ABSTRACT
In recent years, across many countries, governments have been reviewing and restructuring their relationships with the third sector. The language of partnership and investment in ‘community’ is pervasive, and the international breadth of experimentation with renewed relationships is far reaching. In the United States, a call to service and bolstering the nonprofi t sector including faith-based and neighborhood organizations are central planks of President Obama’s change agenda. In the UK, community partnership is a major component of the coalition’s “Big Society” program,1 just as it was a decade earlier of New Labour’s Third Way, although the specifi cs on how to affect such partnership naturally differ. Similarly, the European Union has put engagement with civil society at the heart of its pursuit of democratic legitimacy, integration, and enlargement (European Commission 2001; Dunn, Chapter 7, this volume). So, too, have many transition countries where legal, policy, and regulatory reforms are linked to modernization and democratization processes, and where civil society organizations are establishing a stronger role as more stable democracies develop. Even countries that have long ignored or openly repressed civil society, such as China, are taking steps toward new nonprofi t and charity legislation (Kirby 2006). Political rhetoric abounds, but it has also been accompanied by substantial reform in many countries.
