Paper short abstract:

Based on team research in India, this paper proposes new terms of engagement between Northern and Southern CSOs in advocacy collaboration. Showing contextualized agency as a basis for CSO leadership, it argues that collaborations can 'Start from the South', while doing justice to complementarities.

Paper long abstract:

When it comes to civil society organizations (CSOs), a long-term goal in the field of international development is to create conditions where responsibilities and leadership increasingly lie with Southern CSOs. If Southern CSOs are to do more leading, their contexts, understandings, and ambitions must move more to the centre of programmes and collaborations. But what could that mean in practice? Over the past two years, we researched this question through seven studies engaging a wide array of CSOs in India. Seeing that mechanisms for starting from Southern capacities, perspectives and diversities are largely missing in the development industry, we developed an understanding of CSO agency as the capacity of organizations as interpreting and acting entities working from certain perspectives, capacities and rationales, to act on the basis of diverse analyses of possibilities and constraints, from different approaches. We propose this contextualized agency as an important new angle from which to understand CSOs' advocacy roles and advance Southern leadership. We recommend advancing Southern leadership by 'Starting from the South', rooted in the contextualized agency of Southern CSOs. Our recommendations are to put programming upside down, and to think of Northern CSOs as part of relatively Southern-centred networks rather than leads in linear North-South relations. From these starting points, we offer a framework operationalizing new terms of engagement between Northern and Southern CSOs through five practical recommendations to Northern CSOs and donors.