Civil society and development geography

The elusive concept of `civil society' has become a major `buzz word' within development literature and practice. While interviewing a range of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community groups in El Salvador in the summer of 1997, I realized the extent to which the term has now become common parlance. In particular, I was impressed by the way in which civil society was constantly referred to by those working in Salvadorean organizations. However, it also raised the question as to how a term such as civil society with its roots in seventeenth and eighteenth-century social and political philosophy, and discussed by Hegel, Marx, Gramsci and de Tocqueville among others, was being used by grassroots development workers in Latin America (see also Pearce, 1997a). This experience, coupled with the fact that the concept was appearing fairly consistently in the development literature, has prompted me to focus this year's progress report on the issue of civil society. While the eclecticism of development studies means that this review does not concentrate solely on the work of development geographers, the issue of civil society has been increasingly addressed from a geographical perspective. In a recent article in this journal, Glassmann and Samatar (1997) identify state±civil society relations as central theoretical issues within development geography, and something which should form part of future frameworks for analysing third-world states. It is also illuminating that much of the literature on civil society adopts spatial metaphors in discussion of civil society (see Marston, 1995; also Kelly, 1997, on the use of scalar metaphors with respect to globalization). For example, civil society is `a space which reflects the social divisions of society as a whole' (Pearce, 1997b: 72), or `a space for multiple groups to compete for access to decision-makers' (Brinkerhoff and Kulibaba, 1996: 136), or `a potential location of power outside the state' (VonDoepp, 1996: 27) (emphasis added). With these metaphors in mind, this review addresses the origins of the term civil society, and how and why it has re-emerged within the development field. Of particular importance here is the way in which civil society captures a set of ideas within recent discourse in relation to structural adjustment policies, decentralization, notions of participation, empowerment and democratization, and the role of NGOs.