Centre de Recherche et d’information pour le Développement (CRID – Research and Information Centre for Development), is a vast network of and coordinating hub for progressive French NGO’s. Established in 1976, CRID is a founding member of the World Social Forum (WSF) International Committee. Today, the Centre gathers over fifty NGO’s, producing vast amount of dialogical, collaborative knowledge and is a site for popular education and movement building.
CRID’s own self-conception is not one of an NGO, but of a nodal point, cultivating ‘transversal solidarities’ (coalitions across issues and identities) and pulling together many movements around a shared vision of global justice and ecological health. Since its inception, it has opposed conventional conceptions of development and worked to formulate a counter-hegemonic project of human development. Its current work on this front includes important initiatives that struggle for justice for oppressed migrant and immigrant communities in France—issues not typically addressed in conventional development discourses.
Consistent with its emphasis on developing transversal solidarities and its continued involvement with and support for the WSF, CRID maintains a strong commitment to dialogical approaches that synthesize knowledges from different activist experiences and standpoints. This emphasis on knowledge production and mobilization as an empowering, democratizing process, provides the reasoning behind the over 40 ‘platforms,’ which CRID helps to facilitate (but does not control). Platforms typically bring a set of movement organizations or NGO’s together on a common cause or particular theme, pooling knowledge in the areas of experiential exchange/knowledge integration, educational tools and methodological training. Some platforms produce collaboratively-authored papers; others are more action oriented. CRID also coordinates major popular-educational initiatives and publishes Altermondes, a quarterly magazine on internal solidarity, development and ecological sustainability.
CRID is a considerably nationally-focused group, yet given its network-based method of knowledge production and through its 53 member groups that are active in solidarity work around the world, it engages in North-South movement building and political-cultural mediation/translation. With only a small paid staff of dedicated activists, its reach into domestic and global civil society is remarkable. Its member groups partner with 1500 groups in the South and in East Europe, and with approximately 7500 local groups in France, the latter representing approximately 180,000 volunteers.[i]
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Endnotes
[i] Figures are from http://www.crid.asso.fr/spip.php?article13, accessed February 13, 2015.