Research paper: Palestinian civil society organisations' role in community development / young researcher Khaled Al-Dawawsa

The civil institutions, or civil society — what is known as A non-governmental organization (NGO) — count as a fundamental and very important element in the components of any nation or state, for the rousing and supportive role they hold in strengthening local and international rights and elevating the individual's character through spreading knowledge, awareness, and the culture of democracy, and mobilising individual and collective efforts for more social and economic development, influencing public policies, and deepening the concept of social solidarity. They therefore count as one of the state's pillars on its way to growing the citizen and working to raise their value and push toward their feeling of belonging to a society working to ease the ways of a dignified life for them — playing a role complementary to the role of the government or the authority in lightening the burden from its shoulders in many fields, among them expenditures, and supplying it with the human crew, capacities, and productive service skills that form a challenge in many of the stages of the growth of civilisations and nations: either a positive factor, or a negative factor that drains existing means and available resources and wastes them, when it would have been fitter to share in planning and research to benefit from their utility.

Self-evidently, development is society's elevation and its transfer from the fixed condition to a higher and better condition, and what it reaches of good investment of the energies available to it, existing and latent, and their employment for the better. That is, it is the achievement of a rapid, cumulative, and lasting increase over a period of time in production and services, as a result of using scientific efforts to organise the joint governmental and popular activities.

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The role of Palestinian civil-society organisations in achieving communal development

The views contained in the paper express only the view of their author, and do not necessarily express the view of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies