of civic driven change (CDC) as conceived by the core group, and to place CDC within the current debates on mainstream development thinking.

Kees Biekart

Associate Professor Political Sociology, Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

Kees Biekart has co-ordinated TNI projects on and with the Central American peasant movement, and the politics of European NGO aid to civil society organisations in the South.

Biekart's latest works include The Politics of Civil Society Building: European Private Aid Agencies and Democratic Transitions in Central America (TNI/International Books 1999) and Compassion and Calculation: The Business of Private Foreign Aid, co-edited with David Sogge and John Saxby (TNI/Pluto 1996).

He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam, and as a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), focuses on teaching and research related to civil society, NGOs and social movements.

Kees Biekart is also Treasurer of the Board of Directors at the Transnational Institute