Arenas of conflict? How local integration infrastructures and multi-level dynamics shape the space for conflict and cooperation at the local level in Austria

Civil society is non political sphere and individual made voluntary organization widely understood as the space outside the family, market and state. It is associated for welfare of state on the ground of civic knowledge, civic education and civic virtue. Civil society works and plays its role in the democratic regime. Democratic regime operates on the basis of democratic norms and values. Civil society plays roles in the democratic society relating to maintaining, promoting and strengthening good governance. It plays various roles like participating, mediating interest, mobilizing counter knowledge, influencing policy making, building commitment for public good, giving impetus to community building projects, motivating citizens, government towards co-operation, etc. It can play the communicative role, protective role, control role, socialization role, service delivery role and the global citizenship role in different cases. Major areas of good governance are democracy, rule of law, proprietary rights, corporate governance, human rights, welfare state and labor institution. And in these areas civil society can perform their respective roles. In the case of Nepal some roles have been managed under constitution and statutory law mainly in good governance operation and management act. But these provisions seem inadequate for showing their role visibly. Maintaining good governance through properly implementing fundamental rights, government has not made effective laws yet. Nepalese parliament has promulgated the act named good governance operation and management act 2008. Here some provisions relating to civil society's role in operating and managing process has been mentioned. In this article constitutional role as well as legal role has been taken in due consideration because civil society's constitutional and legal roles have not been duly recognised yet. Thus the study has given emphasis on description and analysis of content relating to civil society 's role managed under the constitution and statutory law act. To draw the conclusion in this study descriptive-analytical and content analysis methods has been used and information has been taken from secondary method. constitution of Nepal and good governance operation and management act 2008 have been taken as major contents for analysis of civil society's role in managing and operating good governance in Nepal.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of the civil society during the Catalan political process (2012–2021). In a context of a huge political polarization of the Catalan society, we would like to focus on the influence and role of the organized civil society in the political decisions during this period. The methodology used in this paper is based on a qualitative research using in-depth interviews with Catalan spin-doctors, participant observation, and study cases. In the paper, we can prove that the role of the organized Catalan civil society was fundamental to understand some of the decisions taken by the Catalan government, such as the consultation of ninth of November 2014; the referendum of first of October 2017; the proclaim of the Catalan Republic; the demonstrations against de verdict of the Spanish Supreme Court; the pressure of the civil society to boost pro-independence Catalan political parties to continue with a separatist agenda after the 2021 elections; and the following negotiation process with the Spanish government. As far as the findings is concerned, it is important to underline how the Catalan civil society have used different ways to organize themselves and mobilize their followers. We will comment the effectiveness of social networks; how these groups have converted themselves in actors of the political digital conversation; and how they have been able to modify the political agenda and have impacted in the media agenda setting. This paper contributes to understand more effectively the important role of the organized civil society in the Catalan political process and emphasizes its political role and influence. So do, we are able to suggest future political scenarios that could have an important impact on the political polarization that currently affects Catalonia.

In a democratic country, civil society will develop and grow strongly. The state as an integration of political power, is the main organization of political power. Also, the state is a tool of society that has the power to regulate human relations in society and regulate the symptoms in society. Good governance can also be interpreted as a synergic and constructive relationship between the state, the private and the civil society. This study aims to find out and understand how is the relationship of the roles of both civil and private society in order to achieve good governance. In this research applied the civil society, state theory, the concept of good governance, and the concept of decentralization theory. The results that the relationship of the roles, both civil and private society can be seen through building democratic governance through the role of civil society, social and political participation in decentralization. Local governments in Indonesia, through a decentralized system, have enabled the rapid development of democracy. Thus, democratic governance depends on how much civic engagements are.

