Civil Society’s Expanding Roles In Sustainability Transitions
Civil society’s current engagement in providing and fostering sustainability practices and services illustrates that civil society’s role has expanded beyond advocacy, and that some civil society organizations aim to address the challenge of inclusivity via sustainability innovations. While some civil society organizations may provide basic services that are no longer met by a changing welfare state, others may play a critical role in changing unsustainable social, ecological, economic, and cultural patterns.
Civil society organizes itself in collectives, networks, and nested hubs; mobilizes resources (people, ideas, and funds); and arrives to the wider public through its attempts to put sustainability into practice. For those affected by significant urban challenges, who thus become interested in transforming our cities and societies district by district and community by community, the sense of change that civil society brings can often be seen as a sign of hope that humanity can, collectively, steer away from a deeper crisis or trap.
However, the activities of civil society can also create systems where governments can avoid or limit their responsibility in taking daring action to deal with the structural, persistent problems behind these unsustainability crises. Civil society encompasses a broad range of organizations, from grassroots groups to professional associations, that operate between the state, individuals, and the market. This heterogeneity means that civil society includes various institutional logics, crossing the boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit.
As civil society’s initiatives and social innovation networks proliferate across Europe, it is relevant to consider what is understood by civil society, its role in sustainability transitions, and how this role evolves and changes in different socioeconomic and sociopolitical contexts, across sectoral domains (such as energy, food, mobility, built environment, and education), and across spatial scales (local, regional, national).
Three Roles of Civil Society in Sustainability Transitions
This chapter characterizes three major roles for civil society as being central to the success of moving towards sustainability transitions.
Pioneering and Modeling New Practices
First, local initiatives by civil society can pioneer and model new practices that can then be picked up by other actors (for example, policymakers), eventually leading to incremental or radical changes in our practices and ways of organizing things. Civil society can therefore be an integral part of, and driver for, such transformations; by establishing new connections in the system, it may trigger wider change.
Their proximity to local urban contexts, flexibility (due to operating on the fringes of complex bureaucratic settings), and elasticity allow for transformative innovation to be created and seeded by and through civil society. Civil society organizations have the knowledge and capacity to bring about projects that directly contribute to sustainability, showcasing and gathering evidence in favor of their feasibility as legitimate alternatives.
Filling Voids Left by the Changing Welfare State
Second, civil society can also fill the void left by a changing welfare state, thereby safeguarding and serving social needs, but doing so in new ways. Civil society organizations are often modeling the innovations themselves, and rapidly experimenting and adapting ideas to the local context, which, if successful, can contribute to altering ways of doing, organizing, and thinking (cultures, structure, and practices).
Civil society initiatives can provide empirical ground or proof of concept for new market forms (such as the sharing economy or the economy of the common good) or for new economic structures (such as co-management, cooperatives, and alternative currencies) by responding to a market need in a socially, culturally, and ecologically responsible and value-creating way.
Hidden Innovation in the Shadows
Last, civil society can act as a hidden innovator – innovating in the shadows, disconnected from public or market actors – through initiatives that may contribute to sustainability, yet remain disconnected from wider society. This pattern of action is often reinforced by the public engagement and stewardship programs cities have in place for planning and by the governance of regeneration programs.
Civil society often innovates with the “rules in use” rather than with the “rules of the game,” meaning that they address lower-level institutions and their informal counterparts, and prioritize applying results in practice, then manifesting contrasts with existing policies and other types of formal institutions. The reluctance of civil society actors to become visible can be viewed as a desire to step away from wider society and pursue their own aspirations and ideas “far from the maddening crowd.”
Challenges and Tensions Facing Civil Society
While civil society plays crucial roles in sustainability transitions, there are also significant challenges and tensions it faces in its interactions with state institutions and other actors.
Avoiding Co-option by Neoliberal Agendas
Within the European Union, civil society initiatives can be used by neoliberal agendas to support their narratives on decentralization and retreat of the state. As it recognizes that neoliberalism is contested, civil society may unintentionally be supporting the argument of a “self-servicing” society that does not require governmental support for basic services, such as elderly care and education.
National and local governmental agencies responsible for social policy and welfare policy can use the presence and activities of civil society as justifications for the reductions of welfare state programs. This raises the risk of deepening social inequalities between and within communities, given their uneven capacities to self-sustain and self-organize.
Navigating Overexposure and Invisibility
Civil society activities can be structured as political responses to injustice or to deeply marginalized systems of provision. As political expressions, they can also be exclusive or provoke conflict. These facets position civil society as a politicized actor, often stigmatized as the troublemaker rather than seen as the whistle-blower for market failures.
The overexposure resulting from the utilization of civil society organizations by the state can leave these actors exhausted and erode their mission. On the other hand, the reluctance of civil society actors to become visible can be viewed as a desire to step away from wider society and pursue their own aspirations and ideas, which challenges the notion that civil society wants to be discovered.
Balancing Autonomy and Interdependence
Civil society operates as a self-organizing actor to meet social needs that have not historically been provided by the state or the market. However, this raises questions concerning the distance they establish from the “centers of power” and whether they can be truly transformative. Tension occurs when civil society actors need to decide whether they strictly adhere to their core values and try to fit in while transforming dominant structures, or make compromises to make their organization adaptable to the system in which it operates.
Implications and Future Research Directions
This article highlights several important implications and future research directions for understanding the evolving role of civil society in urban sustainability transitions.
Enabling Transformational Roles for Civil Society
Identifying the conditions that enable civil society to play a transformational role in cities is crucial. Intermediary organizations can help create links between initiatives and government structures, serving as a space where radical, bottom-up initiatives and top-down, dominant actors in the existing system can meet.
Civil society organizations can also indicate which urban localities are most vulnerable to social and economic segregation and create evidence-based cases for local welfare redistribution that has a systemic impact on urban poverty. Understanding how civil society can radically alter welfare distribution approaches and transform cities towards social resilience is an important area for further exploration.
Capturing the Fluid and Dynamic Nature of Civil Society
Adopting a dynamic understanding of the role of civil society and using empirical designs that can capture their fluid nature in cities is necessary to move beyond romanticized inclinations. Cross-case study analyses and meta-analyses, rather than in-depth, single case study research, would contribute to understanding both the bright and the dark sides of civil society roles today.
Embracing the Diversity of Civil Society
Conceptualizing and empirically exploring the dynamic interactions between urban civil society actors and other actors and elements in the contexts in which they are embedded is crucial. Examining the multiplicity of interactions beyond the dichotomy of collaboration and conflict will deepen the understanding of actors’ impact and enable a response to contextual conditions, as well as an understanding of the impact of context on sustainability transitions.
Promoting Knowledge Co-production
Encouraging knowledge co-production about the impacts of social agency and the relationship to urban transitions is essential. Including civil society actors in research design and cycles will position them as local experts, contributing their knowledge and practices to local innovations rather than being involved solely in engagement and in raising awareness.
By addressing these research directions, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the evolving and multifaceted role of civil society in driving sustainable transformations in urban areas, particularly in addressing the development of “shadow areas” that have historically been marginalized and underserved.
