Ambiguities of global civil society

Towards a Global Civil Society

Loading “Social Issues - Measuring religion in global civil society.”

Across the social sciences, research has accumulated focusing on what has been termed a "global civil society" (Cox 1999; Wapner 1996) and a corresponding "global" or "world culture." (Boli and Thomas 1999; Featherstone 1990). Although scholars of global culture vary in terms of the questions they pose and the arguments they advance, there is one point upon which they tacitly seem to agree: glo...

Forest Certification as a Global Civil Society Regulatory Institution

Forest certification is a process through which transnational networks of diverse actors set and enforce standards for the management of forests around the world. The central purpose of forest certification programs is to verify for interested outsiders that the management activities of certified enterprises are acceptable and appropriate. In doing so certification programs take on important pu...

Global civil society? The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development

In the face of mounting environmental degradation and persistent poverty over the previous decade, Johannesburg’s World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) of August and September 2002 inherited a number of unmet accords from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. Consequently, the United Nations Stakeholder Forum Implementation Conference (IC) was convened to integrate civil society stakeh...

The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: National and Global Influences on Transnational Association

Recent decades have seen an explosion of transnational networking and activism, but participation varies widely around the globe. Using negative binomial regression, we explore how national and global political and economic factors shape this “uneven geography” of participation in transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). Contrary to assumptions in popular discourse, we find a contin...