Civil Society. Michael Edwards

Civil Society - Michael  Edwards


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wanders through the corridors of the World Bank, not that of Habermas or Hegel. Indeed, the first two schools of thought are regularly conflated – it being assumed that a healthy associational life contributes to, or even produces, the “good society” in ways that are orderly and predictable. This messy melange of means and ends will be challenged extensively in the pages that follow, but before embarking on this investigation it is important to understand why such lazy thinking is so common. Why has this particular interpretation of civil society become so popular since the Cold War ended?

      Second, the political changes that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s gave the idea of civil society a prominence it had not enjoyed since the Enlightenment but in a manner that also encouraged the conflation of ends with means. Civil society became both a rallying cry for dissidents – a new type of society characterized by liberal-democratic norms – and a vehicle for achieving it by building social movements strong enough to overthrow authoritarian states. The paradigm case for the conflation of these two perspectives was Solidarity in Poland, though here, as more recently in Latin America and the Middle East, civil society tended to be disregarded or neutered once the dissidents had been elected into office. Nevertheless, the rise of direct democracy that was such a feature of political change across large parts of the world during the 1990s and 2000s remains a trend of global importance, perhaps as important as the invention of representative democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the balance between direct and representative democracy continues to shift in favor of the former – driven by disaffection with conventional politics as well as the attractions of alternative means of participation – the political role of associations as vehicles for organizing such participation is bound to grow. As we shall see in later chapters, these changes bring both problems and opportunities.

      At a more detailed level, it is useful to break down the developmental roles of civil society into three interrelated areas: economic, political, and social. The economic role of civil society centers on securing livelihoods and providing services where states and markets are weak, and on nurturing the social values, networks, and institutions that underpin successful market economies, including trust and cooperation. As Lester Salamon has shown, voluntary associations the world over have become key providers of human services (especially health and welfare), and now constitute a 2.2 trillion dollar industry in just 40 countries that were sampled.13 NGOs, religious organizations, and other civic groups have always been significant service providers; the difference now is that they are seen as the preferred channel for service provision in deliberate substitution for the state. In more radical formulations (such as the World Social Forum), civil society is seen as a vehicle for “humanizing capitalism” by promoting accountability among corporations, progressive social policies among governments, and new experiments in “social economics” that combine market efficiency with cooperative values.


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