Edwards - Civil Society

Table of Contents

For Cora

My own civil society

Copyright Michael Edwards 2014

The right of Michael Edwards to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2004 by Polity Press

Second edition published in 2009 by Polity Press

This third edition first published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7935-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7936-5 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8429-1 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8428-4 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Preface

Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, the number of searches for civil society recorded by Google each year has fallen by 70 percent not a particularly rigorous indicator of interest and support perhaps, but surprising to those like me who once saw civil society as the big idea for the century to come, as I put it in my original Preface. Of course, people still organize themselves for voluntary, collective action, and episodes like the Arab Spring continue to hit the headlines, only to subside into less intense activity once the streets and squares have been cleared of protestors and police. Perhaps this is inevitable given that such bursts of civic energy are difficult to sustain after their immediate causes have been addressed, and in the face of widespread repression and insecurity. As I write this Preface the same script is being re-enacted in Istanbul's Taksim Square and across the cities of Brazil met, as usual, by tear gas and batons rather than by greater openness to reforms. Even the few positive attempts by politicians to nurture civic action have receded, with Britain's Big Society getting smaller by the day, and little sign that widespread grassroots participation in Barack Obama's re-election campaign has had any impact on the willingness of his government to pursue a more radical agenda in the USA.

To me, however, these facts change little about the significance of civil society in the long-term evolution of politics and culture. The reality of activism in most settings has always been less glamorous than the headlines may suggest, and strong social movements are comparatively rare. The power that people have to shape their societies is usually channeled through their day-to-day participation in voluntary associations and communities; churches, mosques and synagogues; labor unions, political parties and other expressions of normal civic life. In , I use the metaphor of civil society as an iceberg with its peaks above the waterline in the form of high-profile organizations and events, and the great mass of civic interaction hidden underneath. Examples like the Arab Spring are significant in and of themselves, but perhaps of longer-term importance is what is happening below the surface. Since the early 2000s there is increasing evidence that much of the ice is melting as face-to-face civic interaction becomes less popular or more difficult to sustain. Or perhaps the iceberg is simply reshaping itself under the influence of new developments in technology, social media and the market, with consequences for civil society that may be positive, negative, or somewhere in between. It is these longer-term, subterranean developments that are the focus of the third edition of this book.

One of the benefits of revising a manuscript at regular intervals is that new ideas and interpretations can be added along the way. I have received a good deal of critical feedback from readers who have used this book in academic courses, commissions of inquiry, policy-making processes, public education, and strategic planning for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations and other donor agencies. So in this revision I have added two new sections on subjects that have developed rapidly since the second edition was produced in 2009. The first concerns the overlaps between civil society and the market that are producing an interesting breed of hybrid institution variously known as social enterprises or social entrepreneurs, backed up by venture philanthropy, impact investing and other forms of financing that are heavily influenced by business thinking. These issues are treated in as a potentially important shift in the ways in which we understand the constitution of the good society.

The second set of developments revolve around social media and the increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in civic interaction probably the most talked-about phenomenon in the civil society debate in recent years. Such technologies, and the shifts in communication they facilitate, have the potential to greatly expand at least some parts of the public sphere, and so they are dealt with in explores in more detail emerging forms of participatory democracy, in which civil society has a central role to play. Finally, I have updated the case studies, data, examples and references used throughout.

As this book has evolved since the early 2000s I have come to appreciate two longer-term trends that underpin all the different revisions, and that now run more clearly throughout the text. The first is the absolute necessity of building, sustaining and revitalizing the infrastructure of citizen action at the grassroots level, without which civil society cannot function in any of its guises. If it is worth telling, the story of civil society has to be written not by bureaucrats or billionaires, but by millions of ordinary people who wish to rearrange the geometry of human relationships in ways that speak to their visions of the good society. The creation of civil society is a human drama, not a technical exercise in government planning or a supply chain in a business in which inputs and outputs can be manipulated and controlled. Otherwise there is little hope that citizens will be able to hold power to account from a position of independence, or come together to determine their own futures other than as recipients of top-down direction and the incentives of the market.

It is particularly important those most affected by poverty and discrimination are able to express themselves directly in civil society action so that voluntary associations, political participation, and public debates are not dominated by groups claiming to act on their behalf. And that means protecting and enhancing the self-governing organizations that have always formed the core of civic interaction, through which the mass of the population can activate their energies as creative citizens. The homogenizing of civil society ecosystems discussed in variously described in terms of corporatization, NGO-ization and greater bureaucracy poses a special threat to the collective action capacities of low-income and other marginalized communities, as exemplified by the attempted destruction of the labor movement in the USA, for example, or the dramatic decline in support for community organizing among philanthropic foundations. Yet it is precisely this hard, basic, civic or public work that is most under threat today from a combination of widespread economic insecurity, rising individualism and inequality in every sphere of life, political repression and increasing government surveillance, and the popularity of celebrity humanitarians, billionaire philanthropists and the hype-merchants of social media and the market, who apply a sheen that gilds the surface of civil society in many countries but who do little to build it at its core. Unglamorous, unheralded and often unsupported, this is the civil society we simply cannot afford to lose, since we cannot achieve anything that is of real value to all of us by working as individuals, however successful, but only through collective action, like an orchestra instead of a brilliant soloist or a tapestry instead of a few rich threads.