At annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, you can now hear the term ‘civil society’ referred to in every presentation and in every informal fireside conversation. The world, it seems, no longer consists of two sectors – public and private, state and corporate – there is a third: NGOs and CSOs (non-government organisations and civil society organisations). The Third Sector now wears suits and ties. Its CEOs now mingle seamlessly with those from banks, energy companies, media giants and government agencies.
The problem with this embrace of ‘civil society’ is that it bears little resemblance to what civil society actually is or means. Most of civil society is not constituted formally or headed up by a CEO. Just 40 years ago, very few not-for-profits or charities had CEOs at all: that term was associated with the corporate sector, and few community groups or charities had even contemplated mimicking the language and culture of that very different sphere. But in just four decades, all this has changed, and it has changed at an extraordinarily rapid rate, with very little public discussion or scrutiny of the enormity of this organizational transformation and its short and long term social impact.
The silence in public debate is partly attributable to the complexity of the social sector and its diverse organizational forms and social purposes. Some parts of the sector identity as NGOs; others rely on informal social bonds and practices. Some have representative ‘peak’ bodies; many do not. Some identity as part of a Third Sector; most are unfamiliar with this term. Fewer still understand themselves to be part of the ‘civil society’ now routinely referred to in UN management-speak and diplomatic discourse.
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In Australia, there are 700,000 community organizations (voluntarily-formed groups with a formal associational character). Of these, just 35,000 or 5% are run by professional managers; the other 665,000 or 95% are entirely voluntary in character, with no paid staff. Should any Australian not-for-profit be invited to Davos, you can be certain that it would be one of the 5% run by paid managers. The other 95% do not register on the radar screens of public and private sector executives. Yet the 5% do almost 100% of the public talking about and for the third sector, not-for-profits and charities, and impose their own self-understanding and culture on the sector as a whole.
Outside the 700,000 formal community organizations in Australia, there is a vast array of additional social forms, in families, kinship networks, neighbourhoods, friendship circles and informal support groups. These too are part of civil society. Overlapping with these are faith and religious associations, which encompass both formal and informal groups. And interspersed amongst all of these are a broad range of micro-economic units constituted as family businesses, family farms, and household production and trading entities. These too are part of civil society: their constitutive relationships are relational and familial in character, outside both state and corporate sectors.
This vast array of social relationships and associations constitutes civil society. It is made up of the things we do as civilians, freely and voluntarily, in association with others, outside the state and the market. Social well-being is largely determined in and through our relationships in this civil sphere: these relationships are personal and horizontal in nature. State-citizen relationships are vertical and coercive. Business-customer interactions are monetary exchanges. Our experience of love, care and belonging is formed by our relationships in the civil sphere, not by the state or the market. Our lives are subsequently shaped, battered and sometimes improved by the state and the market, but the primary formation of our unique selves and our values is the work of civil society.
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Given the importance of civil society to our personal and social life, how is it that the Great and the Good at Davos can confuse all this with the CEOs of NGOs? In fairness, they are reflecting wider trends that have been entrenched for a long time. Civil society was rendered invisible by the politics and ideologies of the 20th century. The only part of it that has become visible in the last four decades is the NGO component. When the larger NGOs began speaking the same language as the managerial elites of the public and private sectors, they were recognized – and embraced as long lost cousins. The rest of civil society – the dispersed and anonymous mix of relational ties and associations that shape our personal and social lives – is invisible to political movements, governments and public policy.
Does any of this matter very much? For more than a century, political movements, governments and public policy focussed exclusively on states and markets, and ignored civil society. When they focussed only on state-citizen and business-customer interactions, they ignored the things that are most important to most of us, most of the time.
If today we are pondering why politicians and governments seem detached from their societies, and why political discourse no longer inspires or motivates us, we will only really comprehend the full scope of this phenomenon if we recall the century-long disregard by the political class (on both Left and Right) of civil society and its constitutive relationships.
The pincer movement of Left and Right that we inherited from the 20th century cut civil society from our gaze. If you didn’t like the focus on the market and commercial interactions, you were on the Left. If you didn’t like the focus on the state and the public sector, you were on the Right. These notions of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ formed a stable linear structure for politics without civil society.
The big events of the 20th century compounded this exclusion of civil society:
- Historically, the 20th century was the century of concentrated power (Communism, Fascism, World Wars, Big Business). Civil society is dispersed, localised, small in scale.
- Ideologically, the philosophies of the 20th century were individualist-collectivist (Fordism, Marxism, Nazism, Existentialism, Scientific Management, Neo-Liberalism).
- Organisationally, labour unions and corporations were easy to organize. Before the Internet it was difficult and costly to organise the disparate components of civil society.
These dynamics gave us the familiar structure of politics that we’ve inherited from the 20th century:
- Left-Right viewed the public sector/private sector as the solution to every problem. They regarded the imposition of state or market solutions on society as the proper business of government.
- Left-Right viewed only individuals and governments as social actors. They could not see associations of individuals and their interactions. They could not see individualism-collectivism as flip sides of the same coin.
- Left-Right served core public/private sector constituencies. They ignored the third sector (households, associations, social enterprises, cooperatives). They ignored family and small-businesses and the self-employed.
- Left-Right viewed government as ‘management’, the execution of top-down, corporate-style administration. They used political parties as their instruments of management, based on command-and-control cultures.
But today, this Left-Right structure of politics cannot solve 21st century problems, for four reasons:
- The active participation of citizens is required to solve the pressing social, economic and environmental problems of our time. The imposition of state or market prescriptions on society does not work.
- Associations of individuals – citizens and consumers, big and small – are key social actors. They always have been, able to accomplish tasks beyond the scope of individuals.
- Self-employed people, micro and family businesses are a vast and growing constituency that does not fit the traditional public or private sector, and does not welcome the imposition of cultures generated from those sectors. They will shape electoral outcomes for years to come.
- Top-down ‘management’ of society and organisations runs counter to the practice of participation in distributed networks in the 21st century. It is ‘counter-intuitive’ to the online generation.
All this requires a regeneration of civil society. But ironically, the official recognition of civil society by public and private sector elites is an impediment to this regeneration. Instead of a re-discovery of the diversity of civil society and its importance for the nurturing of personal and social well-being, the Great and the Good have embraced only the managerial, while ignoring the continued incursion of states and markets into the civil sphere.
Centralised states and concentrated markets are corroding civil society and contracting the space available for it. Voluntary and relational components of social life are being colonised by both states and markets. In developed countries, many not-for-profit organisations have been turned into service delivery instruments for the state. In developing countries, a large proportion of NGOs have become instruments for delivery of foreign aid. In both settings, contractual transactions have entered social, associational and familial space, and upturned relational models of functioning. NGOs drawn into these processes have become corporatised beyond recognition and detached from their founding purpose and culture.
In an age of distributed networks, powered by the internet, civil society has an opportunity to come into its own. But we await an authentic public voice to speak for, and represent, its diversity and critical importance for our well-being.
Vern Hughes is the Director of Civil Society Australia.
May 2018
