Civil Society. Michael Edwards

Civil Society - Michael  Edwards


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role, voluntary associations are seen as a crucial counterweight to states and corporate power and an essential pillar of promoting transparency, accountability, and other aspects of democratic governance. Especially where formal citizenship rights are not well entrenched, it is civil society that provides the channels through which most people can make their voices heard in government decision making, protect and promote their civil and political rights, and strengthen their skills as future political leaders. Arguing from democratic theory, a strong civil society can prevent the agglomeration of power that threatens autonomy and choice, provide effective checks against the abuse of state authority, and protect an open and inclusive public sphere. Take “participatory” or “citizen budgeting,” for example, which has spread across the world from Brazil over the past thirty years in an effort to open up the process of allocating public resources. An independent evaluation undertaken in 2018 showed that – although such experiments have lost some of their initial focus on social justice – they have definitely contributed to greater transparency, accountability, and popular participation.14 Progress is usually slow, unspectacular, and subject to reverses (especially during authoritarian setbacks, as happened in Brazil itself in 2018), but there has been progress nonetheless,15 and in this progress the health and strength of associational life is one important factor, whether in the context of protecting human rights, advancing peace negotiations, enriching the cultural life of communities, or producing a measurable decline in crime and violence.16 More broadly, the role of NGOs and social movements in mobilizing opposition to authoritarian rule and supporting progress toward multi-party elections has been well documented in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Since the early 1990s, these functions have been extended to the global level, with NGO networks becoming increasingly influential in challenging the policies of the international financial institutions and establishing new norms of accountability. Civil society in this sense means “people power” writ large.

      As a result of these criticisms and disappointments, there have been signs that interest and support for civil society have begun to wane, confirming Alan Wolfe’s judgment that the “idea of civil society failed because it became too popular.”20 “Civil society is passé” was the conclusion of a senior German government official in private conversation; “it had its moment in the 1990s but now it’s time to move on to something else.”21 Or take China, where the role of NGOs was placed on a par with the nation-state in official communiqués from 2002, but where “civil society” had been added to the list of “things it is now forbidden to discuss” a mere eleven years later.22 In this sense, the years after the fall of communism may come to be seen as the high water mark of the civil society movement.

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