'Back to the Land' Sustainable project
The Centre for Development Studies (CDS)-Birzeit University was established in 1997 as a research programme specializing in development studies.
The CDS aims to deepen and engage development concepts through theoretical and conceptual frameworks that explore and contextualize Palestinian development within the reality of occupation. This includes studying the interactions between the economic, social and political determinants of development as well as the structures of power and dominance that preclude sustainable development.
Back to the Land project intends to create sustainable trends that help the understanding of the contemporary Palestinian situation, develop it, and urges Palestinians to go back to the land. This can be achieved through integral projects of alternative development that encourage going back to the land in a way that creates new paradigms in the agricultural areas, changes the social relationships, establishes new patterns of consumption based on new healthy nutrition policies, and affects new architecture that protect the environment and the Palestinian architectural heritage.
Your generosity and support will help fulfill the following:
- Establish partnerships that encourage youth to return to the land, not only to strengthen people's steadfastness in the land and to stop migration, but also to make these lands attractive areas.
- Reconsider the value and importance of the land on social, economic and environmental levels. Some global models of returning to the land will be simulated, thereby preserving the Palestinian context.
- It is highly significant to convince youth in the importance of living in rural areas. This can be achieved through establishing sustainable models that elevate value of the land, and create vital patterns for youth that exceed planting some Dunums of land and going back to the city, but to take the land as a life project for the coming generations.
- This vision intends to create an integral model, therefore it relies on working on different levels, research, awareness-raising, policies, development. Hence, the vision should be implemented in partnership with local organizations (CBOs and CSOs) in the first place to be sustained and rooted with a self-funding approach.
Your contribution will pave the way for this grand project over the three coming years.