ABSTRACT
This chapter will explain how the public sphere, and civil society within it, evolved during the 1990s. A new wave of single-issue associations emerged in the 1990s, building on the experiences of the ‘new’ civil society organizations of the previous decade. The latter’s challenge to the hegemony of the state over the public sphere and the new autonomy of civil society groups from political parties had paved the way for a proliferation of associations that had shared with those in the 1980s their self-limiting strategy and their independence from political parties. Equally, previously existing civil society organizations were transformed by this new climate.
