Civil Society Workshop Series

The Civil Society Workshop aims that the NGOs working on the basis of advocacy with a rights based agenda in different fields in France and Turkey discover ways of collaboration on various levels with each other. During the workshops, strategic mapping exercise will be used as the methodological tool to display the network of relations that the NGOs work within. At the end of this program, participants will be expected to be able to offer concrete suggestions on the ways their organizations could collaborate/work together with the counterpart organization in Turkey/France.





Civil Society Workshop Series are organized by the European Institute of the İstanbul Bilgi University, in partnership with Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes (IFEA).

More concretely, this program aims that at the end of this program the corresponding NGOs will;

• Share information and knowledge on the civil society of Turkey, France and Europe,
• Build bridges of network and communication,
• Increase the capacity of working with each other,
• Strengthen the already existent relations,
• Use ‘strategic mapping’ as a method for building strategies

Strategic Mapping will constitute a central place in the program as being the main exercise of the first workshop. Strategic mapping has recently become an emerging method, utilized for identifying, analyzing and working on the relations and interactions among the actors, spaces and concepts within the societies. In the context of this program, strategic mapping will be used for identifying the relations that fall within the working fields of the participants' organisations. By this methodology, we expect to spot and analyze the current and potential areas of interaction among the diverse NGOs, geographically (Turkey, France, Europe) and thematically (e.g. water, rural development, women, human rights).

Concept Note on Strategic Mapping *

Strategic Mapping is a method of first visualizing the relationships and institutions which surround, receive benefit, and sustain the issue we are dealing with. The emphasis is on relationships between people and/or institutions (rather than concepts or “causes” of let’s say human rights violations) as it is through these relationships that decisions are made, incentives are given or taken away, and actions are taken. The relationships are carefully diagrammed to create a picture that represents a social space.

When this diagram is sketched out, it then becomes possible to use it to select appropriate targets for intervention for actors who can initiate forms of pressure or change, and to map the tactics that actors could choose to influence selected targets. In this way, a process flow can be created to plan and monitor more precisely how the tactic might function and which relationships it should alter or affect in order to create an effective intervention. As multiple groups can use the same diagram to map their respective targets and interventions, the tactical map converts into a coordinating tool to create a more comprehensive and useful strategy than obtained from groups acting independently and without coordination.

* This concept note is taken from the article “An Overview of Tactical Mapping” (http://www.newtactics.org/sites/newtactics.org/files/resources/8-page_TacticalMapArticle_2008.pdf ) at the webpage of “New Tactics in Human Rights” webpage (http://www.newtactics.org/main.php/TrainingTools) of Center for Victims of Torture.

During and after the workshops the process of information production and sharing will be carried out through this blog website. Participants will upload and download documents and post comments on this blog.