Leading from Within
Leading from Within

Author: Gretchen Ki Steidle

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-09-11

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0262536188

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A roadmap for integrating mindfulness into every aspect of social change: how to lead transformation with compassion for the needs and perspectives of all people. Gretchen Steidle knows first-hand the personal transformation that mindfulness practice can bring. But she doesn't believe that transformation stops at personal wellbeing. In Leading from Within, Steidle describes the ways that personal investment in self-awareness shapes leaders who are able to inspire change in others, build stronger relationships, and design innovative and more sustainable solutions. Steidle argues that both personal and societal transformation are essential for a just society, and with this book she offers a roadmap for integrating mindfulness into every aspect of social change. Conventional methods attempt to compel people to change through incentives or punitive measures. Conscious social change calls for leading with a deeper human understanding of change and compassion for the needs and perspectives of all stakeholders. Steidle offers mindfulness practices for individuals and groups, presents the neuroscientific evidence for its benefits, and argues for its relevance to social change. She describes five capacities of conscious social change, devoting a chapter to each. She writes about her own experiences, including her work helping women to found their own grassroots social ventures in post-conflict Africa. She describes the success of a group of rural, uneducated women in Rwanda, for example, who now provide 9,000 villagers with clean water, ending the sexual exploitation of disabled women unable to collect water on their own. Steidle also draws from the work of change agents in the United States to showcase applications of conscious social change to timely issues like immigration, racism, policing, and urban violence. Through personal stories and practical guidance, Steidle delivers both the inspiration and tools of this innovative approach to social transformation. About Global Grassroots: In post-conflict Africa, Global Grassroots equips emerging women leaders, including war survivors, subsistence farmers, and the undereducated, with the tools and resources to create conscious social change. Our core program is our Academy for Conscious Change, a social entrepreneurship and mindfulness-based leadership program that helps vulnerable women design their own non-profit solutions to address priority social issues. In our first decade of operations we have trained over 650 change agents who have designed 150 civil society organizations benefiting over 150,000 people.

Grassroots NGOs by Women for Women
Grassroots NGOs by Women for Women

Author: Femida Handy

Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited

Published: 2006-07-05

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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Extrait de la couverture : " Based on empirical evidence from first-hand interactions with 20 Indian women founders of NGOs, this book presents a theoretical understanding of the role and impact of NGOs in women's development. It looks at what motivates and facilitates female entrepreneurship in NGOs, the structures that evolve based on their feminist ideologies, the services they provide and the social impact of these NGOs in promoting the empowerment of women."

Gender, Governance and Empowerment in India
Gender, Governance and Empowerment in India

Author: Sreevidya Kalaramadam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1317246837

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Since the mid-1980s, the presence of women in governance has become a major marker of successful democracy in global and national discourses on the democratization of society. A diverse set of nation-states have legislatively mandated gender quotas to ensure the presence of elected women representatives (EWRs) in various rungs of governance. Since 1993, the Indian state has legislated a massive program of democratization and decentralization. As a result, more than 1.5 million EWRs have taken office within the lower rungs of governance or the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI). This book is an ethnography of the Indian state and its policy of legislated entry of women into political life. It argues that political participation of women is necessary to change the political practices in society, to make institutions more gender, class and caste representative, and to empower individual women to negotiate both formal and informal institutions. Its locus is the everyday life contexts of EWRs in the southern Indian state of Karnataka who negotiate their own meanings of politics, state, society, empowerment and political subjectivity. Analysing three factors – structural boundaries, sociocultural divisions and conjunctural limitations imposed on the participation of EWRs by political parties – the book demonstrates that the social embeddedness of PRIs within everyday practices and social relations of identity and power severely constrain and shape the political participation and empowerment of EWRs. Providing a valuable insight into contemporary state and feminist praxis in India, this book will be of interest to scholars of grass-roots democracy, gender studies and Asian politics.

Reinventing Japan
Reinventing Japan

Author: Y. Takao

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2008-07-01

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 9781349539666

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The book is about new dynamic forces that are driving change in Japan. It is developed around two key concepts of civil society and social capital. The focus is on pathways to Japan's social renewal that promotes stronger communities and more participatory citizenship beyond the reach of economic growth.

