The ongoing review of decentralisation in South Africa will defi nitely affect political parties’ legitimisation mechanisms at the local level. For this reason, one may expect the same actors, together with civil society organisations (CSOs), to be actively involved in the policy process of review. Their apparent low involvement in this process is taken as this policy brief’s starting point, wh...

This article examines whether transnational networks reconfigure state-civil society relationships in ways that lead to civil society empowerment and increased organizational capacity to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Mexico. Using a comparative case study, I identify the types of transnational networks and exchanges that both help and hinder community-based HIV/AIDS organizations (CBOs) that...

In this Health Policy article, we selected and reviewed evidence synthesised by nine knowledge networks established by WHO to support the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. We have indicated the part that national governments and civil society can play in reducing health inequity. Government action can take three forms: (1) as provider or guarantor of human rights and essential se...

Throughout the world, social cause organizations and independent media organizations work together, despite their differences and competition with each other for resources, toward creating civil society. This paper assesses the network dynamics of a system of cooperative competitors in Croatia. The research is framed from the theoretical perspectives of resource dependency, cooperation competit...

since there are various views on the civil society, in this paper the writer first introduces two main views, a limited view and a broad view, explaining the concept based on these two views. the two views, formed by social and political theorists, are firmly grounded in political and social literature. to explain the concept, the writer introduces the indexes of the civil society, the most imp...

Recent research on the geography of NGOs in Global Civil Society yearbooks has emphasized a north-west European bias. This has been taken to imply that global civil society is but a pale geographical shadow of the power concentrations in global economy and governance. Using an interlocking network model and data on 74 global NGOs with offices across 178 cities, NGO connectivity values for citie...

Politics is not the ghost in the machine of global health policy. Conceptually, it makes little sense to argue otherwise, while history is replete with examples of individuals and movements engaging politically in global health policy. Were one looking for ghosts, a more likely candidate would be democracy, which is currently under attack by a new global health technocracy. Civil society moveme...

Civil society has been regard as a prerequisite for democracy, and social networks and interpersonal trust are two important elements of civil society. By using data from the Asian Barometer Survey, this study investigates the effects of social networks and interpersonal trust on public support for democracy in three East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results of statis...

The use of eParticipation by civil society actors is rapidly evolving. New socio-technical tools, devices, applications, services, networks enable a revitalization or foster new forms of social and political actions. Currently the civil society movements adopt and shape them to better organize, inform, communicate, and disseminate their (counter-) public and the traditional political system and...