Development in Practice
Volume 23, Issue 5-06, 2013
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cdip20/current

Special Issue: Civil societies at crossroads: eruptions, initiatives, and evolution in citizen activism

Abstract
This Special Issue has grown from the sense that important changes in the last two decades pose dilemmas and challenges for civil societies in many countries. The Issue reports on a series of studies of the evolving roles of civil society sectors and citizen initiatives in several regions of the world. This introduction identifies a series of events and forces that over the last two decades have fundamentally changed the contexts of civil society activities in many countries. These changes have catalyzed a wide range of citizen eruptions and initiatives on particular issues as well as national civil society evolutions in many countries. The papers in this Special Issue have resulted from a multi-country collective reflection organized by five civil society support organizations from different regions. They sought to identify roles, capacities, contributions, and limitations of civil society in these changing contexts using a variety of approaches to data collection and analysis. This introduction briefly describes the papers in the Special Issue. They include regional overviews, descriptions of national sector evolution, and cases of citizen activism in Southern and Eastern Africa, Asia, Southern Latin America, Western Europe and Russia. The final paper provides an overview of the lessons learned from comparative analysis across these and other cases and draws some of the implication of those lessons for practitioners and policy makers.