ABSTRACT
The main focus of the Chapters in this book is on the roles of the EU and of national and sub-national governments in promoting sustainable development. This Chapter steps outside the state at the local level to analyse the roles of organizations in civil society in promoting sustainable development.1 These organizations take many forms, but, essentially, they are partnership bodies, drawing resources from EU programmes, from the public and private sectors, and from charities, trusts and a variety of other organizations. Such organizations are not new. Their origins go back into the nineteenth century. But their numbers seem to be growing in late-twentieth-century Europe (Channan 1993).
