Voice and Accountability

The article assesses the importance of citizen engagement in engendering good governance in the health sector. However, citizens need an effective ‘voice' in order to be heard. Thus, the article argues for the need to utilise existing civic organizations like the rural women's associations as platforms of civic engagements. Using Akwa Ibom state as a study location, the article investigated the role of rural women's associations in citizen engagement in the primary health sector. Findings reveal that although rural women's associations are engaged in diverse socio-economic and political activities, they however do not engage in socially accountable activities. Nevertheless, findings further reveal that associations have the potentials of becoming platforms for social accountability if harnessed by development partners. The argument of the study is anchored on the participatory development approach which argues about the need for beneficiaries of development to become active participants in the development process.

Networked Collective Action and the Impeachment of President Park

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of online and offline interactions and information exchanges that took place in organizing candlelight vigils in 2016–2017 that contributed to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Interactions between agents and affordances resulted in the nation’s first removal of a president through impeachment processes. Key agents—in particular, journalists, social media influencers, citizens, activists, news organizations, and civic organizations—interacted to produce, share, and amplify cognitive and affective content resulting in massive citizen participation in candlelight vigils for 20 consecutive weeks. It provides an in-depth analysis of these and related issues based on interviews with journalists, activists, citizens, government officials, and technology company representatives and experts. The interview data are triangulated using analyses of news reports and social media posts.

After the Candles Were Extinguished

This chapter covers several issues South Korea has dealt with following President Park’s removal from office: the election of Moon Jae-in as president in May 2017, pro-Park groups’ anti-government rallies, and a public divide on potentially pardoning Park in 2021. In addition, it considers citizens’ evaluations of the impeachment candlelight vigils three years after Park’s impeachment. There is now a growing sense that the momentum for change ignited by the vigils may have been lost and that real systemic change has not been achieved. This chapter looks at how some actors within society are striving to sustain momentum for social change. While political parties and civic organizations in South Korea are experimenting with different strategies to engage citizens, some people are already demanding new forms of participatory democracy. Grass-roots organizations such as WAGL and Parti Co-op have emerged to design and implement alternative ways of incorporating citizens’ direct participation in policy decision-making processes.

Time Banks as Transient Civic Organizations? Exploring the Dynamics of Decline

Time banks have become a popular type of civic organization constructed to facilitate egalitarian economic exchange through a community-bounded currency. Especially after the recent economic crises in Europe, the rise in the number of time banks has been accompanied by relative transience and sometimes short lifespans. We adopt a relational perspective to explore the dynamics of decline in the civic engagement of a time bank in southern Germany. Using methods of longitudinal social network analysis, we analyze the relational processes and individual trajectories of members within the emerging transaction network over a period of eight years. Rather than explaining why, we have found how relational trajectories of members through a structure of core and periphery have led to creeping decline in activity and membership. Given the repeated observation that time banks and other types of alternative economic practices are often characterized by considerable volatility and potential collapse, relational thinking and network analysis are especially suited to unpacking the underlying relational mechanisms that shape these outcomes of volatility and demise.

Civil Society as Networks of Issues and Associations: The Case of Food

Scholars usually conceptualize civil society as both a discursive and an associational space. In the former, focus is on communicative practices; in the latter, attention shifts to the actors that cooperate or clash about the identification and production of collective goods. In this chapter, we sketch the contours of an approach to civil society that treats both dimensions in an integrated way. Looking at the role of food issues in urban settings as diverse as Cape Town, Bristol, and Glasgow, we borrow from social network analysis to explore first, how civic organizations combine an interest in food-related issues with attention to other themes, thus defining different, specific agendas; next, we ask if and how interest in food identifies specific clusters of cooperation within broader civil society networks.

Project-Think and the Fragmentation and Defragmentation of Civil Society in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey

By drawing from authors’ fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey, this article critically examines perceptions of project-think among civic organizations in the Middle East. As a managerial rationality, project-think has four key components: (a) a prioritization of discrete needs and discrete groups, (b) an orientation toward funding, (c) a focus on short-term and measurable results, and (d) the positioning of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as career ladders. Through unpacking these four components, we find that project-think is perceived to contribute to the fragmentation of civil society by fracturing social issues, dividing the NGO sector, isolating organizational energy, and complicating relations between groups. Simultaneously, we demonstrate that, civic actors use various strategies to circumvent the perceived impacts of fragmentation. By mapping these intertwined meanings and experiences of fragmentation and defragmentation, this study contributes to debates concerning the political effects of managerialism among civil society in the Global South.

