ABSTRACT
This chapter examines civil society in Latin America and the social movements and other interests that inhabit this independent ‘public sphere’ outside the state and use it to address societal problems. The concept of civil society has grown in importance in Latin American politics, providing the basis of new theoretical understandings of democratisation based on autonomous organisations (Alvarez et al., 1998). The emphasis on civil society became an important characteristic of the study of democracy in the region in the 1990s when large multilateral financial institutions identified the potential in Latin America of organisations serving as intermediaries between the people and their governments for aiding the transition to democracy, and started to grant them generous funding (see O’Donnell et al., eds, with Stubits, 2008). It was believed that civil society organisations could play an important role in changing conditions in some countries by opening and deepening democratic spaces. However, there has been considerable disagreement about what civil society is, not least because the large diversity of groups that are said to comprise it defy easy categorisation and some actors, such as business groups, the Church and trades unions, might at times be considered both ‘established actors’ yet also part of civil society (see Chapter 7). There has also been disagreement about civil society’s contribution to democracy or otherwise (see Box 8.1; see also Encarnación, 2003).
