Civil Society at Crossroads: Shifts, Challenges, Options?

What are the roles, capacities, contributions and limitations of civil society in changing local and global contexts? This report is an output from the The Civil Society at Crossroads initiative in which regional focal institutions worked with a wide variety of local partners to identify and document the stories of civil society.

Two kinds of narratives have emerged from discussions:

• The first kind told the story of civil society in a country over a period of two to three decades; these included India, Cambodia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Netherlands, Russia, Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK)
• the second kind of narrative focused upon a particular issue around which a citizen movement or civil society actions were mobilised. These included the anti-corruption movement in India, the farmers' movement against land grab in Cambodia, the commuters struggle in Indonesia, the citizens' protest in Malawi and Uganda, the Occupy movement in UK, the citizens' movement in Greece, the student movement in Chile, the women's movement in Uruguay, the campaign for LGT rights in Argentina, 'roof over our heads' in Latin America and Makassar community actions in the Netherlands

Within these contexts the project has aimed to look at the following issues:

• how do endogenous, informal, spontaneous, sporadic and emerging forms of civil society operate locally?
• what types of interactions do these informal formations have with more formally constituted actors (like NGOs)?
• what are the dynamics of interactions between civil society and political society at the national and sub-national levels?
• how does private business interact with and influence the local civil society? Where are the points of convergence, divergence and contestations?
• what is the nature of indigenous, local and sub-national civil society in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries? What resource and capacity challenges do they face today?
• what are the new challenges faced by civil society in emerging, middle-income societies?  What is the impact of declining international assistance in these contexts?  What patterns for resourcing civil society are evolving?