Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia by Akihiro Ogawa

Author:Akihiro Ogawa [Ogawa, Akihiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781138655959
Google: lD_DAQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34703138
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Contributions of civil society organizations to representing community voices

In general, civil society performs important roles on different issues like democracy and governance. It is in this context that I understand the roles of civil society organizations and members in addressing the environmental issues and human rights concerns faced by marginalized groups in Bangladesh. Most of these issues and concerns are related to local development promoted by external agencies using the buzzwords of social mobility, empowerment, and sustainability. Civil society can represent local voices and can address local concerns like biodiversity loss, irregular flooding, salinity intrusion, drought, and river bank erosion by challenging the dominant approach. They can also address these concerns by revealing corruption and malpractice related to development projects like the Flood Action Plan (FAP) and social services programs like the EGPP (Employment Generation Program for the Poorest). For this purpose, civil society organization follows different advocacy approaches like conformist, reformist, or transformist (Scholte 2002: 284). These contributions can be formal or informal based on their nature and responsibilities, such as academic institutions, business forums, consumer advocates, environmental movements, ethnic lobbies, faith-based associations, human rights promoters, labor unions, local community groups, peace movements, and women’s networks.

Based on these contributions, civil society in Bangladesh guides social transformation that can be described in terms of Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Rural villages and their traditional socio-economic and political practices have changed significantly in coordination with new development approaches. This transformation process sometimes carries some major risks of inequality, exploitation, and domination, which are regulated by public opinion, politeness, and good norms. The different civil society organizations like BRAC and the Grameen Bank are working to reduce these issues and concerns. For example, BRAC has three major sectors: well-being and resilience, economic development and social protection, and empowerment. Each of these sectors has expanded to other major areas like disaster management related to health, nutrition, water sanitation, and hygiene.

BRAC’s report informs us that they provided relief to 1,200 flood victim families in Gaibandha, Lalmonirhat, Kurigram, and Sirajgonj with 1.4 tons of food supplies and US$9,758 in cash support in 2015 (2015: 6). In addition to these emergency supports, they operated some recovery programs with vegetable seed distribution to 20,000 households and mobile money to 3,000 marginal farmers so that they could overcome the impact of the floods. Based on these supports, BRAC is encouraging the generation of a resilience fund known as Community-Level Disaster-Resilient Funds (CLDRF) to deal with new disasters. For this purpose, BRAC uses its organization Polli Samaj (Village Society), a women’s local community organization, to coordinate the CLDRF in the disaster-affected districts like Sirajgonj, Kurigram, Gaibandha, and Lalmonirhat. Additionally, BRAC provided support to form 764 groups with more than 19,000 women who live in disaster-vulnerable districts in Bangladesh (BRAC 2015: 14).

As part of economic development, BRAC focuses on agriculture and food security to fight against climate change effects, which is closely linked with the second of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. For food and nutritional security in coordination with biodiversity

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.