ABSTRACT
There are a number of South African non-governmental organizations (NGOs) whose objectives include enhancing public debate and participation and building civil society capacity. Generally donor-funded, the activities of such NGOs are understood as deepening democracy and supporting a healthy civil society. This chapter seeks to assess claims about the role of NGOs in the public sphere: does their work open up the sphere of debate and critique or are their endeavours by definition elitist, excluding the experiences and socio-economic realities of the majority population? A number of interrelated processes are charted by which certain actors are included and others excluded in conceptions of civil society in South Africa. This, it is argued, may in fact impact negatively on the existence of spaces of public deliberation and on the shape of post-apartheid democracy. The chapter thus seeks to contribute to a critical reading of formalized South African NGOs and their relationships with other components of civil society. In the first part, I examine how particular donor understandings of civil society, chiefly its conflation with professionalized NGOs, contribute to a limited definition of civil society in post-apartheid South Africa. In the second part, reconceptualizations of public-sphere theory are employed in order to direct attention to popular movements and their potential to open up spaces for a critique that NGOs may structurally be unable to engage in. In examining the relationships of formalized NGOs to social movements, I argue that processes of NGO-ization as well as NGOs’ own ‘reformism’ of civil society may contribute to a narrowing of spaces for public debate.
