Hovedopgave. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-166).

As the world globalizes and people travel more, volunteering has never been more popular to combine with a cultural exchange. Many countries have volunteers and non-governmental organizations which try to help that country’s vulnerable. This study investigates the impact of non-governmental organizations through a case study done at one of ActionAid Denmark’s Global Platforms in Kenya. This Platform works as one of ActionAid’s training hubs where participants from mostly Denmark and Kenya take part in courses focusing on capacity building and global citizenship. Their aim is to provide knowledge to facilitate social change. By using qualitative data in the form of interviews and observation, this study makes an impact assessment and evaluates what impact the Mt. Kenya platform actually achieves and what challenges there might be. Questions about the impact and challenges are asked to a wide range of involved people at the Platform, namely participants, staff, locals and neighbors. This study’s theoretical concept employs the theories “4 Levels of Evaluation” developed by Donald Kirkpatrick and Robert Brinkerhoff’s “The Success Case Method” as well as Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning and Beck’s & Purcell’s theory of social change. The analysis shows that the trainings themselves make a tremendous impact on the individuals participating in the Platform’s trainings. The courses are well structured and executed by the facilitators. The concept where different cultures meet and interact is a success in itself. To make even more impact in the community and for the people in the surrounding area, the Platform needs to be more visible to the locals and improve its marketing and communication activities so the locals want to participate more.

Studien ämnar undersöka hur intressentdialogen initieras och vad som sker mellan ett vinstdrivande företag och ideella organisationer, även kallade NGOs. Företag har idag en stor påverkan på samhället, där NGOs är en av företagens viktigaste intressenter. NGOs kan utöva påverkan på företag genom dialoger och företagen kan med framgång ta hjälp av NGOs i arbetet med ansvar- och hållbarhetsfrågor, även benämnt som CSR. Med utgångspunkt i teorin om intressenter och Triple Bottom Line visar studien, via tre olika intressentdialoger, hur dialogen initieras, vad syftet är samt vilka frågor som diskuteras. Vidare identifieras vilka frågor det råder konsensus och i vilka det kan uppstå konflikter. Genom en intervjustudie med representanter från sex organisationer, framkommer det att det råder till stor del konsensus. Det har sin förklaring i syftet med dialogen, den transparens som föreligger och en ökad medvetenhet hos företagen. De frågor där det uppkommer konflikter har bland annat berört finansiella kunskaper hos NGOs, riktning av donerade pengar och praktiskt arbete med projekt.

Between 1994 and 2012, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) established a contested zone of exception to neoliberal governance in southern Mexico and women's-rights-as-human-rights universalism reshaped international development and activist discourse. Within this context, Ana, Beatriz, and Celia González Pérez pressed claims against a group of Mexican Federal Army soldiers for rape at a military checkpoint in 1994. A rare instance of first-person denunciation of rape warfare, the Tseltal-Maya sisters' own powerful representation of the physical and procedural violations committed against them forms the starting point of this analysis, which proceeds from there, chapter by chapter, through communal, national, and international representations. Centering the women's speech, then moving to what are conventionally understood as broader fields of discourse produces new ways of understanding violence in relation to nation, culture, and gendered sociality. Though in 2001 the human rights commission of the Organization of American States upheld the women's claims, as of this writing (2012) the Mexican state has neither awarded reparations nor prosecuted the accused. I argue here that the women's unmet demands for collective and individual justice produce a novel language of protest which I call denuncia (denouncement) rather than testimony. Denuncia, I argue, puts the physical and the social body at the center of claims against sexual violation; enacts coraje (courage, rage) rather than petitions for recognition of truth; exposes the nationalist ideology of racial mixing that informs the production of testimony in Mexico, and establishes new audiences for its own reception despite the regimes of everyday violence it foregrounds. Formulated amid military occupation, denuncia exposes the gendered intimacy--control of the food supply, inhabitation of public-private architectural spaces, colonization of local enmities--that gave rise to military rape, which I call here "domestic violence." Denuncia emerges to refute the neoliberal discourse that links indigenous culture, gender, and violence just when the material basis of indigenous livelihood is under siege. This dissertation's method would not have been possible without almost twenty years' engagement with Tseltal and Tojolabal-Maya men and women who have formed part of the Zapatista movement. This long-range perspective has engendered a form of feminist scholarly accountability that cultivates listening to ground critique on the terrain of self-determination. / text

