ABSTRACT
The study of ‘civil society’ emerged almost simultaneously with an awareness of citizenship. One finds an early statement of this in Hegel and this continues down the line till Rawls, with several other scholars in between. According to this stream of thinking, civil society comes into being when intermediate institutions arise that connect citizens to the state. It is this that makes the state answerable to the public and it is this that forces those in authority to be transparent in their conduct. It is through the medium of civil society, again, that everyday life of everyday citizens finds its linkages with the state, both in terms of policy making and service delivery. In recent years, however, this notion of civil society has been appropriated by several multilateral agencies, the UN funded ones included, that see the matter very differently. For them, civil society is about Non-Governmental Organizations (or NGOs) who function outside the state, sometimes even in spite of the state. In the NGO version of civil society, the state is a necessary evil that has to be circumvented. What happens, as a consequence, is that people are transformed from being citizens to beneficiaries. This is a huge step forward for NGOs and non-state actors, but a big step back for democracy.
