In Search of a Political Agenda For Civil Society in the North

摘要

In the development community at large, civil society has come to mean two things: the world of NGOs working mainly at the grassroot level to provide a number of different services to the population; and activists who voice political concerns that were previously left out of more formal political debates: gender issues, protection of the environment, development with a human face, cultural diversity, among others. Of course, these two groups overlap: there is, indeed, a growing sense that the kind of work done by NGOs at the local level needs to be extended at the national and international political level so that the root problems as well as the symptoms are addressed. In this article I am concerned with the political agenda of civil society groups in the North, as opposed to that in the South, which is addressed elsewhere in this issue by Smitu Kothari.