0000000000425302
AUTHOR
Ajali M. Nguyahambi
“A good believer is a good citizen” : Connecting Islamic morals with civic virtues in rural Tanzania
Religious communities as arenas for public life are prevalent examples of social embeddedness that need not to be excluded from the design of citizenship initiatives. Across sub-Saharan Africa, religious practices provide some of the most important spaces of everyday identity, belonging and prevailing ways in which citizens participate in community life. While there is expansion in research on Islamic radicalization in East Africa, this chapter approaches religion and faith from the pragmatist point of view focusing on everyday Islam in non-radicalized rural contexts. Based on interviews with rural community members in Kondoa district, Tanzania, the chapter analyses how community members ar…
Negotiating CSO Legitimacy in Tanzanian Civic Space
AbstractThis chapter argues that civil society organizations (CSOs) engage in continuous legitimacy negotiations that both shape and are shaped by civic space. It focuses on President John Magufuli’s term in Tanzania, which was labelled as an authoritarian turn characterized by shrinking civic space. The chapter employs broad definitions: of civic space as an arena for action by formal CSOs as well as groups and individuals; of legitimacy as a continuous negotiation of appropriateness; and of democracy as a dynamic form of governance with different manifestations. Drawing on interviews with both professional urban NGOs and rural self-help groups, the chapter investigates restrictions experi…
Institutional Learning in North–South Partnerships: Critical Self-Reflection on Collaboration Between Finnish and Tanzanian Academics
Knowledge production and its possibilities and pitfalls in North-South research partnerships have gained increasing attention. The previous literature has identified certain pervasive challenges, and suggested a variety of ways to change partnerships, ranging from improvement of current collaboration activities to fundamental transformation of the hegemonic Eurocentric criteria for knowledge. Against this backdrop, we ask what kinds of learning can take place in research partnerships. We draw from two sources – an institutional approach and a classical categorization of learning proposed by Gregory Bateson – to develop a heuristic for analyzing institutional learning in North-South research…
Contextualizing citizenship in Tanzania
This chapter describes selected features of the contemporary Tanzania that form the context for learning of citizenship in civil society. The chapter grasps the contextual conditions and circumstances of citizenship in Tanzania by looking at historical evolvement of the notion of development, maendeleo, over the period from colonial eras to the postcolonial single-party system to the contemporary multiparty democracy. The chapter continues with analyses of the moments of donor enthusiasm for civil society and NGOs and the recent debates on the shrinking space of civil society. Essentially, different stages presents different idea of an ideal citizen and also different efforts in order to sh…
Social accountability monitoring as an approach to promoting active citizenship in Tanzania
Social accountability monitoring (SAM) is an approach widely employed by many civil society organizations to promote active participation of people in governance processes, especially in the context where government traditionally is dominant governance actor. This chapter scrutinizes certain attempts to promote change in current citizenship habits obtained through different forms of participation. It discusses how implementation of SAM initiatives encounters multiple context-based factors that affect the expected outcomes. The discussions draw illustrative experiences from local NGO working in Kondoa district to promote change of state-citizens relations in order to improve service delivery…
Communities and Habits of Citizenship: Everyday Participation in Kondoa, Tanzania
AbstractThis chapter contributes to the debates concerning contextualized conceptualizations of citizenship. Based on the work of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, it offers a definition of citizenship as constructed in everyday communities in the course of taking care of shared issues. Further, it examines the habits of citizenship that are both acquired and reformulated in the processes of participation in these communities. The empirical example of villages in Kondoa District, Tanzania illustrates the diverse communities in which inhabitants participate, and the kinds of habits acquired. Six types of communities, the village community, cultural groups, religious groups, self-help groups…