Behind the scenes of LGBTQI+ Advocacy: A mental health conversation with Valentina Parra Oct 21, 2024 | Read more
Canadian coalition calls for urgent action to uphold civil liberties and Charter rights at protests and encampments across the country May 15, 2024 | Read more
Inter Pares joins call for Burma to end use of violence and respect democracy Feb 4, 2021 | Read more
Inter Pares welcomes Canada’s feminist realignment of international assistance Jun 9, 2017 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Stopping the unstoppable: Citizen resistance to exterminator technology in Burkina Faso Sep 4, 2019 | Read more
Behind the scenes of LGBTQI+ Advocacy: A mental health conversation with Valentina Parra Oct 21, 2024 | Read more
The Immigrant Workers Centre to receive 2018 Peter Gillespie Social Justice Award Apr 18, 2018 | Read more
“Until We Find Them”: Searching for missing loved ones on the road to the North Mar 11, 2019 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS | Inter Pares and SUWRA launch Canadian civil society working group on Sudan Jun 25, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Round Table with Vigilance OGM: Agroecology, feminist approaches and the struggle against agrochemicals Oct 7, 2024 | Read more
Behind the scenes of LGBTQI+ Advocacy: A mental health conversation with Valentina Parra Oct 21, 2024 | Read more
Advocacy is resistance: Navigating anti-LGBTQI+ violence in post-war Guatemala May 23, 2024 | Read more
Canada and Africa: Prospects for Internationalism and Common Cause resources : Presentations Share Print Excerpt: In Canada, we relate to governments and constituencies in a variety of often contradictory ways as well: as contractors, fundraisers, researchers, educators, advocates, and campaigners. We are all dependent, albeit to varying degrees, on the aid establishment, and its development model for funding, and for our own public identity and authority. We are challenged from many directions. As we seek continued inclusion in the official development project through our funding relationships with official donors, we too are asked to harmonize and align our efforts for what the OECD calls greater “aid effectiveness”. And we are confronted with the ways in which, even in the name of strengthening African civil society, Northern NGOs are often the agents of legitimization and reproduction of the very relations of power that we seek to transform. We run the risk of being quite effective in roles that are neither helpful nor desirable: as legitimizers (in the North as well as the South) of flawed and ultimately destructive models of development; as facilitators of consent with structures of global governance that are undemocratic; as agents of discipline and conditionality toward our civil society ‘partners’ on the continent, and as usurpers of the voice and authority of indigenous African associations and social movements. So we have some dilemmas: How do we support civil society actors in Africa to build cultures of citizenship and democratic participation when the policies and relationships of the aid regime reproduce and reinforce African governments’ primary accountabilities to debt creditors and aid donors? And when the global institutions that control so much of the policy agenda and space within which African citizens are asserting their aspirations are themselves anti-democratic? How do we support democratic development within an aid framework of “good governance” that to date has had a restrictive focus on strengthening institutions without adequate consideration of the effects of poverty, inequality, and discrimination on political participation and representation? Download (pdf 109.79 KB)