Rise Of Civil Society Research Articles

From Social Sphere to Intermediary Association: A Critical Analysis of Civil Society’s Neoliberal Transformation

In this paper, I examine the neoliberal transformation of civil society through Mitchel Foucault’s insights concerning knowledge, power, and governmentality. The objective of this paper is to trace the evolving understandings of civil society and how they relate to governmental rationalities and technologies of power. The traditional notion of civil society as a distinct and autonomous sphere has shifted toward an intermediary associations approach under neoliberalism. I posit that the mobilization of non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations by states, international organizations, and donor agencies since the 1990s constitutes a form of governmental technology, influenced by neoliberal rationalities. This technology serves the neoliberal agenda of undermining the social state, promoting market creation, and encouraging non-partisanship. This argument suggests that the rise of civil society as intermediary associations coincides with the decline of society.

The Prospect of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Reply to Dryzek, Macedo, Ackerly, and Li

The Prospect of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Reply to Dryzek, Macedo, Ackerly, and Li

Exhibition Review: Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance

Exhibition Review: <i>Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance</i>

Peran NGO dalam Dinamika Isu Perubahan Iklim di Afrika

Climate change has become one of the most challenging issues for the international system in this 21st century because its negative impact has been founded in every regions in the world. One of those is Africa with its far-lagged behind and poorer performance in political, economic, and social sectors than any other parts of the world. This article tries to analyze the ongoing process of the creation of good governance in Africa's climate change dynamics. In Africa, the progress of civil society activism is predicted to be more important factor than the policy outcome from its government in making good governance. In this context, the rise of civil society should be better understood as being an equal partner than a competitor to the policy-makers to have more intensive cooperation and collaboration to solve the urgent climate problems in Africa at present.

Social Co-Governance

In the past 20-30 years, industrialization and informatization made the society more complicated and social conflicts more difficult to deal with; citizens and their demands diversified, and we are now in urgent need of a new public administration model that suits the changed political, economic, and social conditions. Governance thus emerged worldwide, promoting government reforms and public participation, and urging the government to delegate and empower, and quit the fields that they are not good at managing. Scholars discuss the reasons for the emergence of governance from the perspectives of managerialism, the rise of civil society, and administrative reforms. But these are not the only reasons for governance to rise to prominence. It emerged, in a way, in response to the “legitimation crisis” described by Jurgen Habermas. As society develops, citizens require more legitimacy from the government on the basis of what it already provides, and this may involve performance, participation, responsiveness, law-based administration, etc. We hereby analyze the legitimation crisis in a postmodern society and point out that the paradigm of social co-governance is a response to these legitimacy demands and that multiple parties integrate their demands using governance tools such as participation, consultation, empowerment, etc.

Development and Disease: A Study of Cancer Villages in China

The cancer-village phenomenon provides a focal point to examine worsening environmental health problems in China and raises critical questions for sustainability research and policy. This paper seeks to address various concerns relating to health and environment keeping in view the development trajectory of the state. The geopolitics of cancer and the geographical accountability are the main concerns of the research. The reasons for mushrooming of the ‘cancer villages’ and the approach of the government towards tackling it have been discussed. There are implications of the disease for the vulnerable sections of the society and recently there has been rise of civil society and NGOs advocating for better environmental measures and health benefits. Though government has started acknowledging the Cancer Villages, the problem is unlikely to lessen in the near future.

Creative communities and the cultural economy — Insadong, chaebol urbanism and the local state in Seoul

Creative communities that arise in a cultural milieu of place-based social relationships are being targeted for cultural economy strategies to revitalize cities in Asia. The dominance of a small number of family owned conglomerates, chaebol, in the economy and politics of South Korea represents an extreme case of the corporatization of citymaking that drives cultural economy policies. The experience of the historic district of Insadong, Seoul, illustrates the resulting loss of vernacular heritage, gentrification and commodification of creative community life-spaces under the cultural economy banner. At the same time, democratization and the rise of civil society have provided openings for grassroots organizations to seek to protect and support local cultural spaces as sites for creative engagements in urban life. Recent success of grassroots mobilizations in countering corporatization by electing an activist as mayor of Seoul points to the need to give greater attention to role of the local state in sustaining creative communities.

