Poverty is not only scarcity it is also and , usually , lack of power to determine and ensure the conditions that enable lives and livelihoods to be free from want and free from fear. Poverty as vulnerability (unempowerment /... [ view full abstract ]
Poverty is not only scarcity it is also and , usually , lack of power to determine and ensure the conditions that enable lives and livelihoods to be free from want and free from fear. Poverty as vulnerability (unempowerment / disempowerment) results from the lack of effective access to relevant information within society; to effective public services provision and/or to access a free market (i.e. not captured by crony capitalism). Therefore Poverty is a circumstance and not a condition. There are no “poor”; there are only human beings with fundamental, natural or god given rights who, happen to be trapped in poverty despite being individual constituents of a state responsible of orienting the rules of the game towards dignified freedom. They are affected by a social contract failure that may source from a regulatory failure, a legislative omission, an ill-law, a discriminatory public service provision, a simulated act of participation or an ineffective judicial decision.
People living in poverty by exclusion, discrimination or defenselessness are understood as outsiders to the realm of influence of the State, the democratic and institutional apparatus which makes the law and other public decisions that affect the life and livelihood of each of its constituents. Hence the relevance of using law as a poverty reduction strategy. Democratic and Legal Empowerment is the strategy on which systemic change -in law and culture- is possible. However without an active citizenry that is organized and cohered by solidarity, getting leverage to claim subjective rights (legal and fundamental) by virtue of their social contract with the state, systemic change is hardly possible. Effective participatory governance for the vulnerable sectors of civil society as well as for accessing a stable economic opportunity depend chiefly on the organization of the affected constituents, right holders and stake holders.
The Civisol Foundation for systemic Change teams with groups in the informal economy and in poverty as well as their vulnerabilities, to advocate, campaign and litigate for change in normative frameworks and social culture. The CIVISOL Institute, in turn, builds new knowledge around Vulnerable Civil Society Organizations (VCSOs) incorporated as a not-for-profit legal person, a solidarity economy organization, a social enterprise or a microenterprise for clustering, with big capital. Analysis is carried in light of socioeconomic human rights, decent labor standards and the impact of the VCSO in development inclusion, democratic and legal empowerment, and communal and territorial peace building.
CIVISOL is also an arena for exchange, an agora where to come to analyze, deliberate and react to legal and normative frameworks and other public decisions affecting directly or indirectly civil society space and civil society organizations.
Currently the CIVISOL Institute has begun research around two different VCOS: Alas de Colombia a for-profit social enterprise set in the high mountains of Colombia, it grows, sells and exports butterflies along rural women organized and working with them. ARCA is a not-for-profit and solidarity based organization created following a judicial ruling that authorized the opportunity, for informal waste pickers in poverty, to organize and prepare to formalize as municipal public
service providers of the collection, transport, sorting and marketing of inorganic recyclable waste. Waste material that once recovered is bought by the industry and used as secondary commodity.
We expect to find and contrast (1) the main challenges posed by (a) the state, (b) the market and (c) the community to the organizing of vulnerable civil society, and (2) the main contributions that each VCSO produces in (a) individual and communal/local democracy (b) territorial peace and identify the effective causes of (c) income generation, (d) development, (e) expansive solidarity and (f) relevant democratic deliberation.
