Civic-driven change (CDC) is a novel lens and a comprehensive way of viewing what happens in the development of society as a political project. It started as a think tank initiative in 2007, supported by some of largest Dutch development agencies, and stimulated reflection on pro-social and citizen-led change.
From the start, it has been a programme including academics, activists, strategists, and policy makers on an equal basis, and generated a range of publications. As a an innovation, a CDC take on change stems from a problem with the two-dimensional way in which societies are often pictured. This was often based on the notion that society was composed of three separate ‘sectors’: the state, the market and a social sector that often is labelled as ‘civil society’. Essentially the CDC programme is a joint global effort to rethink the role of civic agency in key change processes as well as to ‘re-politicize’ the civil society debate.
The CDC initiative partly emerged from the knowledge programme on civil society building with the Dutch private aid agency Hivos, which was finalized in 2011.
Here you can find the latest CDC publications:
Civic Driven Change: The Update to the Basics (February 2012)
Civic Driven Change: A narrative to bring Politics back into Civil Society Discourse (November 2011)