Research on Public Policy Performance Evaluation Based on Local Fractional Algorithm

In this paper, we prompt public performance evaluation method based on local fractional algorithm. This paper takes the public value as a basic framework to build a system and it combines the execution process of ecological construction policies with the performance evaluation of the ecological effects. Then it extracts index factors from some aspects such as the fairness of the process, respect for the subject of co-production the management effi- ciency of the government departments, the sustainability of ecological effects and so on. The performance evaluation indexes and models of the ecological construction polices based on the public value are of great significance and feasible. Currently, together with the booming of the public man- agement reform in the worldwide and globalization has brought about a lot of changes in the international political and economic environment. Against this background, domestic makers and experts and scholars of science study in many countries have been fully realized that intensifying macro analysis and promoting the reform and innovation in the making and implementation system are of great significance to the destiny of the country and the regime and the sustainable development of the econ- omy. In recent years, countries all over the world, particu- larly the developed countries, have conducted wide range of reform and assessment in system and perform- ance, such as the Reinventing Government Movement in the United States, the Second Nation-Making Movement in the Republic of Korea, and the New Action Examination and Approval Committee in Japan (1). There have been a lot of achievements in relevant studies. Among them, the issue of how to relax government control and how to strengthen per- formance assessment has become very popular for study and government reform. The public performance evaluation is a new field of study, while study on the demands of evaluation is also in its infancy now. Public performance evaluation can be considered as performance-oriented public evaluation, or can be considered as measuring the results of the in a certain area for a certain time, which is with the Overall Performance Evaluation, public sector performance evalua- tion and public project performance evaluation, forming the whole system of government performance evaluation. Study on the demands of evaluation is a key stage of the whole process of evaluation, and decide the concepts, methods and the orientation of the evaluation. Public policy, as an important way of distributing the public resources, has great influence on the society. Essentially saying, the demands of public performance evaluation come out of the bad policy and its consequences. Like unscientific decision- making process; or the preference, which is the result of game of different interest groups; or the values the gov- ernments holing are different with the public's during the process; or the goals of the governments' acting are different with the society's, there are a great many parts of the current public policies are not reasonable. Unreasonable policies brought great waste of resources, attached a negative impact on the public's life, and even caused political crisis, which can be found in histories of many countries in the world. So the public performance evaluation is acting an irreplaceable role in the whole process (2). The motivations, which promote the growing of demands on the public performance evaluation, are related to the changes in the financial system, the rise of the govern- ment accountability, the rise of civil society, and the devel- oping of the public policy, etc. The reasons that the motiva- tions turned up come from both inside and outside of the government. Different goals of evaluation and various de- mands from the public, the demands of evaluation are differ- ent and changing factors of economy, society and politics are essential to realize the demands. In the light of that the demands of evaluation are clearing, and the technology are developing, the system of public performance evalua- tion will definitely be built up in someday, and will play an important role in the democratization and legalization pro- gress of our country.

