In Lucknow, India, embroiderers belonging to the Self- Employed Women’s
Association enhance their skills. |
The
powers of free markets and states are often said to have spelt the end for civil
society. Not so, argues the author: the non-profit sector is booming, alongside voluntary
action
The new spectre which
is haunting the developed world is not that of the proletariat, which Karl Marx called
to our attention some 150 years ago. Rather, it is the lonely bowler, as described
by Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American
community—the alienated individual cut off from his or her social roots, lacking
bonds of trust and reciprocity, and forced to function in a universe of all against
all without those “habits of the heart,” as Alexis de Tocqueville called them, which
make human existence tolerable.
Accusing
the welfare state
This
situation has been traced in some accounts to the rise of the state and the more
formal parts of the voluntary sector, which have supposedly crowded out informal
voluntary activity and left it without a clear social function. A struggle is said
to be raging between two epic foes: on one side the organized structures of social
existence, chiefly the state and formal social organizations; and on the other the
self-organization of individuals, with the former emerging victorious in the world’s
more developed regions, while true citizen self-organization holds its own, mainly
in less developed regions.
In reality, we seem to be in the midst of a “global associational revolution”—a massive
upsurge of organized private voluntary activity, of structured citizen action outside
the boundaries of the market and the state. It may well prove to be as momentous
a feature of the late 20th century as the rise of the nation-state was in the late
19th century.
Why is it happening now? The answer lies in four crises and two revolutions.
The first of these impulses is the perceived crisis of the modern welfare state,
the growing sense that in Western Europe and North America, it has become overloaded,
and expectations have outrun the capacity of state-delivered welfare to deliver.
Far from simply protecting individuals against unreasonable risk, the welfare state
stands accused of stifling initiative, absolving people of personal responsibility
and encouraging dependence.
A crisis of development has arisen alongside this. The oil shocks of the 1970s and
the recession of the early 1980s dramatically changed the outlook for developing
countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia and parts of Latin America, average
per capita incomes began to fall. One result has been a growing consensus about the
limitations of the state as an agent of development, and a new-found interest in
“assisted self-reliance” or “participatory development,” an aid strategy that stresses
the engagement of grassroots energies through NGOs.
A worsening global environmental crisis—fuelled partly by the continuing poverty
of developing countries, and partly by the wasteful practices of the wealthy—has
also stimulated citizens into taking action on their own.
Finally, the collapse of the socialist experiments in Central and Eastern Europe
has deepened scepticism about the abilities of government to satisfy the full range
of human needs. While the promise of socialism had long been suspect, the economic
regression of the mid-1970s helped destroy what limited legitimacy the communist
system had retained. This failure ushered in a search for new ways to satisfy unmet
needs, leading not only to the formation of market-oriented cooperative enterprises,
but also experimentation with a host of NGOs.
Beyond these four crises, two further developments also explain the recent surge
of third-sector organizations.
The first is the dramatic revolution in communications that took place during the
1970s and 1980s. The widespread dissemination of the computer, fibre-optic cable,
fax, television and satellites opened the world’s most remote areas to the communications
links required for mass organization and concerted action. This development was accompanied
by a significant increase in education and literacy. Between 1970 and 1985, adult
literacy rates in the developing world rose from 43 to 60 percent.
Awakening
the global bourgeoisie
The
combined expansion of literacy and communications has made it far easier for people
to organize and mobilize. Authoritarian regimes that had successfully controlled
their own communications networks have grown powerless to stop the flow of information
through satellite dishes and faxes. Isolated activists can more easily strengthen
their resolve, exchange experiences, and maintain links with sympathetic colleagues
at home or abroad.
Finally, the economic expansion of the 1960s and early 1970s produced a new global
bourgeoisie which has helped promote third-sector growth. During this period the
world economy grew five percent per year, with all regions sharing in the expansion—in
fact the growth rate of the USSR, East European and developing countries exceeded
that of industrial market economies. In Latin America, Asia and Africa, this growth
helped create a sizeable urban middle class frustrated by the lack of real economic
opportunity and often, real political participation. When economic conditions deteriorated
after the 1970s oil shock, these new elites turned to NGOs in response, providing
much of the leadership that has fuelled third-sector growth.
A
wish-list for the non-profit sector
The
result has been the emergence of an organized, private, non-profit sector that has
quietly taken its place as a major economic, social and political force in nations
around the world. Work done in 22 countries for the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit
Sector Project has revealed that non-profit organizations accounted for five percent
of the workforce, not including the involvement of an estimated 11 million full-time
unpaid volunteers. It also revealed that, as a general rule, the larger the non-profit
sector, the more extensive the level of volunteering, underlining the fact that voluntarism
is in some sense a social and not just an individual act.
What all of this suggests is the need for a new approach to address public problems.
Two paradigms have dominated our thinking up to now. The first stresses sole reliance
on the market, and the other sole reliance on the state. But the market model, though
it has recently staged a remarkable recovery, essentially collapsed in the Great
Depression of 1929. The public sector model fell with the Berlin Wall. The temptation
will be strong among third sector activists to advance the “non-profit sector” as
the panacea, and to urge complete reliance upon it.
Without denying the vital contribution that non-profit institutions can make, we
should be wary of claiming more for the sector than it can deliver. We have learned
over the past 100 years that today’s problems are too complex for any one sector
to handle.
What this suggests is that the appropriate paradigm for the 21st century is one of
partnership and a politics of collaboration—i.e. a “new governance” that emphasizes
collaboration, not separate action, by the different sectors as the best hope for
achieving meaningful progress. This is the true meaning of the “civil society” about
which we hear so much today—not a sector, but a relationship among sectors, and between
them and citizens, in which all are actively engaged in addressing public problems.
Voluntarism has an important part to play in achieving such civic engagement. It
can propel institutions into engaging in such collaborative efforts and can serve
as the social grease to lubricate the resulting cooperation. Given the suspicions
that often exist on all sides, this will not be an easy future to achieve or to manage.
But it is the one that seems to me to offer the greatest prospects. |
