Community-based legitimacy for advocacy organizations - a toolkit

How do community members value the activities of their advocacy partners? Which sections of local communities are reached through these activities, which voices gain prominence, and who may be left out? As advocacy organizations increasingly intend to shift power to Southern partners, questions about community interactions and local power relations regain relevance. This toolkit zooms in on experiences on the local community level and community members’ relations with advocacy organizations that are based in regional capitals as well as in the Global North. It presents academic literature on these interactions based on research conducted from 2018-2023 in Ghana and Kenya around case studies on land and extractives. Science comics were designed about these cases, which are partly reproduced in this toolkit with a link to the full comics at the end. Printed versions of the comics were previously distributed to community members involved in the research project, both in English and in the local languages. This toolkit is intended to connect the work of advocacy organizations and academic research conducted in local advocacy environments.