World War I and the humanitarian impulse

World War I and the humanitarian impulse William I. Hitchcock (bio) The Great War is quite rightly associated with the tragedies of the battlefield, with combat deaths of nearly ten million soldiers, with the construction of the vast network of cemeteries all across northern Europe that Kipling called “cities of the dead,” and with the emotional and psychic scarring of a generation of European peoples. Knowing the political and military history of post-1918 Europe, we think of the Great War as but the first act in a century of horrors. Yet when we consider the legacies of the Great War, it is worth recalling that one less melancholy outcome was the creation of a new conception of humanitarian action on behalf of wounded soldiers and distressed civilians. The humanitarian impulse that surged in 1914 has, no less than the ideologies of genocide and barbarism, been one of the hallmarks of the past century, though it has been far less scrutinized by scholars. Lately, historians and social scientists who are interested in the rise of civil society and the place of non-state actors in international relations have turned to the early twentieth century to chart the emergence of the humanitarian idea. This essay reviews some of that scholarship and tries to assess its enduring meaning for our times. I The First World War did not invent humanitarianism. The impulse to respond to the suffering of others had mobilized [End Page 145] communities of people into action since the Enlightenment. Such networks responded to a variety of stimuli. Slavery; war and its associated human tragedies; ethnic and religious conflict and atrocities; famine and natural disasters; health emergencies and epidemics—all these calamities triggered humane responses in North America and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 In some cases humanitarianism could be politically radical: the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century was animated by more than a desire to offer succor. Its aim was nothing less than the destruction of the practice of slavery, with all the dramatic political implications such an agenda contained. Humanitarianism was also stimulated by the growth and formal expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, during which time the concept of improving newly conquered peoples, and developing them into an “imperial race,” served to legitimate the practice of conquest.2 Missionary groups too often used the premise of an imperial mandate to call for the cleaning up of abusive labor practices in the colonized world.3 And humanitarianism was spurred when religious and liberal political agendas overlapped in certain nineteenth-century social improvement campaigns.4 Yet the rise of the modern humanitarian community is really the product of war. The mid-nineteenth century nationalist conflicts in Europe coincided with a growing sentimental view that civilized societies ought to respond to suffering with care and human kindness rather than indifference.5 This moral imperative met the nationalist fury on the battlefields of Europe, and it was the suffering of wounded soldiers during one such conflict (the Franco-Austrian tangle triggered by the Italian wars of independence) that prompted Henri Dunant, a Swiss evangelical Christian and businessman, to take action. In June 1859, Dunant came across the blood-soaked battleground of Solférino, where thousands of French, Italian and Austrian soldiers lay dying. Shocked by the absence of medical care, Dunant mobilized local civilians to provide ambulances and medical aid for the men. Upon his return to Geneva, he wrote a best-selling exposé, and then convened a group of like-minded citizens to form an international relief society to treat war victims. Dunant’s appeal to his friends came at a time when Europeans had been sensitized to the issue of wartime casualties through the work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War (1853-56), when she had campaigned for [End Page 146] military health reforms. Dunant’s efforts struck a chord and his group formed an organization in 1864 that would soon call itself the International Committee of the Red Cross. The humanitarian impulse now had an institutional home.6 The founding document of the humanitarian movement was the Geneva Convention of August 22, 1864, whose brief articles laid out simple rules...

Faith and the State: A History of Islamic Philanthropy in Indonesia

Amelia Fauzia (2013). Faith and the State: A History of Islamic in Indonesia. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. ISBN: 9789004233973. i-xxxi + 346 pages.Amelia Fauzia's thorough analysis of Islamic philanthropic practices in Indonesia from the early decades of Islam in the archipelago to today is more than a timely review of a tradition that both perpetuates and influences state-civil society relations. Given their historical continuity, cultural tenacity, and social, political, and economic relevance, these practices - also referred to as zakat (almsgiving), sedekah (donation, giving), and waqf (religious endowment) - play a vital role in Indonesian society today.As a lecturer of Islamic History and Civilization at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta and holding a PhD in Indonesian history and Islamic studies from the University of Melbourne, Amelia has been working on the topic of Islamic philanthropy since 2002, when she engaged with a global research project on Philanthropy for Social Justice in Muslim Societies. This project brought together researchers from six different countries under her leadership, supported by a team of experts at the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture (CSRC) in Jakarta (in- cluding Chaider S. Bamualim and Irfan Abubakar, with whom she co-edited Filantropi Islam dan Keadilan Sosial [Islamic philanthropy and social justice] in 2006). Following several publications on the above-mentioned topics as well as on Islamization, Islam- ic identity, and civil society, Faith and the State is the subsequent publication of her PhD thesis - extensive review and detailed analysis of the practices of zakat, se- dekah, and waqf in Indonesia and their role in shaping the between the state and Muslim civil society. Her central argument is that Islamic philanthropic ac- tivities, including the establishment of educational institutions, the provision of com- munity services, or the financial support of community development projects, repre- sent element of a strong civil society and grow in the face of a weak state (p. 7). Amelia maintains this idea throughout her book without ignoring the complexity of the specific historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts.Faith and the State deals exclusively with Islamic philanthropic practices in Indone- sia and their development from the early centuries of Islamization to the more recent events of the post-New Order regime. It looks at the social and cultural consolidation of different forms of giving against the background of Islam and at various processes of reformation, (re)organization, and legislation of these practices. Islamic philan- thropy is presented as a dynamic and a highly contested space between the private and the public realm, between faith and the state (p. 6). Both a part of civil society (following Kathleen D. McCarthy, author of the American Creed: and the Rise of Civil Society) and an indicator of the state-civil society relationship (p. 9), philanthropy renders a neat separation between the private and public as well as between the state and society hard to achieve. Avoiding structural and conceptual di- chotomizations, Amelia indicates how, regardless of the role played by Muslim elites, religious authorities, or the state, Islamic philanthropy will never be fully formalized or regulated, mainly because of its authentic origin in the altruistic and reciprocal nature of people (p. xvii) and in the collective awareness and concern for the wel- fare of others (p. 1). And, although Islamic philanthropic activities are every so often used as a tool to communicate advanced ideas of social justice and to promote social change, the majority of philanthropic practices remain mostly traditional and self- contained, performed by Muslims motivated mainly by their faith.The book is chronologically structured around three major periods in the history of Indonesia. …

