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What emerges when philosophical pragmatism encounters lived experiences of citizenship in Tanzania and Uganda?

– A novel theoretical approach based on philosophical pragmatism to citizenship for development research was experimented in a multidisciplinary research collaboration with four universities. The project articulated theoretical understanding of how citizenship habits are formed though participating in diverse practices that address joint issues, explained the Principal Investigator of the research consortium, Prof. Katariina Holma from the University of Oulu.

– These practices are not necessarily explicitly “political” in the sense advocated by approaches such as citizens’ engagement in international development. A citizen claiming for her rights is quite unfamiliar figure for ordinary citizens, continues Academy Research Fellow Tiina Kontinen from the Ģ��ֱ��.

The empirical investigation on people’s own conceptualizations of citizenship, their ideas about their rights and obligations, as well as their reflections on meaningful spaces of participation and belonging, revealed that the idea of an individual citizen of a nation state with certain rights and obligations is quite distant from the lived experiences while residence in local communities and religious and ethnic groups appeared significant.

The habits of subdued citizenship in violent-ridden Northern Uganda, gendered citizenship formed in prevalent cultural practices in rural Uganda, virtuous citizenship constructed in Islamic communities in rural Tanzania, and contributing citizenship acquired in women’s self-help groups in rural Tanzania identified in the project reflect the particularities of citizenship in postcolonial, post-social, and semi-authoritarian contexts of East Africa.

The “stickiness” of citizenship habits became evident in a contexts of explicit NGO-interventions for changing them such as introducing gender equality, introducing critical education, or promoting social accountability monitoring.

Combining quality and impact

GROW project was part of the Development Research Programme co-funded by the Academy of Finland and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The programme has specific requirements concerning the societal relevance and impact.

– We have three cornerstones for our funding, quality of research, renewal of science, and impact from research, I have to say that your research matches all these. We also have to remember that your project is very international, I really admire you how you keep the project together and work with your international partners, congratulated the Programme Manager Mikko Ylikangas from the Academy of Finland.

The outcomes contributed to one of the areas of emphasis in Finnish development policy, well-functioning and democratic societies, and informed the practices of the Unit for Civil Society.

– It is not often we have a chance to reflect the issues we are working on with such a distinguished academic audience. It is important to get theoretically anchored, outsiders’ perspective, for us practitioners, as we normally base a lot of our learning on reports produced within the development business, surely this places some limitations for the level of critique, reflected Senior Officer Anu Ala-Rantala from Department for Development Policy of Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

– We contend that the best way to build research capacity is not workshopping and training but doing research together, commented Tiina Kontinen, the Principal Investigator in the Ģ��ֱ��.

In each stage, the projects worked in close collaboration with researchers from the University of Dodoma, Tanzania and Makerere University, Uganda.

– We were really partners in knowledge production, I have been partnering in many research projects, and often you only play a role of a data collector, said Alice Ndidde, the local Principal Investigator in Makerere University.

The results of the project will be published by Routledge later this year in an edited volume Citizenship Practices in East-Africa: Perspectives from Philosophical Pragmatism. The book meets an increasing demand in development sector.

– We want to decolonize our curriculum and read more African scholars. I will certainly add this book for the reading list in my courses, said Simone Datzberger, Assistant Professor in Education and International Development at University College London. She presented on the lack of learning of political agency in Ugandan secondary schools and emphasized the importance of civil society as a space for learning citizenship.

Further information:

Tiina Kontinen
tiina.t.kontinen@jyu.fi
+358 40 485 6718

Project: Growth into Citizenship in Civil Society Encounters (GROW), 2015–2019, Academy of Finland Development Research.

The project is a consortium between two research groups:

Research group in the Ģ��ֱ��: Civil society and citizenship in development, PI Academy Research Fellow Tiina Kontinen

Research group in the University of Oulu: , PI Prof. Katariina Holma