The International Journal
of Not-for-Profit Law

Volume 6, Issue 1, September 2003

A publication of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law

Global Civil Society: An Overview

By Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, and Regina List
Baltimore, Maryland, USA: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 2003. $12

Reviewed by Jonathan Nelms*

A publication of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, Global Civil Society: An Overview seeks to introduce the reader to the worldwide civil society sector, that gray area between the market and the state that combines cultural centers, healthcare providers, universities, environmental groups, human rights organizations, soccer clubs, soup kitchens, and much more. The book's ambitious mission is made difficult not only by the enormousness of the sector, but by the seemingly contradictory impulses that the sector aims to serve: the desire of participants to act independently in order to better their own lives, and the knowledge that improving the greater community is often the only way that they can improve their individual situations.  

The authors begin with a broad definition. Under their "structural-operational definition," a civil-sector organization is an entity that is private, not-for-profit in orientation, self-governing, and voluntary in nature (employees of civil-sector organizations may be paid, of course, but participation or membership must not be mandatory). 

Next, the authors examine civil society efforts in developing, developed, and transitional countries. They find that the worldwide civil sector amounts to a $1.3 trillion industry that employs nearly 40 million people; if it were a country, it would have the seventh-largest GDP in the world. Further breakdowns note differences in how civil-sector organizations are funded, how extensively they rely on professional staffs as opposed to volunteers, and how NGOs in a given region are split between those that provide services and those that perform purely expressive functions. The book examines the sector in a variety of sociopolitical clusters, regional groupings, and developmental levels, and thereby illustrates how much civil society organizations differ even as they pursue the common goal of getting more people involved in their communities.

The Overview does an excellent job of introducing the sector and its diversity, especially to the newcomer. For the expert, the Overview is just that--an overview of a far broader and deeper study, which is ongoing at Johns Hopkins. Readers who know what they are looking for may do well to skim the Overview and proceed to the project's online resources. The planned second volume of Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector, with this Overview as an introductory chapter, will cover the civil society sector in each of the thirty-five countries in greater depth. The full work will be released in December 2003. 

* Jonathan Nelms is a second-year student at the Georgetown University Law Center.  He is currently serving as an intern at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.

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