The communication adaptiveness and power dynamics of the state, the market, and civil society in the information age: the case of Korea

The authority of the state and the market, the duumvirate of the industrial society, has been challenged in various ways in the current information era advanced by the rapid development of information and communication technology. By comparison, the weight of civil organizations has increased sharply, and netizens equipped with information technology have emerged as a major player in civil society. This article experientially examines the changes in power dynamics of the state, the market, and civil society in the Korean context, based on a survey of people's perception of the communication adaptiveness of these spheres, that is, their openness and exclusiveness internally and externally. The survey results suggest that the state sphere tends to be perceived as less communicative and open than the market and civil society. By contrast, civil society is perceived to be the most open and communicative sphere. This may reflect some change in power dynamics of these spheres, which can be characterized as the rise of civil society and the relative decline of the state. In terms of the power dynamics of the three spheres, the results challenge the conventional trichotomous model assuming somewhat clear boundaries between the state, the market, and civil society. Given that the findings of this article derive from the Korean situation and, thus, are valid mainly in the Korean context, this article shows an important socio-political change in the information age: that is, mutually interactive and overlapping processes among the spheres can accelerate by the rise of ‘digital citizens’ and civil society's increasing power.

Who are the active and central actors in the ‘rising civil society’ in Mexico?

The debate about the rise of civil society in Mexico suggests that the processes of political and economic liberalization are multiple and uneven and, thus, have different and contradictory effects on different social groups. This study takes such arguments into account and examines the nature of collective identities and social networks that are more likely to be mobilized in the rising civil society. Who, with what types of social networks and identities, are the active actors in this rising civil society in Mexico? This study also attempts to identify the central actors who take an active part in multi-sector coalitions. As such a broad coalition often leaves profound effects on politics and society, it is vital to ask which actors are likely to take an important step toward multi-sector coalition making. Using a catalog of 1797 protest campaigns collected from three Mexican newspapers between 1964 and 2000, event frequency analysis is employed to find active actors and social network analysis – blockmodel method and degree centrality measure – is applied to uncover central actors. The analyses reveal that while workers, peasants, or students continue to be very active, the centrality of these actors in contentious networks and coalitions has not increased. New central actors in the rising civil society turn out to be civic associations and NGOs formed around single issues, such as environment, retirement, and human rights. When a multi-sector coalition occurs in contemporary Mexico, NGOs and civic associations are likely to play a crucial role in it.

