Source: http://www.clad.org.ve/portal/publicaciones-del-clad/revista-clad-reforma-democracia/articulos/035-junio-2006/governance-and-leadership-for-social-change
Governance and Leadership for Social Change
Sonia Ospina
This work presents preliminary results of a national and multi-year research project developed in the United States to explore how leadership for social change happens in grassroots, civil society organizations. The article describes key leadership practices that these organizations use to influence public policies in the name of communities that have been traditionally marginalized from society's participation and distribution processes. These results are used to reflect on the role that civil society organizations play in the general trend towards the emergence of new forms of governance in the context of the United States.
The preliminary results reported offer a perspective on leadership for social change that departs from traditional mental models of effective leadership and that seems more in line with new forms of governance. This perspective questions the idea that social transformation requires heroic leadership from a few individuals in authority positions. Instead, the characteristics of social change leadership discussed invite us to imagine the potential of leadership as something that belongs to the group and that emerges at any level of the organization or social system where common work is being pursued.
This model of leadership seems more appropriate to support and advance new governance practices, where the legitimacy and authority to resolve public problems are distributed horizontally as well as vertically among different social actors, with equal leadership capacity to improve citizens' quality of life. Interestingly, instead of always promoting cooperative relationships between civil society and government, this kind of leadership is characterized by the effective management of a paradoxical relationship that combines confrontation and dialogue within the same strategy.
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A project has been developed in the United States about leadership in civil society organizations, and how this can change the same society.The articule suggests to manage a specific leadership, in which is important the common work, this leader must have enough authority to govern in the best way a group. It would be a good relationship between the citizens and government in the way it combines an equal leadership using the dialogue and solve the colective problems in the society.
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