ABSTRACT
Governments increasingly recognize the inter-connectedness of governance. Their response to civil society engagement, however, is starkly different. Some have embraced the “associational revolution” (Salamon 1994), while others have embarked on an “associational counter-revolution” (Rutzen & Shea 2006). History vividly illustrates these competing approaches: Consider, for example, June 5, 1989. On that day, Solidarity won the elections in Poland, triggering a series of events that led to democratization in Central Europe. Refl ecting on trends, Fukuyama (1989) famously argued that we reached the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the fi nal form of human government” (4).
