How local civil society organizations adapt, survive, and thrive under different regimes and resource constraints
As authoritarianism spreads around the globe, what allows civil society to survive—and even thrive—under pressure? Most research to date on civil society, the sphere of voluntary associations, civic organizations, and collective action independent of the state has focused on external forces such as colonization, foreign aid, and globalization, without paying sufficient attention to the role of local agency, institutions, and social context.
Civil Society Is Local argues that robust grassroots civil society organizations (CSOs) are central to democratic recovery. Their capacity to innovate new strategies to access resources has sustained civil society through hard times, even amid political and economic instability. Case studies of local civil society in less-studied contexts—Georgia, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Uruguay, Liberia, Nepal, Poland, and Thailand—demonstrate how civil societies evolve in dynamic ways as organizations rise and fall in relation to government openness and how they respond to changes in regulations and philanthropic resources.
Civil Society Is Local provides valuable insights into how civil society develops in different legal and cultural contexts. It speaks to nonprofit and NGO practitioners and to scholars of comparative and global civil society, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
Reviews
"As a scholar of comparative and global civil society, I find Civil Society Is Local especially timely and compelling. The book challenges conventional, often Western-centered understandings of civil society by bringing locally- grounded experiences into global conversation, demonstrating how history, culture, politics, and global forces shape diverse civil societies worldwide."—Bok Gyo Jeong, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Associate Chair, Department of Criminal Justice and Public Affairs, Kean University
About the Author
Elizabeth A. Bloodgood is a professor of political science at Concordia University. Her research on NGOs' emergence and adaptation to national regulations and data environments appears in Voluntas, NVSQ, and the European Political Science Review, and in Beyond the Boomerang (2022), coedited with Christopher Pallas.
Anna Domaradzka is an associate professor and director of the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies at the University of Warsaw, specializing in sociological and organizational approaches to CSOs and social movements. Her research has appeared in Voluntas, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Nonprofit Policy Forum, and Voluntaris. She has coedited the Handbook on Urban Social Movements (2024) and The New Social and Impact Economy (2021) and coauthored A Shrinking Space for Civil Society? (2016).