The Future of Cities in a Post-national Urban Age in Asia – Corporate Globopolis versus Vernacular Cosmopolis

The long held idea of the city as theater of social life is being replaced by a historically new paradigm of the city as an “urban sector” posed as an “engine of growth” with government in service of a globalizing corporate economy. In Asia support for this new paradigm is coming from the neo-developmental state that is facilitating the emergence of a corporate managed “mixed assemblage” of denationalized spaces that are part of emerging intercity networks rising out of the nation-state to articulate global flows of capital. Millions of international migrant workers in Asia add to a new era of post-national urbanization. However, democratic reforms, devolution of government, and the rise of civil society are rising to challenge corporatization by championing issues of social justice, the right to the city, and the vernacular neighborhood. As the dynamics continue to interplay, a contest over the future of the city is emerging between the city as an inclusive cosmopolis of diversity versus the city as a corporate globopolis of networked privatized spaces for elites. Of particular interest are the ways in which transborder intercity networks based on social cooperation rather than competitive corporate relations can create new synergies for economic resilience for secondary city regions.

China in and beyond the headlines

Introduction: China, the United States, and Convulsive Cooperation Lionel M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston Part I: In the Headlines Chapter 1: Jousting with Monsters: Journalists in a Rapidly Changing China David Bandurski Chapter 2: Youth Culture in China: Idols, Sex, and the Internet Jonathan S. Noble Chapter 3: Dismantling the Socialist Welfare State: The Rise of Civil Society in China Jessica C. Teets Chapter 4: Mutually Assured Destruction or Dependence? U.S. and Chinese Perspectives on China's Military Development Andrew S. Erickson Chapter 5: China's Environmental Tipping Point Alex L. Wang Chapter 6: China's Historic Urbanization: Explosive and Challenging Timothy B. Weston Chapter 7: The Worlds of China's Intellectuals Timothy Cheek Chapter 8: Why Does China Fear the Internet? Susan D. Blum Part II: Beyond the Headlines Chapter 9: Producing Exemplary Consumers: Tourism and Leisure Culture in China's Nation-Building Project Travis Klingberg and Tim Oakes Chapter 10: Professionals and Populists: The Paradoxes of China's Legal Reforms Benjamin L. Liebman Chapter 11: The Decriminalization and Depathologization of Homosexuality in China Wenqing Kang Chapter 12: The Evolution of Chinese Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Arab Spring Orion A. Lewis Chapter 13: Culture Industry, Power, and the Spectacle of China's Confucius Institutes Lionel M. Jensen Chapter 14: Tensions and Violence in China's Minority Regions Katherine Palmer Kaup Chapter 15: An Unharmonious Society: Foreign Reporting in China Gady Epstein Afterword: What Future for Human Rights Dialogues? John Kamm

From support to pressure: The dynamics of social and governmental influences on environmental law enforcement inGuangzhouCity,China

AbstractThis paper examines how changes in governmental and social influences affect environmental enforcement in Guangzhou city, China, between 2000 and 2006. The paper finds that a form of “decentered regulation” has developed. Regulatory enforcement is no longer the sole affair of the government and the regulatory bureaucracy, but has been increasingly influenced by societal forces. The transformation over time shows the promises and limits of decentered regulation in Guangzhou's dynamic authoritarian setting. Analyzing a set of longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews, the paper finds that by 2006, the rise of civil society and its increased support for protecting the environment had a double‐edged impact on the enforcement of environmental regulations. The paper demonstrates that on the one hand, by 2006, when government support for enforcement was low, societal forces developed an ability to counterbalance such lack of governmental support and positively influence enforcement. However, it also shows that when government support was high, a concurrent rise in societal support created a negative effect on enforcement. Thus too much societal support can become an enforcement burden.

Evaluation in Latin America: Paradigms and practices

AbstractThis chapter addresses the development of evaluation, as a practice and as a field of knowledge, throughout Latin America in relation to the sociopolitical context, including characteristics of the state and its relations with civil society. It comes from the perspectives of evaluation as a learning tool, as a means to improve accountability and transparency in public administration, and as a dialogic device. The political context is described in terms of three historical moments: (a) the existence of the welfare state, (b) the withdrawal of the state in the framework of the Washington consensus and the emergence of neoconservative policies, and (c) the return of the state and the rise of civil society and active politics. Finally, there is an analysis of opportunities and challenges facing contemporary policy evaluators and decision makers. ©Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

