Claiming Citizenship – serie

People’s understandings of what it means to be a citizen go to the heart of the various meanings of personal and national identity, political and electoral participation, and rights. The contributors to this book seek to explore the difficult questions inherent in the notion of citizenship from various angles. They look at citizenship and rights, citizenship and identity, citizenship and political struggle, and the policy implications of substantive notions of citizenship. They illustrate the various ways in which people are excluded from full citizenship; the identities that matter to people and their compatibility with dominant notions of citizenship; the tensions between individual and collective rights in definitions of citizenship; struggles to realize and expand citizens’ rights; and the challenges these questions entail for development policy.This is the first volume in a new series: Claiming Citizenship: Rights, Participation and Accountability

Rapid advances and new technologies in the life sciences - such as biotechnologies in health, agricultural and environmental arenas - pose a range of pressing challenges to questions of citizenship. This volume brings together for the first time authors from diverse experiences and analytical traditions, encouraging a conversation between science and technology and development studies around issues of science, citizenship and globalisation. It reflects on the nature of expertise; the framing of knowledge; processes of public engagement; and issues of rights, justice and democracy. A wide variety of pressing issues is explored, such as medical genetics, agricultural biotechnology, occupational health and HIV/AIDS. Drawing upon rich case studies from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, Science and Citizens asks:· Do new perspectives on science, expertise and citizenship emerge from comparing cases across different issues and settings?· What difference does globalisation make?· What does this tell us about approaches to risk, regulation and public participation?· How might the notion of ‘cognitive justice‘ help to further debate and practice?

This book addresses one of the greatest challenges of our age: that of building democratic polities where all can realize their rights and claim substantive citizenship. In recent years, innovations in governance have created a plethora of new democratic spaces in many countries. Yet there remains a gap between the intention to institutionalize participation and the reality of exclusion of poorer and marginalized citizens. Through case studies of a diversity of institutions - hospital facility boards in South Africa, a national-level deliberative process in Canada, sectoral management councils and community groups in Brazil, India, Mexico and Bangladesh, participatory budgeting in Argentina, NGO-created forums in Angola and Bangladesh, community forums in the UK, and new intermediary spaces created by social movements in South Africa - contributors examine how the democratic potential of these new spaces might be enhanced.

'Development is a process, Amartya Sen famously noted, of 'expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy'. But freedoms depend upon on political and civil rights, or more properly a corpus of rights capable of removing such unfreedoms as tyranny, exclusion and neglect. Rights, Resources and the Politics of Accountability is the first study to seriously explore how the poor claim, contest and secure rights and how the rights of the powerful are deployed to defend their privileges and to control resources and access to power. Drawing upon exemplary case studies - spanning the globe from Mexico to Nigeria to India to the US - Newell and Wheeler have laid out a provocative new agenda for thinking about not simply the existence of a discourse of rights in development, but struggles over their character and institutionalisation, and the competing forms and mechanisms of accountability by which the poor can improve their well-being. A state-of-the-art book: theoretically rich, empirically compelling and irresistibly forward-looking.' -Michael Watts, Director of African Studies, UC Berkeley'This book is fascinating not only because it puts accountability at the centre of the debate between rights and access to resources and questions some inherently flawed assumptions about accountability oft repeated by today's development pundits, it is fascinating because it tells stories about how poor and marginalized come together to negotiate and claim their rights to resources from the rich and the powerful.' Chandra Bhushan, Associate Director of the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi.

Debates over social movements have suffered from a predominate focus on North America and western Europe, often neglecting the significance of collective action in the global South. Citizenship and Social Movements seeks to partially redress this imbalance with case studies from Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria.This volume points to the complex relationships that influence mobilization and social movements in the South, suggesting that previous theories have underplayed the influence of state power and elite dominance in the government and in NGOs.As the contributors to this book clearly show, understanding the role of the state in relation to social movements is critical to determining when collective action can fulfil the promise of bringing the rights of the marginalized to the fore.

Debates over social movements have suffered from a predominate focus on North America and western Europe, often neglecting the significance of collective action in the global South. Citizenship and Social Movements seeks to partially redress this imbalance with case studies from Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria.This volume points to the complex relationships that influence mobilization and social movements in the South, suggesting that previous theories have underplayed the influence of state power and elite dominance in the government and in NGOs.As the contributors to this book clearly show, understanding the role of the state in relation to social movements is critical to determining when collective action can fulfil the promise of bringing the rights of the marginalized to the fore.

Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.