Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It is increasingly acknowledged that development should be ‘locally led’, taking the starting point that national and local actors are best placed to achieve timely, appropriate and effective outcomes. Approaches of ‘localisation’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘shifting the power’ that seek to fundamentally transform power relations have gained traction within international development and humanitarian action. When it comes to evidence-based working, however, civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Global South are still often approached from a deficit perspective, deemed to lack the necessary expertise for quality research and in need of ‘having their capacities built’ by their Northern counterparts. This top-down approach severely limits the space for national and local CSOs to work from their own contextual understandings and delegitimises research that these organisations can do, thereby disqualifying relevant knowledge and capacities. This article puts forward the CSO Research Ecosystem as a facilitation model for locally led research, thereby enabling a more inclusive understanding of evidence within the context of development partnerships. Presenting insights from case studies in India, Uganda and Jordan, this article shows how the CSO Research Ecosystem model can be used to address questions around accountability, ownership and resources, and advance locally led CSO research in transnational development partnerships.
Source: Third World Quarterly
Institution: Wageningen University & Research
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415758939