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2005 Annual Report

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2005 Annual Report Our objective as the Centre for Civil Society, our staff determined in 2005, is to advance socio-economic and environmental justice by developing critical knowledge about, for and in dialogue with civil society through teaching, research and publishing. The Centre was established at the University of KwaZulu- Natal in July 2001, with the mission of promoting the study of South African civil society as a legitimate, flourishing area of scholarly activity. A related goal was to develop partnerships within civil society aimed at capacity-building, knowledge sharing, and generating reflection and debate. With an excellent start in these directions, we now also aim to work across the African continent and internationally. Our three core strategies are: independent critical scholarship (including provision of research grants); information dissemination; and teaching/training. Our two-dozen strong community at UKZNs Howard College campus is comprised of academics and research officers, administrators, visiting scholars, and doctoral and masters students. Our colleagues include more than 200 research grantees, Research Associates, community liaisons and other collaborators. Internal research: The Centre serves as a research unit housing several major multi-year programmes. These have their own staff funded mainly from external resources raised from international foundations, including the Ford Foundation, Mott Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. In addition, the Centres staff work on their own self-directed research projects and contribute to the vibrant intellectual life of the Centre through seminars. Several thematic research areas economic justice, energy, water, HIV/AIDS and others in formation are being developed. Grant Agency: The Centre has been fortunate to have resources for grants made available to academics, research institutes, independent scholars and civil society organisations based in South Africa and other African countries. In addition, the centre offers several Doctoral and Post-Doctoral fellowships to outstanding scholars working on theses relevant to African civil society. Information Agency: The Centre runs a popular website which contains over 1 200 articles, documents and images. The site receives an average of over 1 800 page impressions per working day. The Centre also hosts a well-used library containing books, films, journals, popular periodicals and internet access; runs a weekly film screening project; and regularly publishes and distributes research reports. The Centre is very active off-campus, especially in low-income urban communities in KwaZulu-Natal. Discussion and Debate: The Centre runs an email list-serve with 800 subscribers; hosts an academic seminar series on civil society; hosts public interest forums; and runs the very popular Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, a monthly event that usually attracts an enthusiastic audience of around 250 people. Postgraduate Teaching and Activist Training: The Centre currently teaches a course in the School of Development Studies Masters Programme, where CCS also sponsors a half-dozen research masters and doctoral students with specialised civil society dissertations. The Centre also participates in various undergraduate teaching projects, hosts regular civil society workshops, and runs a training programme for people working and volunteering in civil society. Centre staff also attend conferences and offer lectures at other universities and for civil society audiences, locally, regionally and internationally. COVER: A boy leaps over a polluted stream in Mandela Park squatter camp, Bekkersdal township west of Johannesburg, South Africa. CONTENTS PG 1 INTRODUCTION 01 2 CCS SCHOLARSHIP 05 1.1 RESEARCH PROJECT: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 06 1.2 RESEARCH PROJECT: SOCIAL GIVING 08 1.3 RESEARCH PROJECT: CIVIL SOCIETY IN A GLOBALISING SOUTH AFRICA 10 1.4 RESEARCH PROJECT: ENERGY ADVOCACY 11 1.5 RESEARCH PROJECT: WATER ADVOCACY 13 1.6 RESEARCH PROJECT: CIVIL SOCIETY AND AFRICAN INTEGRATION 13 1.7 RESEARCH GRANTS 13 1.8 PUBLICATIONS AND CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 15 2 INFORMATION DISSEMINATION 27 2.1 THE INFORMATION NEXUS 27 2.2 HAROLD WOLPE MEMORIAL LECTURES 27 2.3 SEMINARS 29 2.4 WEBSITE AND LISTSERVE 31 3 TEACHING AND TRAINING 33 3.1 POST GRADUATE TEACHING 33 3.2 INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS EXCHANGE 33 3.3 RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS SKILLS TRAINING PROGRAMME 33 4 CENTRE OPERATIONS 35 4.1 THE CCS COMMUNITY 35 4.2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 37 4.3 CENTRE FINANCES 41 SAs social movements march from Alexandra Township to the world summit on susutainable development in Sandton, 31 August 2002 INTRODUCTION According to Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula