Rights and justice

Power and governance: lessons and challenges (2010)

Last year Christian Aid organised a one-day conference to identify lessons, challenges and future priorities for partner organisations supporting communities to influence and hold their governments to account.

Speakers included representatives from Oxford University, the Institute of Development Studies, Minority Rights Group as well as Christian Aid partners funded by the UK’s Department for International Development through its Governance and Transparency Fund.

The resultant report – "Power and Governance: Lessons and Challenges" – draws best practices and recommendations from the conference, and is a useful tool in understanding the challenges of civil society governance work, the complex power relations that affect its implementation, and the importance of reviewing programme activities and objectives through a "power lens."

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J2P: what change? Doing justice to poverty (2009)

This paper sets out Christian Aid's understanding of poverty, which is not simply a matter of people living on less than a dollar a day but much more complex. We see poverty, fundamentally, as a lack of power - economic power, yes, but also personal, social and political power.

Poverty is, at its core, political. We cannot solve poverty by giving people a little more than they have. Instead, we must work as part of a global social movement to create the freedom for people living in poverty to exercise greater power over their own lives. By recognising the true nature of poverty in all our work, we aim to challenge the structural causes.

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From local to global: stopping corruption from stunting development (2008)