ABSTRACT
This book has been organized in three parts on civic organizations and governance, social movements from local to global, and social capital and trust. However, there are a number of connections between the work in each section; the approaches overlap – linking social capital corresponds to governance, civic organizations are hubs of social capital and often of social movements; networks and trust are features not only of social capital, but also of social movements and civil society. The concluding chapter aims to take four of the conceptual discussions contained in the preceding sections a little further. The first issue to address is whether civic organizations have an active role in governance or are simply drawn into the process of creating governable subjects for states. Linked to this is a second theme of competing conceptions of civil societies as (a) supportive to or (b) alternative power bases to states. The third theme we consider is the interplay of local, national and global spaces in social movement mobilization. The final theme concerns the balance of different types of social capital that were found in the case studies, and the forms of trust that underpin them.
