Story & Partnerships
How did we get here?
The desire to reimagine what global collaboration to promote sustainable peace has been part of Conducive Space for Peace (CSP) since its founding. CSP is a Danish registered international NGO, specialising in facilitating transformation in the peacebuilding system to enable greater local leadership for more equitable, dignified, and sustainable peace.
CSP started out from the central question of how to prompt global transformations so that the international peacebuilding system enables local leadership and resolutely supports local initiatives by centring the agency, dignity, and power of local civic actors. Since the inception of the idea in 2012, in Nepal and the founding of our organisation in 2016, in Denmark, CSP has come far in building new relationships, developing new thinking, and co-creating spaces and platforms for change agents to connect and build community.
CSP’s work is deeply future-oriented and taps into the desire and imagination of people from every corner of and positionality in the peacebuilding system to see a radically different and fundamentally more peaceful global community emerging on a foreseeable time horizon.
While the world is in turmoil, the realisation that we need radically new ways of global or translocal collaboration for peace and equity looms large in the imagination of people everywhere. We agree that this presents a unique opportunity to advance systems transformations, wedge-in new perspectives, and build networks among the willing to create the necessary change.
Who is travelling together?
The RESPACE Team
The RESPACE Team is composed of 23 committed change agents who engage both locally and globally to create new ways of collaborating to promote sustainable peace and equity. The RESPACE team members represent a spectrum of experiences and perspectives spanning age, gender, geographical, cultural history, profession, organisational affiliaton, and many other dimensions of life. They share values of equity, reciprocity, and peace and all hold a curiosity for engaging with people across the globe, believing in the transformative potential of collaborative dialogues in conducive spaces. While centered on reimagining new spaces and infrastructures for promoting peace and equity with civic actors at the forefront, the team also includes change agents from state, multilateral, and other institutions, recognising the importance of multiple, inclusive stakeholder engagement with the power shifted towards civic actors.
The Hosting Team
Around the idea of reimagining global collaboration for sustainable peace, CSP partnered with the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR) and Reos Partners to create RESPACE – Reimagining Equitable Global Spaces and Infrastructures for Sustainable Peace.
NEAR network is a movement of Local and National Civil Society Organisations from the Global South rooted in their communities who share a common goal of promoting fair, equitable, and dignified partnerships in the current aid system. They are powerful in making civil society perspectives from the Global South visible and are rooting actions and advocacy through their member organisations with their communities on ground. NEAR brings together a wealth of experience from civic actors from all corners in the Global South. As a consortium of local organisations who are entrepreneurs and innovators in finding solutions to challenges that they intimately understand, they seek to shape a system where local communities are empowered agents of change with the capacity to address the challenges that impact their own communities.
Reos Partners is an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues. Reos designs, facilitates, and guides processes that enable teams of stakeholders to make progress on their toughest challenges. Their approach is systemic, collaborative, and creative. Reos has been pioneering the participatory use of futures work in conflict-affected contexts – among others Colombia, South Africa, Ethiopia – and developed the Transformative Scenario Approach. Working globally and across contexts they engaged with governments, corporations, and civil society organizations on diverse challenges such as conservation, food, energy, climate, education, health, education, and justice.
Funders
Our partnership also includes the generous support from our funding partners the Robert Bosch Foundation (RBSG) and Humanity United (HU). Two philanthropic foundations who are committed to systems change in peacebuilding. Beyond their financial contributions, we hold a genuine learning partnership that allows us to reflect on our mutual visions and impact.
Other Supporters
We are also generously supported by Adra Denmark and the Global Foundation for Community Fund (GFCF).
Where do we want to go?
Our goal with the RESPACE initiative is to develop Transformative Scenarios about the potential futures for peacebuilding that can orient, instruct, and inspire change agents and movements in their collaboration to change the system and/or develop entirely new equitable spaces and infrastructures for peace. Part of our work is to strategize collaborations and collective action that can promote and build towards the desirable futures of equitable global spaces and infrastructures for sustainable peace.
We use the terms ‘spaces’ and ‘infrastructures’ as substitutes for ‘ways of collaboration’. By spaces, we mean conducive conditions within which people can informally collaborate, and by infrastructures we indicate a need for a certain level of governance or structured relations that allow the conducive conditions to be sustained over time. We refrain from using the term institutional structures or institutions because these terms carry a lot of baggage that relates to an understanding of international institutions as impaired by power inequities and unconducive conditions for those outside these institutions.
What this initiative offers is to contribute inspiring visions, instructive scenarios, and new collaborations and relationships towards the future of peace. Building on a decolonial practice, these will radically reimagine the future role of local civic actors throughout the globe, leading the way in their contexts and collaborating in solidarity across them.
