Introduction

Over the past 50 years or so, civil society – and particularly the third sector within it – has attracted growing attention as a key site for nurturing the active citizenship that is seen by many as the bedrock of a democratic society.

A number of factors have contributed to this current interest. Revolutions against authoritarian regimes, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently, were hailed at the time as demonstrating that citizens were taking power to themselves. Meanwhile, falling turnouts at elections and evidence of growing apathy or mistrust of formal politics have led governments in the more established democracies to look for ways of reinforcing their legitimacy and revitalising their own democratic systems. The spread of neoliberalism to many parts of the globe found in civil society and the third sector an opportunity to roll back the frontiers of the state. In contrast, those alarmed at the rise of neoliberalism and the market turned to civil society more generally as a means of countering the market's worst excesses. Against this background, concepts of communitarianism and social capital also found a ready audience. After a decade or so of structural adjustment, even global financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, stressed the need ‘to engage the energies and enthusiasm of those at the grass-roots’ (Salamon, 1995, p 257).

In this book, we set out to unpack a number of the central assumptions that lay behind this current interest in civil society and the third sector. We started by asking how the concepts of active citizenship, civil society and the third sector have been constructed, dissected and reconstructed, both internationally and more locally. We then discussed the differing claims that can be made about the way in which third sector organisations nurture active citizenship: as a vehicle for agency, association, democracy and cosmopolitanism. The first part of the book ended by exploring the varying roles that the third sector plays in relation to market and state, taking account of differing ideologies, and sociopolitical contexts, as well as the scope for human agency within wider structural constraints. We have paid particular attention throughout to the ways in which neoliberal globalisation has framed the relationship between the third sector and active citizenship in different contexts.