The article is devoted to the role of civil society in achieving the SDGs. The author notes that civil society institutions can play the role of initiators of social transformations, consultants, communicators, monitors and tools for strengthening partnerships both at the national and global levels, in the process of achieving the SDGs. At the same time, the article emphasizes the still insufficient level of civil society involvement in the achievement of the SDGs. The author provides an overview of the best practices in this area and makes proposals for activating civil society in the implementation of the SDGs. The goal is to determine the role and functions of civil society in achieving the SDGs, identify the main areas of activity, develop recommendations for enhancing the role of civil society in achieving the SDGs. Research methods - analysis of legal documents, review of best practices. Research results. - Civil society is a key partner in achieving all 17 sustainable development goals, but is not sufficiently involved in the processes of achieving the SDGs; - New forms of cooperation and interaction with civil society institutions should be introduced for their active involvement in the achievement of the SDGs; Conclusions. It is necessary to ensure the involvement of civil society institutions in all stages of the implementation of the SDGs - from the development of national action plans for achieving the SDGs to reporting. At the same time, it is important to strengthen the interaction not only between the state and the institutions of civil society, but the interaction between the institutions of civil society themselves, including through the creation of their coalitions.

In most German cities today, refugees are welcomed and supported by a large and growing number of individuals and collectives whose volunteer work covers almost all aspects of refugee reception. At the same time, the arrival and establishment of refugees has been met with xenophobic protest and violence in many German localities. Focusing especially on the example of a local welcome initiative, but also considering exclusionary civil-society practices, this contribution explores recent civil-society involvement in refugee reception against the legal and political context of asylum in Germany. It will be argued that measures of forced dispersal, deterrence and discomfort, in particular, have materially and discursively produced the framing of current refugee movements as a ‘crisis’ and have triggered the differing actions and reactions among local populations. The fact that the ‘refugee crisis’ has been presented not only as a threat, but also as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ that needs to be tackled by both German state actors and civil society has encouraged the wave of positive reactions. Furthermore, taking into account local negotiation processes of asylum is significant if we want to understand the recent and often contradictory civil-society responses. The paper draws on observations from an ongoing research project on local migration regimes and urban asylum, as well as on other studies dealing with refugee reception in Germany.

Introduction The complexity of injury and the multi-sectoral nature of its prevention demands a whole-of-society approach. Engaging with civil society in a form of collaborative governance is central to this approach. Civil society, defined as neither state, nor market, nor family, includes organisations such as advocacy groups, charities, professional associations etc. This study looks at the role of civil society organisations in the implementation of child injury prevention interventions in Europe. Methods The method was built upon an existing approach, known as ’organigraphs’. Mintzberg and van der Heyden developed the approach to depict how organisations actually work. We further developed its practical application to explore how interventions in child safety are developed, implemented and monitored across the local, regional, national and EU levels. Professionals working in child safety in 25 European countries were asked to draw organigraphs for an intervention in one of four child injury domains: road, water, home safety or intentional injury prevention. The analysis focused on the action surrounding civil society actors, represented by the connectors leading to and from those actors. Results We received 44 organigraphs in total from 31 participants in 24 countries; nine for intentional injury prevention, nine for water safety, 12 for road safety and 14 for home safety. Civil society actors were present in the majority of Organigraphs and they played multiple and diverse roles including: ’advising’, ’funding’ and ’implementing’ child safety initiatives. Conclusions The role of civil society, described in this data set, appears to be relatively well-developed. Strong, functional and long-standing partnerships between civil society actors across policy sectors and government may lead to greater capacity to address the complexity of child injury. Key messages Effective child injury prevention requires multi-sectoral action to address its complexity. Stakeholders come from the public and private sector and from civil society. Greater engagement with civil society may represent an opportunity for countries and regions to improve their response to the challenges of injury prevention among children.

In this article the frames of democratic global government, which determine the role of a global civil society as an alternative of market-driven globalization, are being analyzed. With this intention the main theories of international political economy – hegemonic stability theory, complex independence theory, new multilateralism, and also the comparison of the approaches to the potential possibilities of strengthening of the role of civil society in the system of global government are being examined.In order to create the necessary framework for democratic global governance in the twenty-first century, global and national civil societies must enter into more intensive synergies with individual national states and international organizations. Therefore, the article aims to define the role of global civil society in the project of global democratic governance as an alternative to market-driven globalization and to consider the main theories of international political economy by comparing their approaches to the potential opportunities of civil society in the global governance system.The article concludes that, based on the definition of opportunities for expanding the role of civil society in global governance, the theory of complex interdependence and the new multilateralism offer the most appropriate theoretical framework for examining the contribution of civil society in removing the tensions generated by globalization. One can talk about the expansion of the role of civil society in global governance, as the growing presence of social movements and non-governmental organizations on the global scene has become visible due to their activities in the areas of services, education, and protection of rights that contribute to the development of a global cooperative system.

