Practice in Participation
Description
"PRACTICE IN PARTICIPATION is a joint venture of southern civil society organisations committed to promoting participatory practices in the empowerment of excluded citizens worldwide. Our focus is on maintaining and presenting a platform for archiving and creating a repository of ‘grey literature’, especially for community-based organisations. We believe that with collective learning, the empowerment of communities can be at a faster pace than ever.
Organizations and practitioners using participatory methodologies promote collectivization and learning for empowerment and inclusion such that the poor and excluded can claim their rights and improve their lives. Such practitioners are engaged in action research (and action learning) in order to enable positive change. They learn from each other and from poor people and communities (horizontal learning). Most engage in reflection to improve their practice.
The challenges, environment and issues in trying to bring about social change in the global (developing) South are varied and certainly different from those of the global (developed) North. Yet, there is no space available to make available, synthesize and learn from the experiences and realities of the global (developing) South. Access to practical knowledge and field experiences (often available in the form of ‘grey literature’) of organizations based in the global (developing) South has been a felt need for many organizations. Sharing of South–South knowledge will help many community-based organizations improve their practice. Access to this knowledge by the global North (from where most of the funding decisions are made) will hopefully lead to reality-focused goals and monitoring systems.
PRACTICE IN PARTICIPATION is a one-of-its-kind initiative which aims at global south-to-south collaboration for preserving, maintaining and collaborating on issues and practices of social justice. It is an invited space for practitioners to share their local knowledge and learn from others’ practical experiences, and participate in generation, production and dissemination of knowledge based on experiences from the field.
The underpinning thought is to create a platform where practitioners and empirical researchers communicate their learnings from practices. Envisioned to empower people for change through dissemination and by connecting practitioners working on similar themes from across the world, the portal will act as an intermediary for knowledge on participatory practices. The portal is distinctive in its emphasis on cross-cutting methodological practices – participatory approaches, methods, tools, principles and concepts – which are already being practiced somewhere on the ground." (http://practiceinparticipation.org/index.php/pages/about-us)