How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

Setting out to explore critically the way civil society has entered development thinking, policy and practice as a paradigmatic concept of the 21st century, Howell (development studies, U. of Sussex) and Pearce (Latin American politics, U. of Bradford) trace the historical path leading to the encounter between the ideas of development and civil society in the late 1980s and how donors have translated these into development policy an programs. They find that there are competing normative visions, which have deep roots in Western European political thought, about the role of civil society in relation to the state and market both among donors and within the societies where donors are operating. This leads to donors playing a major role in shaping the character of service provision. They also argue that their study exposes the hitherto unexplored power of the market, as opposed to solely the state, to distort donor programs. c. Book News Inc.

Using case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and including such critical countries as South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt, Civil Society focuses on the processes and politics of dismantling "corporate" (state directed) economies in the Third World in order to move toward civil societies of free associability and democracy. The book presents a number of significant findings and recommendations, for example: Civil society plays an emerging role in East Asia and Latin America but is still weak in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. No one model of development fits all countries. It is imperative to recognize and accommodate indigenous aspects of civil society in development. Corporatism will remain especially important in countries at a middle level of development as they make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

This book re-conceptualizes civil society engagement with global governance institutions in the field of development in terms of opposition. With an innovative theoretical framework, it maps and explains opposition strategies through detailed case studies on the EU, the Asian Development Bank, and the Global Forum on Migration and Development.

"Devoting particular emphasis to Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico, proposes a theory of civil society to explain the economic and political challenges for continuing democratization in Latin America"--Provided by publisher.

Constructing roads in Madagascar; forestry along Canada's Pacific Coast; water and sanitation projects in South Africa; community banking in the United States; constructing a new global system for corporate reporting. These all have something in common. They provide great illustrations of the types of profound and wise changes needed in the way we run our affairs if we are to respond to the scale of environmental and social challenges and opportunities facing us. They are examples of "societal learning and change". Today, this phenomenon is occurring across industries as diverse as resources extraction, infrastructure development, agriculture and information technology at the local, national, regional and global levels. Its essence involves the ability to create rich relationships that bridge large differences. This book describes this phenomenon for practitioners to help them address issues and develop opportunities more effectively. Building on the traditions of individual and organizational learning, this book suggests that our challenge is to create learning societies and processes. This involves both change in ourselves as individuals, but also change in the way the three key systems that make up our societies – the political system (government), economic system (business) and social system (civil society) – function by creating more robust interactions that respond to human and environmental imperatives rather than organizational ones. Societal Learning and Change presents a meta-framework that covers diverse approaches, including corporate citizenship, social responsibility, community development, private-public partnerships, inter-sectoral collaboration and sustainability strategies. It makes sense of all of these by emphasising that they all share the need to change relationships at the societal level and explaining how to do this from a systems perspective. The book helps overcome the conundrum where individual organisations are unsuccessfully trying to achieve big change with their stakeholders. Rather than stakeholder management with an organization-centric viewpoint, this book describes the importance of taking a stakeholder engagement and issue/opportunity-centric strategy. Wherever you are, you can make a contribution to shifting the paradigm through a societal learning and change strategy. The critical contribution is creating new relationships between people and organizations that traditionally would not interact but in fact have common interests. When these relationships become meaningful by addressing a problem or developing an opportunity, people begin to learn about each other and develop mutual appreciation and understanding. Often this process is complicated and confusing. People do not use words in the same way even if they speak the same formal language; they do not learn or perceive the world the same way although they may share a common culture; their organizations have diverse goals, resources and weaknesses that make working together problematic. However, it is these very differences that are the source of the value of working together. Societal Learning and Change aims to make it easier to solve differences in order to work together successfully; it does this by identifying some of the differences as sources of tension and opportunity and describing the development processes of building relationships that can produce mutually rewarding innovation that is unimaginable when the relationship begins. This is an extremely optimistic book at a time of great pessimism about the huge forces of globalization and corporate power that seem to be overwhelming us. It will be essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of organizational learning, sustainability, poverty, international development and stakeholder relations.