This article examines the European Commission’s discourse to identify whether and how the Commission’s perception of the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) has evolved in the context of the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing populism. To this end, we conduct thematic and frame analyses of a variegated data set consisting of announcements, speeches, press releases, and statements published by the Commission between 2013 and 2018. The article shows that the ‘refugee crisis’ and the populist turn have changed the European Commission’s view of CSOs, particularly concerning their democratic function within the European Union set-up as providers of input legitimacy. The lower profile given to civil society in the Commission’s discourse following the surge in populism and growing animosities towards non-governmental organisations signals a discursive turn in the Commission’s perception of CSOs as catalysers of participative and deliberative democracy as well as of policy-making informed by CSO expertise. However, the Commission has framed CSOs as important contributors to the output legitimacy of European Union policies, emphasising the role of civil society in the implementation of migration policies through socioeconomic reforms, providing services, and ‘debunking’ migration-related information.

This rapid review focuses on the role of civil society in SSR in several contexts. It finds that donor driven SSR is seen to have failed to include civil society, and that such efforts have been focused on training and equipping security forces. However, in some contexts, donors have been able to successfully develop civil society capacity or engage civil society groups in reforms, as in Sierra Leone. There are also several examples of security and justice reforms undertaken by local popular movements as part of regime change, namely Ethiopia and South Africa. In other contexts, such as Indonesia, the role of civil society has led to partial successes from which lessons can be drawn. The theoretical and empirical literature attributes several potential roles to civil society in SSR. These include making security and justice institutions accountable, mobilising a range of social groups for reform, publicising abuses and advocating for reform, offering technical expertise, and improving security-citizen relations. The literature also points to the inherent difficulties in implementing SSR, namely the entrenched nature of most security systems. The literature emphasises that security sector reform is a political process, as authoritarian or predatory security systems are usually backed by powerful, skilled and tenacious vested interests. Dislodging them from power therefore requires significant political will – civil society can be one part of this. The evidence base for the topic is relatively thin. While there is much literature on the theory of SSR from a donor perspective, there are fewer empirical studies. Moreover, scholars have identified relatively few successful examples of SSR. The role of civil society is found to be greater in more economically developed countries, meaning there is less discussion of the role of civil society in many African SSR contexts, for example (except to note its absence). In addition, most research discusses the role of civil society alongside that of other actors such as donors, security services or political elites, limiting analysis of the specific role of civil society.

ABSTRACTThe expectations for the role of civil society are growing due to an abysmal record of high-level political leadership in reaching an agreement and a sustainable peace process. How much impact can civil society have and what roles can it take in the peace process? This case study of South Korean civil society shows how the civil society was able to bridge the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the Korean conflict with the support of a global civil society, and created a hospitable public atmosphere for the peace process in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the space for the civil society to make a contribution in the Korean peace process required the interdependency of the roles of high-level and civil-society leadership in the interplay between the international and domestic political environments. The peacebuilding role of South Korean civil society demonstrates that the horizontal capacity of civil society alone cannot guarantee a breakthrough and sustainability in a peace process, but if it is coordinated with the vertical capacity, civil-society peacebuilding can be a useful platform for sustainable peacebuilding.

Civil society has been the engine that has permitted many of the accomplishments seen in tobacco control in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the role of civil society is not clearly understood. Civil society plays five main roles: advocate, coalition builder, provider of evidence-based information, watchdog and service provider. Some of these roles are played weakly by civil society in the region and should be encouraged to support beneficial societal change. Civil society working in tobacco control has evolved over the years to now become more professionalized. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use have brought about significant change with positive and negative consequences. Strengthening civil society not only supports the tobacco control movement but it provides competencies that may be used in many ways to promote change in democratic societies.

All international cooperation agencies promote public participation and assert the need to mobilize civil society in urban environmental management. The World Bank is one of the main promoters of this approach, which it describes as good urban governance (World Bank, 1999). In fact, they all strictly adhere to the principles put forward by Agenda 21 (1992 Rio Conference). These principles advocate decentralizing environmental management responsibilities in favour of local government, as well as the need for local government to involve the population and to work in partnership with the private sector and with the associative and community sector. The majority of programmes privilege capacity-building and the transfer of real power to such stakeholders. However, such principles assume that civil society is an organized entity comprising stakeholders which are independent from the government and which can act as its potential partners. The objective of our research has been to study the role of Vietnamese civil society in urban environmental management within the framework of actual environmental projects, so as to assess the connections or lack thereof between Vietnamese society's grassroots organizations (that is, People's Committee, patriotic associations and mass organizations) and what are commonly known as NGOs. Such projects should illustrate three types of civil society mobilization within the framework of urban environmental management practices: environmental planning and management, the provision of urban environmental services and the management of environmental conflicts. Our overall theoretical construction operates under the concept of governance. Governance describes a general socio-political concept within which relations between governments and civil society take place, with the objective of reinforcing local capacities in order to decentralize administration. Civil society includes the private sector, but in current political strategies, it really mainly consists of grassroots community organizations (GCO). The second stage consists in recognizing these organizations, developing their capacity and empowering them.

This chapter considers the issue of how regional civil society networks and their activities in the Middle East impact on regional governance. The role of a Middle East civil society has rarely been researched from a regional perspective. This reflects the fact that most analysts do not see the potential for regional integration there. The theory of new regionalism has occasionally been applied to the Middle East context, despite the fact that the region’s integration is usually envisaged as slow or even unlikely (see Harders and Legrenzi 2008; Lindholm Schulz and Schulz 2005). The region tends to be described as post-Westphalian, states still playing the most important role. Nevertheless, many regional projects have not only been launched, but have also been discussed by various players in the Middle East, as well as outside the region, and civil society representatives have been involved in these discussions. Civil society not only acts within each country in the region, but also through transnational networks. In this way, it constitutes a forerunner not only to regionalization but also to democratization in the regional context.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, advancing sustainable development has become a new concern in African regional governance. Perhaps the best example of this regional environmental governance is in the Lake Victoria Region (LVR) in East Africa where innovative regional institutions have been created under the East African Community to deal with environmental problems collectively. Civil society organisations (CSOs) are increasingly taking part in these regional processes. However, the role of civil society in regional governance in Africa has been neglected in most regionalism studies, which tend to be state-centric. There is a great need for empirical data on regional civil society as well as for new theoretical tools. This article is based on field research that investigates the role of civil society in regional environmental governance in the LVR. Civil society can constitute a dynamic force at the regional level, but the involvement of CSOs in regional institutions is complex and to varying degrees takes place on the latter's terms. CSOs can play two different roles in regional environmental governance; as problem-solvers and as critics. The article concludes that the LVR is an example of a new form of participatory regional governance in Africa.

This article describes the role of Kenyan civil society in two attempts to achieve ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ through a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC). The first occurred in 2003, when a change of political leadership led to the creation of a Task Force on the Establishment of a TJRC (TF), and the second occurred from 2008 to 2013, when a postelection crisis led to the formation of a coalition government and the institution of a widely criticized TJRC. In both instances, the fate of the exercise depended in large part on civil society organizations: the alliances they made, the arguments they mobilized, the support and criticisms they provided and their interactions with citizens, media, international donors, state actors and TF or Commission staff. Civil society approaches were also shaped by a combination of their individual and collective understandings of what constituted the most important issues and best practice, and their interpretations of government motivations, and thus by what was deemed possible, and to be feared, in working with such a state-led initiative. The article suggests that truth commissions are not a discrete tool that can be applied with the same effect in any setting, and that transitional justice actors must pay greater attention to local politics and dynamics in establishing truth commissions, including the capacity, concerns and interests of local civil society organizations, which have the power to either bolster or undermine such a project.