Civil Society, NGOs and the State

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2008:

In the nearly two decades since the end of the Cold War, the world has witnessed a remarkable rejection of the big plans and projects that characterized the period of high-modernization that existed between the Bretton Woods pact of 1944 and the end of the par value system in 1971. In place of hydroelectric engineering feats, geographically based industrial zones, and political experiments in 'third world welfare states' a multitude of social policy initiatives and international development programs tied to smaller, more efficient, face to face, culturally appropriate, and voluntary civil society based organizations have proliferated. This has spawned a sea of buzzwords, acronyms, and theoretical assumptions such as social capital, capacity building, governance and accountability, empowerment, participatory development, and non-governmental, community based, and third sector organizations (NGOs, CBOs, and TSOs). These new civil society approaches to international development assistance have become hegemonic and ubiquitous across all sectors of the development industry from small grassroots organizations to large multilateral donors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For many policy scientists these changes represent a welcome move towards sustainability, development on a human scale, and an end to the outrageous geopolitically driven excesses of the Cold War. However, some have argued that these approaches are the harvest of an exhaustion of utopian energies, post-modern fatalism, and a retreat from enlightenment visions of rationalism, progress, and the perfectability of mankind. This subject will examine critically different perspectives.

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This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• work independently

• communicate knowledge effectively

• think creatively

• prepare a research paper