Towards a Global Research Agenda on Civic Engagement: Lessons from a Decade of Mobilization in the Arab Region

This two-year collaborative exploratory project seeks to address a gap in research on how civic engagement and social mobilization can promote accountable governance in fragile and transition contexts, including reflections on the coalitions formed, the policy changes targeted, the response of elites/the state, the role of knowledge and knowledge producers in advocating for policy change and the interactions between local, national, regional and international actors in policy formulation and implementation.

The CLS focuses on three case countries: Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. The countries have similarities and differences that together make the cases complementary and help to better understand the mobilisation for change in education contexts with different regimes of governance and hence conditions for civic mobilisation.

Specifically, we map what forms of mobilisations exist in the field of education in the three countries, who are the individuals and groups involved in mobilisation and the multi-dimensional themes that are the focus of mobilization. We further identify the multiple teams that organisations mobilise around, and we show how agendas and objectives shift over time and with the changing political and economic contexts and how civil society actors in the field of education define change and what kind of change they succeed in achieving.

In addition to mapping and interviews with relevant actors, we run dialogue meetings that bring actors together.