Building civil society on rubble: Citizenship and the politics of culture in Taiwan

This article explores a path to organizing politics that differs from the Western model of civil society. I want to argue, first, through analysis of a case in Taiwan, that the state’s technologies of governance have radically restructured notions of the social and in turn the way people practice politics; second, as culture has itself become a crucial contest site, the contest has in turn given rise to new forms of political action; and third, that, ironically, the rise of civil society has occurred alongside the revitalization of tradition. In other words, presumably shared “tradition” inspires individuals’ political actions, which in practice operate quite separately from the premise of liberal individualism. I conclude that we should look very carefully at the political and social context in which the civil society emerges, and then we can determine in what ways it is connected to people.

Decentered Authoritarian Regulation in China: Changes in Social and Political Influences on the Effectiveness of Environmental Law Enforcement in Guangzhou City

This paper examines how regulation functions in China’s dynamic authoritarian setting through the study of changes in political and social influences on environmental enforcement in Guangzhou city between 2000 and 2006. The paper finds that a form of 'decentered regulation' has developed in the dynamic authoritarian context of Guangzhou city, as regulatory enforcement is no longer the sole affair of the government and the regulatory bureaucracy, but has been increasingly influenced by societal forces. It was found that by 2006, the rise of civil society and its increased support for the environment had had a double-edged impact on the enforcement of environmental regulations. While in 2000 societal support improved enforcement effectiveness perceived by enforcement officials if local government support was high, by 2006, societal support improved their perceived enforcement effectiveness only in cases where political support was low. When political support was high, extra societal support for environmental regulation produced a negative effect on enforcement effectiveness. The transformation over time shows the promise and limits of decentered regulation in Guangzhou’s dynamic authoritarian setting. It demonstrates that there is a consistent ability of societal forces to counterbalance governments who do not support their own regulation. However, it also shows that with the rise of civil society and increased concerns over social instability, a resultant overburdening of political and social pressures can jointly create a negative effect on enforcement.

Global Human Rights Awareness, Education and Democratization

The 1990s was the era of human rights awareness, democratic transitions, and growing involvement of international organizations and the nongovernmental sector in human rights education (HRE). The UN Decade for HRE from 1995–2004 was not only born out of the initiatives and pressures of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) but it also actively triggered many new private initiatives and commitments by governments to increase HRE. New information technologies, globalization, and the rise of civil society paved the way for new strategies and methods to disseminate the idea of human rights worldwide. With this in mind, two aspects will be discussed in this article. First, how HRE can become an integral part of all formal education systems. In this respect I will discuss the role of governments and state responsibility. Second, there were shifts and developments that made HRE an adaptable and coherent education concept oriented towards future challenges such as climate changes or migration. Coherent international concepts and a clear definition of HRE should help avoid the misuse of education in human rights for political or ideological reasons.

Why can't civil society media grow in Serbia?

This article starts with basic information about historical developments and circumstances concerning Serbia as a country still in the process of transition. Media restructuring is explained from the point of view of an activist who has been fighting for civil society media both in research and practice. The process of transition that is taking place in Serbia is a good opportunity for an attempt to establish a third media sector. However, this endeavour has been unsuccessful so far because most media organizations restructuring from government monopoly have chosen the commercial privatization option, even though civil society media are a legally sanctioned and recognized option. This article presents results that are far from optimistic. The main part of the article is dedicated to reasons that explain how a specific type of broadcasting media has been prevented from growing in Serbia. The civil society media model was, and still is, a blind spot of media transition. It is ignored in the political sphere, and the public is not properly informed about it. Journalists are not keen to try media restructuring in the direction of civil society media either, as a survey of their opinions and attitudes shows. The survey indicates that professional journalists also have poor knowledge about civil society media as an alternative to privatization. Consequently, they did not attempt to make use of civil society media legislation in the restructuring of their own media organizations. An encouraging finding of the survey was that working journalists are aware, in principle, of the liberating and participatory potential of people's media. It seems that only the rise of civil society in Serbia can create the societal conditions in which civil society media can graduate from hope to reality.