LESS DIVIDED AFTER ETA? THE EVOLUTION OF IDEOLOGICAL CLEAVAGES IN THE BASQUE ENVIRONMENTAL FIELD, 2007–2017

The Basque Country has traditionally been considered a strongly polarized political community. The influence of the center-periphery cleavage and the shadow of political violence have conditioned many aspects of social life, including relations among civic organizations. Previous literature suggests that differences in organizations’ national identities and/or position towards ETA’s (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Country and Freedom in the Basque language) violence have often acted as cleavages fragmenting collective action fields. This research examines whether this picture changed substantially after ETA’s abandonment of violence in 2011 by taking the environmental field as a case study and looking at the evolution of patterns of interorganizational collaboration between 2007 and 2017. The results of statistical network analyses show that both Basque nationalism and ideological positions towards ETA’s use of violence had a strong influence on organizations’ decisions to collaborate with one another up to 2011, whereas during the more recent postconflict period, collaboration seems to occur in a more pluralistic and less ideologically driven fashion.

Citizen science and social movements: A case of participatory monitoring of genetically modified crops in Japan

Agrifood related social controversies tend to involve scientific issues and advocacy groups increasingly turn to citizen science (CS), participatory data taking by regular people, to produce health and environmental data. A common assumption is that CS’s value lies in the data produced, and its volume and quality decide its persuasive power. This article describes participatory monitoring of genetically engineered rapeseed (canola) in Japan to suggest that social movements can leverage CS not only for the production of scientific data but also as occasions for recruitment, political awareness-raising, and collaboration with other civic organizations. The article proposes a new framework for understanding CS–social movement relations that is multi-actor (vs. expert–laypeople dyad); process-oriented (vs. product/data-oriented); and long-term (vs. one-shot and isolated data taking). There is an increasing awareness of the diversity of CS. Even those that are led by grassroots organizations have multiple and shifting uses of data and foster varying political subjectivity among participants. The proposed framework helps to understand the dynamics that shape such heterogeneous pathways of CS.

Private and public partnerships: The Greek diaspora’s branding of Philotimo as identity

This article recognizes the discourse of philotimo as a prevalent mode of the diaspora’s representation of national identity in the context of the Greek debt crisis. It shows how this narrative adheres to the cultural technologies of nation branding to establish a positive Greek self-representation and in so doing, countering the crisis-related international devaluation of the national image. This cultural rehabilitation functions as a mode of governmentality: it seeks to shape the global perception of Greece and Greek identity for several interrelated purposes. First, in endowing value to Greek identity, it aims to restore national credibility and in turn cast Greece as an attractive destination for foreign investments. In this capacity, the narrative links national culture with global capitalism. Second, in redeeming the Greek nation as a moral nation, the branding fosters diaspora solidarity to Greece as a moral imperative. Notably, the purpose of the branding enterprise is not to merely disseminate a favourable image globally, but also to constitute Greek identity in the diaspora and Greece. Operating at the intersection of national, transnational and global processes, the narrative requires analysis that extends beyond the conventional framework of diaspora–homeland relations. The Greek branding enters a broader politics in which countries deploy their national cultures to position themselves competitively within global capitalism. From this angle, the article identifies an emergent diaspora political form – a partnership between private and civic organizations – which asserts authority to represent Greek identity globally for the purpose of economic, social and cultural gains. It concludes with a reflection about the social and political implications of this branding, as well as the role of scholars who write about this phenomenon, and more broadly about Greek national mythologies.

14 Treaty Entry into Force, Exceptions, Modifications, and Terminations

This chapter discusses the entry into force, exceptions, modifications, and terminations of investment treaties. While enunciating rules of international law governing foreign investors and investments, investment treaties at the same time incorporate various devices to regulate and limit the applicability of those rules and thereby allow contracting states to mediate tensions between demands of treaty partners and of internal pressure groups, such as labour unions, local manufacturers and merchants, and civic organizations. Such devices include treaty provisions on four matters: the entry into force of the treaty; treaty exceptions; treaty modifications; and treaty terminations. States employ the first two as part of the treaty negotiating process. On the other hand, states usually employ the latter two devices as a result of their unsatisfactory experience with a treaty that has entered into force.