Democratic Governance and Political Participation in Nigeria 1999 - 2014
Democratic Governance and Political Participation in Nigeria 1999 - 2014

Author: Femi Omotoso

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2016-05-21

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 1942876394

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The year 1999 was a watershed in the history of Nigeria as it witnessed the peaceful transfer of power from the military to the political class. Given Nigerias tumultuous history of successive military interventions, this development was the first genuine transition that saw the military elite transferring political power to civilians without itching to stage a comeback. This edited volume, composed of 22 chapters discusses the form, trajectory and substance of democratic governance in post-military Nigeria between 1999 and 2014. It is a compilation of well researched essays and narratives on Nigerian government and politics. The book is a multi-disciplinary assessment of Nigerias democratic strides, including contributions from scholars in a broad range of disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology, political science, economics, international relations, among others. The book examines the factors responsible for the resilience of the current democratic governance structures, in spite of centripetal and centrifugal forces frustrating democratic consolidation in the country. It equally interrogates these factors and makes appropriate recommendations for overcoming them. Key themes covered in the book in the Boko Haram insurgency, governance and corruption, militancy, sharia law, Islamic banking amongst others. It sheds light on contending issues affecting, afflicting and retarding the countrys progress. Issues like ethnicity, electoral corruption, human rights abuses, privatization of national assets, kidnapping and armed robbery, overbearing leadership personality and many more are critically discussed. Local government autonomy and the challenges of grassroots development and civil service administration are also thoroughly analysed. Democratic Governance and Political Participation in Nigeria 1999-2014 is a detailed, exhaustive, deep, stimulating and captivating narrative of the Nigerian situation. It is enthusiastically recommended for those who wish to know more about contemporary Nigerian history. As a collection of contemporary issues on the Nigerian government and politics, the book is recommended for courses in politics and governance in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. It is an invaluable companion for both graduate and undergraduate students as well as scholars of African politics.

Community Power and Grassroots Democracy
Community Power and Grassroots Democracy

Author: Michael Kaufman

Publisher: International Development Research Centre Books

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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The collected essays in this book provide a comparative examination of the process of grassroots mobilization and the development of community-based forms of popular democracy in Central and South America. The first part contains studies from individual countries on organizations ranging from those supported by governments and integrated into the country's political structure to groups that were organized against the existing political system. The organizations studied included those focusing on a particular concern, such as housing, and those with wide responsibility for community affairs; but all were organizations based on common interests where people lived and, in some cases, where people worked. The second part offers theme studies on men, women and differential participation; problems and meanings associated with decentralization, especially in relation to devolution of power to the local level and the construction of popular alternatives; and the competing theoretical paradigms of new social movements and resource mobilization.

Gendered Paradoxes
Gendered Paradoxes

Author: Amy Lind

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-11-09

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0271076364

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Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Essays on Gender and Governance
Essays on Gender and Governance

Author: Martha Craven Nussbaum

Publisher: MacMillan India

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13:

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The relationship between gender and governance has too often been neglected in both theoretical and empirical work. Until very recently, most influential political thought has been built around a conceptual distinction between the public realm of politics, military affairs, and administration, and the private realm of family and domestic life. Women s role, in a wide range of traditions and in theoretical work influenced by them, has typically been associated with the private realm, and men s role with the public realm. The public/private distinction has been thoroughly criticized as being in many ways misleading and untenable. Nonetheless, it continues to influence both theoretical and empirical work, with the result that women s efforts to gain a voice in governance have often been ignored. The papers in this volume aim to set the record straight. They advance a theoretical structure, both positive and normative, within which the question of gendered governance may usefully be pursued. They also analyze some current developments that indicate many ways in which women are actively participating in governance, in both government and the institutions of civil society, and the obstacles that remain. The essays in this volume are the outcome of a year long collaborative exploration of the multiple factors that influence the process of engendering governance in complex societies, in particular the changing roles of various actors including women s movements, the state and civil society.