Digging the Narrative Approach to Civic Driven Change

I couldn't help myself, to be honest. The opportunity to participate in the dialogue on civic driven change in Jaipur organised jointly by Context, International Cooperation (a Netherlands based social enterprise/consultancy) and CECOEDECON (a 25-year young Jaipur-based NGO), especially getting to spend some time bantering with Fons and his friends/fellow-travellers was just too good to miss... Especially as the subject seemed to be a wedding of two subjects that I am passionate about: social change (of the civic driven variety) and complexity theory.

Admittedly, I was a little confused about the purpose of the gathering (as in what we hoped to get out of our discussion on these two subjects), and I also felt that I would have appreciated more time and space for genuine dialogue on the subjects raised rather than what turned out to be a rather linear (admittedly it was a circle) exchange of views (funny, considering all the concern with social change itself being a non-linear process!)... But there were great time constraints and I had the good fortune of sitting in the debriefing group at the end, where there was more space for this kind of an interaction.

Overall, what was most meaningful for me? I think, it is the insights I got into the following questions (which is also, I realise now, a reflection of my what questions I was carrying with me):

• Why does a complexity perspective mean that should we look at ourselves as explorers rather than experts or traditional researchers? And how do we go about our exploration? Why is it important to do so in a collaborative manner?
  
• What would a large scale, multi-stakeholder collaborative action research - with the objective of understanding how civic driven change actually happens - look like and how would it operate?
• How I should deal with the ugly thing we know as the logical framework (LFA) in the coming 6th Comprehensive Plan and what kind of meaningful, participatory, qualitative-focused learning systems could be used to compensate for the horrible void that is the LFA?
  
• What is the potential for taking up the strengthening of the inter-organisational platform for civil society learning and self-governance at the Udaipur level? How should I get started and who can I to talk to for this (thanks to Pradeep and Marieke)?

I'm leaving them all as questions because what I have gained is a bit more insight than clear answers. But all rather encouraging.

An interesting opportunity has also emerged for Seva Mandir to work with Fons and Co on the narrative based collaborative action research on civic driven change, including - but not limited to - child-centred change. It also seems to reverberate with conversations we have been having within Seva Mandir on the topic of distilling our own understanding of the change process (including the one we had during the annual camp) and our oft repeated pride in being an organisation that learns from and builds its knowledge based on experience!

Some questions, however, that I'm still not totally comfortable with are the following:

To what extent and what kind of NGO intervention can still permit us to call what happens as Civic Driven? For example, if Seva Mandir initiates a dialogue, makes available certain resources and provides facilitation inputs as a result of which citizens begin to organise themselves around certain resources, issues, commons and values - does this count as civic driven change? Where is that fine line between civic driven and not civic driven change (or perhaps we'd be better off talking about a gradient from totally self-organised civic driven on the one side to coordinated with some civic participation on the other)? It seems to me that the nature of the change that we talk about has some pretty serious implications and this need to be unpacked.

In any case, the wonderful company and conversations at dinner provided a great end to a very interesting day! So thanks to all for making it possible!