published_or_final_version / Social Service Management / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Education is supposed to advance humans towards the common good and a better future, but the present environmental education in trend has largely failed to inculcate a social perception of nature as is required in education for sustainability. The world is facing an ecological crisis as a result of unrestrained exploitation of natural resources and pollution; while the sustainability movement remains sluggish as prevailing citizenship education in the national context continues to serve dominant values through the top-down approach and fall behind actual needs in reforming societies. Outdated thinking of citizenship and the absence of civil society involvement are argued to be the main factors slowing down education for sustainability. Ecological citizenship as an emerging concept to address world sustainability suggests a stronger role to be played by the civil society particularly in renewing the political obligations of citizens towards their unsustainable relationship with nature. A paradigm shift in educational values towards critical pedagogy should encompass environmental justice and ecological footprint to reflect the global dynamics of environmental issues today. International environmental non-government organizations can capture opportunities of this rising role, as affirmed by the Hong Kong case analyzing the work of Greenpeace and WWF and views of local key stakeholders taking part in this movement. Through their usual environmental governance work in the forms of advocacy and stakeholder engagement, international environmental non-government organizations can foster more community-based sustainability education in formal, non-formal and informal settings through the more bottom-up tripartite approach of government-business-civil society. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Collaborative forest governance is viewed as promising for sustainable forestry because it allows forest-based communities to participate directly in management activities and benefit from resource use or protection. Forest-based communities are important because they provide contextual knowledge about the forestry resources being managed. Collaborative forest governance can be strengthened through social learning. Despite significant research on social learning in environmental governance, it is not clear how social learning evolves over time, who has access to social learning opportunities, who influences social learning, and whether learning influences management effectiveness. This study investigated the contributions of social learning to collaborative forest governance in two forest-based organizations: Harrop-Procter Community Forest in Canada, and Kapeka Integrated Conservation Development Agency in Uganda. Data were collected using personal interviews, key person interviews, focus group meetings, and participant observation. Results revealed that in both organizations, participants started engaging in forest management with limited information and learned as they engaged in various activities. In addition, for both organizations, government set the context for what was learned through forest policy. Nevertheless, learning was influenced by the governance structure chosen in the Canadian case whereas learning was influenced by non-governmental organizations in the Ugandan case. As the Canadian organization became effective at complying with forestry legislation over time, learning opportunities and outcomes became more restricted, especially for women. Meanwhile at the Ugandan organization, learning opportunities and outcomes remained restricted for illiterate people irrespective of their gender. In conclusion, this study’s findings suggest that the prevalent view that social learning increases collaboration and collective action in forest resource management cannot be assumed.

The question of what agenda drives NGO peacebuilding in post-conflict setting has been raised in a number of literatures which make generalized conclusions that NGOs tend to respond to the liberal peace agenda, and in the process co-opt local peacebuilding initiatives. Liberal peace agenda refers to the post-conflict peacebuilding approach based on the promotion of democracy, economic liberalization, human rights and the rule of law. As such, NGOs are seen as privatizing peacebuilding, marginalizing local initiatives and applying unsustainable approaches to peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts. Provoked by these assertions, I conducted field research in northern Uganda, which up to 2006 had experienced 22 years of conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and Government of Uganda (GOU). I contend in my findings that while to some extent the generalized observations made by liberal peace critics are true, they fail to fully engage with the micro aspects of post-conflict peacebuilding. The macro-analytic assertions of the liberal peace critics ignore the plurality of the NGO peacebuilding practice, the diverse internal organizational culture, and the complexities and diversities of the contextual dynamics of post-conflict settings. My research was based on a micro level analysis and demonstrated that the peacebuilding process in northern Uganda was interactive, and, as such, engendered diverse encounters of sense-making, relationship building and co-construction of peacebuilding discourse and practice between NGOs, donors and local community. The study shows that peacebuilding was essentially relational and developed through a process of relational constructionism, which denotes social processes of reality construction based on relational encounters.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration