Western countries have established themselves and developed over the last two centuries in the model of the Nation-State, founded on national sovereignty. Civil societies from these countries have been educated and conditioned to respect and fully accept the principles and symbols of a sovereign...

This paper presents a framework for discussing community consultation in the context of the Inter-American Development Bank's projects and offers suggestions on the opportunities, risks, costs, methods, and techniques of community consultation. After discussing some of the links between...

Dieses Interview gibt Auskunft über die normative Ambivalenz des zivilgesellschaftli-chen Sektors. Einerseits erfüllen NGOs wichtige wirtschaftliche und politische Funktio-nen. Sie stellen Güter und Dienstleistungen bereit. Und sie engagieren sich in der öffent-lichen Interessenvertretung....

Recent decades have witnessed both a renewed energy in feminist activism and widespread attacks taking back hard-won rights. Despite powerful feminist movements, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly undermined the progress women have struggled for decades to achieve; how can this be? What...

The smart village is digitally networked and participatory. Its 'smartness', in other words, should be based on interaction between technological infrastructures and civic engagement. While this vision has inspired European policymaking and public discourse in recent years, understanding of the...

Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can...

In a rapidly changing trade environment, marked by economic slowdown and impasse in the Doha Round, the success of the WTO in promoting and legitimizing the rules-based multilateral trading system rests, to a large extent, on maintaining effective relations with civil society, including...

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that institutions matter" for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an...

Der nachfolgende Beitrag thematisiert die Kommunikation mit zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteuren bei Großprojekten. Ziel ist es, ein Kommunikationskonzept für Unternehmen mit Industrie- und Infrastrukturprojekten zu erstellen, um eine mögliche Unternehmenskrise aufgrund von...

Since the late 1980s, the Niger Delta region of Nigeria has become the venue for mobilisation and protests by littoral states on the one hand and oil bearing communities and civil society groups on the other hand. They are protesting not only against ownership and control of oil and gas and the...