Economic and Political Citizenship

Work plan 2014-15

Key words:

Political and Economic Citizenship, local government, collectives, inclusion

Group Coordinators:

Ranjita Mohanty, Alison Mathie

Group Members:

Bettina von Lieres (UTS), Luis Fierro (GRUPO FARO), Simeen Mahmud (BRAC) and Pyranthi Fernando or a representative from CEPA, Sri Lanka; representative from ACODE, Uganda.

Context

This group is exploring the dynamic between economic and political citizenship and its relevance to understanding how institutions and citizens can support inclusive growth for sustainable development.

It explores the ways in which citizens organize to claim economic space, and how this shapes their political participation. It also explores the way in which powerful economic and political actors, often in collusion, destabilize these formations

Questions

  1. How do powerful economic and political actors and institutions shape the emergence of socio-economic formations and how does this shape political participation? How do they destabilize self-organized socioeconomic formations? These questions addresses the concern that citizens involved in many socio-economic formations are unable to participate freely in political spaces because of interference/destabilization/ financial incentives or other forms of co-optation.
  2. How do collective economic actors open up or reclaim economic space and then preserve it through political participation? This question addresses our interest in examples of self organised socio-economic formations that have created space in the mainstream economy or offered alternatives to it that are more economically inclusive, and how that space is protected or enlarged. Examples here would be the case of the economic revenues from oil extraction in the Amazon region are redistributed via local government to local populations, and the example of local currencies and other expressions of the solidarity economy in Brazil that have shown how economic inclusion can be achieved and how that space can be expanded. It also includes the question of how to facilitate informal economic activity (as SEWA has done in India, for example)
  3. How are new forms of economic citizenship being created by the state, i.e. incentives to organize as self-help groups in India?

Outputs

  1. Summary of E-dialogue in June to discuss the framework for exploring these questions more deeply. (June 2014)
  2. Report to CORD network and this working group of the results of the workshop on “Achieving Social Inclusion: The dynamic between economic and political citizenship” to be held at the Coady Institute at the end of June, for which CORD is partnering with IDRC, IAF, and Hivos. This report will show the complementarities and overlap between interests of the working group and the larger research initiative to be developed after the June workshop (August 2014)
  3. Preliminary cases studies or background papers to cases, funding permitting, to be conducted by working group members within the next year. Individual members to seek small grants for this preliminary work. (May 2015)
  4. Longer term: Contributions to larger collaborative research project, a multi-year, multi-case study, that will result on an edited collection of case studies, teaching materials, policy briefs and use of digital media to disseminate lessons learned. (May 2016)