ALC and UNDP Partnerships for peacebuilding and development approaches in Asia

AC4 has been collaborating with the Agirre Lehendakaria Center for Social and Political Studies (ALC-University of the Basque Country), as well as UNDP in Southeast Asia to develop approaches for peacebuilding and socio-economic development in Asia.

More specifically, we have been testing how to build Social LABs in Thailand using prior work in the Basque area, Colombia, Croatia, Perú, India, Mozambique, and Quebec. Experience from the early test cases demonstrates that deep collaboration is the mechanism that spurs social transformation. That collaboration is key in generating empathy and a collective identity across a society and reinforcing that with non-transactional (or not only transactional) exchanges of ideas leading to collective mobilization of human, financial, and social resources. However, because these processes and the contexts in which they occur are dynamic and constantly changing, this type of collaboration requires a constant flow of information across social networks to enable harmonized adaptation to change.

To learn more about this work, read this piece by By Gorka Espiau, Patrick Duong, Itziar Moreno and Joshua Fisher.