in an October 2005 parliamentary statement, there were 5800 protests recorded by the South African police during the prior twelve-month period. Of these, 800 were deemed illegal (although we know from 2005 experiences in Durban that this may mean police simply criminalise constitutionally-guaranteed rights of expression). Here and across the world, grievances are being expressed more regularly over decaying state service delivery; over meaningless options for democratic participation; over excess corporate power; over durable racism and intolerance to immigrants; over suffocating patriarchy and domestic violence; over environmental degradation; over discrimination against homosexuals and differently-abled people; and over the rampant commodification of everything, to name just a few. The Centre for Civil Society is trying to rapidly respond with analysis, research, published scholarship, exchanges of views, training and capacity building. We know that the vast majority of these expressions of disquiet and the regular injuries and even death inflicted upon community and social activists will be too quickly forgotten, too brutally repressed, too cunningly coopted, or too rapidly misappropriated. If democratic instincts are to prevail, a long, slow building process within civil society is always required, so that the surface expressions of these problems are matched by a lasting commitment to stay a course of organising, mobilising and self-educating. For us, one lesson is clear from the last five years of CCS's existence: a little- recognised but crucial mode of knowledge generation, praxis, comes from popular forces challenging systems that dont work. In the course of the challenge, social change advocates are discovering the room for maneuvre within the system, as well as their own strengths and weaknesses. Analysis is not a luxury, it is crucial for good strategy in these very difficult days. Thus we ask ourselves, regularly, whether CCS is doing enough to maintain awareness of the various forms in which civil society praxis occurs. Have we and our CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY 1 many allied researchers yet achieved: · close enough contact with societys most creative organisations to comprehend their analysis, norms, strategies, tactics and limits? · sufficient capacity to do arms-length critiques of civil society (on gender, race, class, ecology and other lines), even in the context of researcher participation (and associated privileges)? · a healthy breadth of constituencies and sufficient coverage of key issue areas? · robust debates over who civil society represents, over accountability, over voice and over differential power? · clear awareness of the merits of micro/individual and household-scale analysis, shifting the gaze and ethnography? · an understanding of the uneven development of civil society, and of the ebb and flow of civil society organising? and · the necessary positioning of CCS within local, national, continental and global discourses and practices? CCSs internal biases, language deficiencies and conflicts make it impossible to answer any of the queries above affirmatively. So these are ongoing challenges, accepted with humility. To these ends, staff decided to radically decentralise power relations at CCS in 2005, allowing energy to be poured into a number of projects and collective decisions on key priorities throughout the year. In February, we arranged a strategic retreat where we considered the helpful mid-term evaluation prepared by Ann Hunter, further committing each other to supportive and democratic processes. In May, staff agreed on phrasing the broad objective that underlies the Centres approach, as follows: to advance socio-economic and environmental justice by developing critical knowledge about, for and in dialogue with civil society through teaching, research and publishing. In November, Salim Vally assisted CCS with internal Organisational Development and managerial processes. As for the content of our work, it is also shifting. As we graduate from our foundational reliance upon very generous core funding support from Atlantic Philanthropies - given Atlantics phasing out of tertiary education and civil society promotion - towards more financially sustainable research project strategies, CCS consolidated a variety of activities in 2005 and began embarking upon theme-specific research. Our internal May 2005 poll confirmed that staff desire work within a multiplicity of areas: African popular geopolitics and solidarity; the politics of HIV/AIDS activism; social movements and labour; land, water, energy and housing; municipal democracy and development; economic justice; and social exclusion (race, gender, class, sexuality, xenophobia). 2 ANNUAL REPORT 2005 We rely in large part upon our relationships with civil society organisations to mandate activities, amend our agenda, and promote new areas of
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