Civic Driven Change

Citizen's Imagination in Action

Kees Biekart

Alan Fowler and Kees Biekart (eds)

October 2008

The Civic Driven change Initiative is a recent thinking and debating process to explore and communicate a perspective of change in societies that stems from citizens rather than states or markets. The initiative is meant to kick-start a public debate about and beyond aided-development.
The civic Driven Change initiative stems from a conviction that local to global problems need a wider range of solutions than states or businesses can provide. It is therefore necessary to fill a gap in existing stories about change in society that are dominated by governments and the market place. In these stories, citizens are allocated roles as participants, clients, or producers and consumers of economic and political goods and services. The force of citizens exercising civi and other rights, self-organising and acting with their own volition to change society, is often obscured and subordinated.

ISBN:

978-90-812200-3-3

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