Civil society organizations and local governance in Hong Kong

Author(s):  
Eliza Wing-yee Lee

This book unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The chapters ask, how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? The book argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The chapters outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, the book demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Wisner ◽  
Alonso Brenes ◽  
Victor Marchezini

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and national NGOs (NNGOs) attempt to play many roles in disaster risk reduction (DRR) and governance of natural hazards. Although in this part of the world, disaster risk management has conventionally been the domain of government and military, a number of factors have favored engagement by civil society actors. These factors include increasing budget pressure on governments, in part due to a shift of donor finance from LAC to Africa, that predisposes them to sharing the cost of DRR. Another factor is the growing consensus worldwide that DRR must include proactive preparedness and vulnerability reduction and not simply emergency response. Besides their more recent entry into humanitarian action, civil society actors work in other roles that assist comprehensive, prospective-preventive DRR. These roles include community and local mobilization and bridging between governments and citizens. As advocates, especially in alliance with academia, they attempt to influence national government policy. Some civil society organizations also campaign on issues of malgovernance including corruption that reduce the effectiveness of DRR initiatives. NNGOs also attempt to introduce risk-bearers’ voices, knowledge, and institutional memory to policymakers. They may also help to introduce innovative local governance practices, in particular attempting to link DRR, climate change adaptation (CCA), and development service delivery. Civil society work may show the use of innovative methods and model with pilot projects the integration of DRR, CCA, and enhancement of livelihoods Civil society organizations also contribute to societal transformation through their actions to support transparency, democracy, and distributive and restorative justice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 158-168
Author(s):  
Yeni Rosilawati ◽  
Zain Rafique ◽  
Bala Raju Nikku ◽  
Shahid Habib

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (03) ◽  
pp. 69-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie McNulty

Abstract As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru’s participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized.


Author(s):  
Mona Ali Duaij ◽  
Ahlam Ahmed Issa

All the Iraqi state institutions and civil society organizations should develop a deliberate systematic policy to eliminate terrorism contracted with all parts of the economic, social, civil and political institutions and important question how to eliminate Daash to a terrorist organization hostile and if he country to eliminate the causes of crime and punish criminals and not to justify any type of crime of any kind, because if we stayed in the curriculum of justifying legitimate crime will deepen our continued terrorism, but give it legitimacy formula must also dry up the sources of terrorism media and private channels and newspapers that have abused the Holy Prophet Muhammad (p) and all kinds of any of their source (a sheei or a Sunni or Christians or Sabians) as well as from the religious aspect is not only the media but a meeting there must be cooperation of both parts of the state facilities and most importantly limiting arms possession only state you can not eliminate terrorism and violence, and we see people carrying arms without the name of the state and remains somewhat carefree is sincerity honesty and patriotism the most important motivation for the elimination of violence and terrorism and cooperation between parts of the Iraqi people and not be driven by a regional or global international schemes want to kill nations and kill our bodies of Sunnis, sheei , Christians, Sabean and Yazidi and others.


Author(s):  
Mark Bovens ◽  
Anchrit Wille

Civil society organizations are, if not schools, at least pools of democracy. In the ‘third sector’, too, active engagement and participation ‘by the people’ have given way to meritocracy, or, in other words, to rule by the well-educated. Many popularly rooted mass organizations have witnessed a decline in membership and political influence. Their role as intermediary between politics and society has been taken over by professionally managed advocacy groups that operate with university educated public affairs consultants. First, the chapter describes the associational revolution, the enormous increase in the number of civil society organizations. Then it in analyses the education gap in membership and the shift from large membership organizations to lean professional advocacy groups, which has occurred over the past three decades. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the net effect of this meritocratization of civil society for political participation and interest representation.


Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil

Chapter 1 defines the volume’s key terms: domestic colonization as the process of segregating idle, irrational, and/or custom-bound groups of citizens by states and civil society organizations into strictly bounded parcels of ‘empty’ rural land within their own nation state in order to engage them in agrarian labour and ‘improve’ both the land and themselves and domestic colonialism as the ideology that justifies this process, based on its economic (offsets costs) and ethical (improves people) benefits. The author examines and differentiates her own research from previous literatures on ‘internal colonialism’ and argues that her analysis challenges postcolonial scholarship in four important ways: colonization needs to be understood as a domestic as well as foreign policy; people were colonized based on class, disability, and religious belief as well as race; domestic colonialism was defended by socialists and anarchists as well as liberal thinkers; and colonialism and imperialism were quite distinct ideologies historically even if they are often difficult to distinguish in contemporary postcolonial scholarship—put simply—the former was rooted in agrarian labour and the latter in domination. This chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.


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