News, Blogs and Events

A new book from LogoLink

This book presents the reflections and analyses of more than 500 participants from across Africa, Asia and Latin America.  Brought together by LogoLink (the Learning Initiative on Citizen Participation and Local Governance) they included social leaders, human rights activists, academics and politicians as well as representatives of community, grassroots and advocacy organisations.  Their synthesis culminated in the World Charter for the Right to Citizen Participation in Local Governance.  Whilst this book is not available online, some of the chapters are and can be found on the Logolink website along with details of how to purchase it.

A new IDS Policy Briefing from J. Gupte, T. Shahrokh and J Wheeler.[[{"fid":"467","view_mode":"media_original","type":"media","attributes":{"height":117,"width":84,"style":"padding: 0px; float: right; width: 94px; height: 130px; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 25px;","alt":"image of front cover","class":"media-element file-media-original"}}]]

Urban violence is an urgent and growing problem in many cities across the world. This Briefing focuses on gender-based violence in Cape Town, South Africa, and juvenile crime in Mumbai, India, to explore how those living with this violence may be enabled to address it themselves. Those living in poverty find a variety of responses to violence and this briefing shares evidence of how citizens can contribute both independently and through collective action to building safer communities.

An action research project conducted by Good Shepherd Youth & Family Service

Parent engagement in a child’s learning has demonstrated positive effects on the child’s educational, social and long-term employment outcomes.  Yet with students from vulnerable populations as much as two and a half years behind those from high socioeconomic status backgrounds, enabling parental involvement is not easy.  Uplift: An Empowerment Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools, by Susan Maury, has just been published by the Good Shepherd Youth and Family Service in Australia.  It details the piloting of an empowerment methodology that focuses on the parents’ voice and viewpoint. The research process ran three workshops in which the parents created a vision for their children’s school years, then identified actions that families, schools, and the community could take to better support their child’s holistic development.  This process became a leverage point for community action, with members working collaboratively with different agencies to achieve steady and sustainable community change for the benefit of their children.

Professional Development Programme

8th-13th February 2015, Brighton, UK

An understanding that the world is made up of an interconnected web of complex systems is at last creeping into development thinking and challenging the simplistic linear models that have for so long underpinned aid programmes.  Ben Ramalingam’s book Aid on the Edge of Chaos, published last autumn, offers an in depth exploration of this whole new way of approaching aid and international cooperation.  In addition, Ben and colleagues have just announced a six day course on Complex Adaptive Systems in Development which will take place in February 2015 in Brighton, UK.  It has been developed to meet the needs of practitioners, researchers and policy makers working in development and humanitarian contexts.  It offers them the opportunity to deepen their skills in the approaches, methods and tools employed by leading complex systems researchers.