CIAO DATE: 11/2008
February 2005
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
This paper comes out of some research that I was able to support using my Canada Research Chair. Dr. Wayland and I were interested to explore several questions about global civil society. We wanted to review the various ways in which it is defined, and whether these definitions had varying implications for whether global civil society represented a novel phenomenon or was continuous with more long-standing processes. In these respects, we join others in the working paper series who have worked on global civil society issues: Jackie Smith, Alex Khasnabish, and Rhoda Hassmann.
We examine two possibly competing hypotheses on the origins of global civil society. The first suggests that global civil society has been developing rationally over a long period of time, continuous with the development of domestic civil society in democracies. The second postulates global civil society to be a relatively new phenomenon, one that has emerged to respond to unprecedented challenges to democracy as a result of globalization. Drawing on a case study of global politics surrounding plant biotechnology, we evaluate these two hypotheses. Our findings support the second, more institutionalist, possibility. We then use these findings to comment on how global civil society might be defined and on its relationship to democracy. A somewhat shortened version of this paper will be published later this year in Global Governance.
Resource link: The Origins of Global Civil Society and Non-Territorial Governance: Some Empirical Reflections [PDF] - 117K