Consortium for Arab Democratic Sustainability (CADS)

Cultivating Demotic Presence: Sustainability

The Arab Democratic Sustainability Consortium is a network of democratizing forces that engage in dialogue and deliberation for democratic sustainability.  As de-democratization has taken hold in the region and around the world over a decade after the democratic openings inaugurated by the Arab Spring, this is a critical time for democratic efforts and commitments in Tunisia and the Arab region.   The consortium is a response to a regional imperative. It is a call to all those working toward democratic change and its sustainability to join forces, to think and learn with one another about how to kickstart re-democratization.

Collaboration, cooperation, collective brainstorming, and strategizing are sorely needed at this juncture. Hence, the consortium is a platform and a space for pooling resources, sharing experiences, and exchanging future-oriented ideas among activists, practitioners, and academics invested in democratic sustainability.

Demos Tunisia’s approach stresses that democratic solutions can come only from within the region. Hard -won democratic knowledge is open to a variety of inputs but filtered through the local repositories and political imaginaries of the locale. The Arab locale is rich with countless experiences and perspectives on the trials, challenges, and opportunities democracy poses. Other democratizers from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe can offer insights about democratic problems and how to approach them. Hence, both intra-regional and cross-regional encounters can only enhance the ongoing quest for democratic knowledge in Tunisia and the Arab world.

CADS fans the democratizing moral flame around a partnership of stakeholders and a democratic movement through the following:

1-     Championing Arab-Arab democratic learning and exchange of good practices, skills, norms and experiences;

2-     Prioritizing local learning through stress on the value of local democratic knowledge combined with existing human, moral, historic, linguistic resources and skills;

3-     Affirming a pedagogy of freedom that recognizes a key value: democratization will not be a gift from external powers. It is learned and honed within the Arab region through local resources;

4-     Opening up equal opportunities for cross-cultural pollination with worldwide democratic forces and movements via equal, voluntary, inclusive, collaborative, and deliberative means;

5-     Creating an Arab hub of NGOS, centres, and associations committed to Arab-Arab democratic learning, through training workshops, conferences, consulting and the of measuring Arab Democratic Sustainability;

6-     Feeding democratic advice and know-how to Arab polities through dialogic, collaborative, transparent, open and peaceful channels;

7-     Building a data strategy and a databank of Arab democratization resources that enriches local and global libraries and classrooms. This endeavour must be Supported by a democratic governance model that ethically collects relevant fragmentary data all over the Arab region into a credible and reusable knowledge resource;

8-Developing a qualitative Arab Democratic Sustainability Index (ADSI); and

9-     Extending bridges of democratic cooperation with like-minded people, centres, universities, associations and NGSs located in Africa, Latin America, Austral-Asia, Europe and North America.