Economic Rights and Citizen Action

Building on JASS' economic literacy and budget advocacy work (below), JASS is joining forces with the Toronto Labour Centre and a range of grassroots and workers organizations to convene the Cross-border Dialogue on Popular Education Strategies and Global Economic Power.  To be held in the spring of 2007, we aim to build upon and strengthen innovative education and organizing strategies that enable citizens hit hardest by changing global economic power dynamics to understand and engage to advance their rights.  (more)

---

Citizen Action, Knowledge and Global Economic Power: Intersections of Popular Education, Organizing and Advocacy
Just Associates, together with ActionAid International, and IDS-Participation Group organized a three-day workshop in August 2005, bringing together popular educators, trade union activists, academics and a diverse array of ActionAid International staff to review and capture experiences in popular economics and to sharpen our conceptual and practical approaches for linking local grassroots organizing with national and global advocacy on economic policy and rights. As a follow-on to the workshop, we're currently developing a short article comparing and contrasting different approaches to economic literacy.

Related Resources:

• Citizen Action, Knowledge and Global Economic Power: Intersections of Popular Education, Organizing, and Advocacy (Workshop Report)
• Demystifying Economics: A Scoping of Economic Education Resources

---

Economic Education for Action
JASS was invited by the Solidarity Center to evaluate its economic literacy programs in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and to strengthen the capacity of South Eastern Europe trade unions to provide economic literacy training and capacity-building for members. The learning generated by the economic literacy evaluations will lay the foundation for a broader education program in Europe and contribute critical lessons to similar efforts around the world.

Related Resources:

• Overview of the Economic Education for Action approach
• Lessons about Consciousness and the Global Economy from Serbia-Montenegro
• "Organizing and Mobilizing Trade Unions Around Economic Issues", Presentation by Cedanka Andric and Aleksandra Vitorovic

---

Community-centered and Gender Budget Advocacy
While much civil society budget work focuses on policy research and lobbying, an alternative, popularized approach starts with the concerns facing a particular community or discriminated group and uses simplified tools to track and influence the use of public money. JASS and its partners have carried out a number of learning and action projects that combine gender equality and budget analysis with citizen participation-focused advocacy strategies. These projects build upon local organizing efforts focused on a range of issues from public education to land use, and use gender analysis to help groups prioritize and understand the unequal power dynamics shaping local problems. In this way, they can pinpoint how budgets and other policies perpetuate inequality and, potentially, address it.  Read more:

• "Budget Analysis and Advocacy" from A New Weave of Power, People & Politics, pp196-8
• Gender Equality and Active Citizenship in Budget Advocacy
• Budget advocacy: Lessons from Indonesia, Citizen Budget Advocacy Project with 13 NGOs in 3 cities in Indonesia to develop the capacity of groups to understand and influence budget policy in order to give some teeth and specificity to general demands about equality, corruption, accountabilty, and transparency.
• Gender Budget Action: Linking Research and Advocacy

---

Past JASS activities and collaborations on Economic Rights and Citizen Action

• Global Economic Justice Action: A glimpse at global economic policy initiatives, a mapping of various global strategies, September 2004.
• Economic Policy Empowerment Program (EPEP)

 

 

Just Associates
2040 S Street NW Suite 203
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: +1 202.232.1211
info@justassociates.org