The Role of Advocacy in Civil Society (original) (raw)

Making Civil Society Relevant (Again)

2003

It seems that wherever one looks in the policy debates about hemispheric relations and the best ways to strengthen democracy in Latin America, the idea of “civil society” is inescapable.

Civil society and the public sphere

1993

n the 1980s, the work of Hungarian and other Eastern European intellectuals 1 was responsible for renewed attention to one of the core concepts of modern Western history, the idea of civil society. The events of 1989 catapulted this concern from academic circles to the broader public discourse. The phrase is now on the lips of foundation executives, business leaders, and politicians; it seems as though every university has set up a study group on civil society and the phrase finds its way into half the dissertations in political sociology. Too often, "civil society" is invoked without sorting out whether it means Milton Friedman's capitalist market policies or social movements like Solidarity or the sort of "political society" or "public sphere" beloved of thinkers from Montesquieu to Tocqueville to Habermas and once thought to exist mainly in cafes and coffeehouses.' The resurgence of the notion of civil society has brought it to the fore in discussions of the North American and Western European democracy as well as of the transition (one hopes to democracy) in Eastern Europe. Even more strikingly, the notion of civil society has begun to inform a range of new discussions of the practice and possibilities for democracy in East Asia. Analysts of the 1989 democracy movement in China, for example, locate one of the social bases of the protest in the emergence of new "civil society" institutionssmall entrepeneurs,

Civil Society and Civic Engagement in a Time of Change

IDS Bulletin, 2016

This article draws on contributions to the IDS 50th Anniversary Conference stream dedicated to citizen voice, agency and accountability to explore the shifting relationship between civil society, the state and the private sector, as well as looking at the nature of civic engagement. The role of digital technologies in civic engagement in the context of a turbulent new political landscape is also examined in order to understand the spaces that might be opened and closed by these technologies.

Advocacy Milieu and its Impact on Advocacy Results in Georgia

2016

Evaluations of advocacy outcomes are, in most cases, limited to assessments of the capacity of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to implement advocacy; they are commonly linked to advocacy project timeframes, and are therefore of a limited nature. With this in mind, this paper focuses on the advocacy milieu that affects advocacy outcomes, to a greater or lesser extent. The impact components or conditions reviewed in this paper are: a) state and political conditions, b) the impact of wider acceptance of advocacy issues, and c) the “motivational effect” and “theory of change” of CSOs to initiate an organization and/or policy advocacy. The article concludes that neither the unstable political environment of Georgia nor the wider acceptance of an issue by the public have an impact on policy advocacy. Instead, success of advocacy is related to the motivation to initiate civic organization and comprehension of the “theory of change.” In addition, the article reveals that in Georgia’s con...

Civil society and public sphere

1997

n the 1980s, the work of Hungarian and other Eastern European intellectuals 1 was responsible for renewed attention to one of the core concepts of modern Western history, the idea of civil society. The events of 1989 catapulted this concern from academic circles to the broader public discourse. The phrase is now on the lips of foundation executives, business leaders, and politicians; it seems as though every university has set up a study group on civil society and the phrase finds its way into half the dissertations in political sociology. Too often, "civil society" is invoked without sorting out whether it means Milton Friedman's capitalist market policies or social movements like Solidarity or the sort of "political society" or "public sphere" beloved of thinkers from Montesquieu to Tocqueville to Habermas and once thought to exist mainly in cafes and coffeehouses.' The resurgence of the notion of civil society has brought it to the fore in discussions of the North American and Western European democracy as well as of the transition (one hopes to democracy) in Eastern Europe. Even more strikingly, the notion of civil society has begun to inform a range of new discussions of the practice and possibilities for democracy in East Asia. Analysts of the 1989 democracy movement in China, for example, locate one of the social bases of the protest in the emergence of new "civil society" institutionssmall entrepeneurs,