Opportunity to Contribute to IIAS Study Group

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We hope that you will consider taking advantage of a significant opportunity that NCDD Sustaining Member Dr. Tina Nabatchi shared with us recently from the International Institute of Administrative Sciences. Her study group is seeking paper submissions, and it could be a great way for some of you NCDDers to contribute to the field while also getting your work out there. For more information, read the full announcement below or find the original here.

Call for papers for the IIAS study group on ‘Co-production of public services’

The IIAS Study Group on ‘Coproduction of Public Services’ is organizing its second open meeting. Our aim is to create and nurture an intellectual platform for the theoretical discussion and empirical analysis of coproduction and its implications for the organization and management of public services.

Topic
Coproduction refers to the involvement of both citizens and public sector professionals in the delivery of public services. Although countries differ in the extent to which citizens play a role in the provision of public services, the idea of coproduction is gaining ground around the world. Financial crises, austerity in public finances, and growing doubts about the legitimacy of both the public sector and the market, have led numerous governments to involve and cooperate with citizens and civil society in the production of public services. Unfortunately, practice is leading both theory and research, and there is a need to bring together theoretical insights and empirical data to enable a better understanding of public service coproduction. Specifically, this study group is interested in:

Coproduction in different national and policy contexts. What ideological and normative stances about the role of government shape the debate on coproduction? What variations are seen across the policy fields in which coproduction takes place? What variations are seen in national (western and non-western) structures of service provision, and what factors explain this variation?
The organization and structure of public service organizations. Do existing structures enhance or work against coproduction? How can public service organizations be better structured to utilize coproduction processes and approaches?
Challenges of coproduction for the work of public sector professionals. How can professionals find ways to meaningfully interact with people using and coproducing services? What are the (dis)incentives for professionals in promoting and using coproduction?
The role, capacity, and willingness of citizens to engage in coproduction. What characteristics distinguish citizen-coproducers from passive service recipients? What motivates citizens to engage in coproduction?
The potential benefits and pitfalls of directly involving citizens in the production of public services. What is the impact of coproduction on efficiency, democratization, responsiveness, accountability of public service delivery?
The way in which coproduction is accommodated in public law and/or constitutional law. How do various legal frameworks support (or not) coproduction? How can law be enhanced to further and sustain coproduction activities?
The relationship between public spending and coproduction. What financial models can be used to nurture coproduction? Can coproduction compensate for the withdrawal of public spending in times of financial crisis, or does collaboration with citizen-users demand additional resources?
What are the implications of a service-recipient/coproducer dominant approach to public services for the further study of public administration? What insights can be brought in from other disciplines, such as political science, law, economics, psychology, sociology and history? What insights can be gathered from complementing research on coproduction with research on active citizenship, service management and customer engagement, or citizen self-organization?

Meeting Format
The meeting will open with keynotes by Prof. Elio Borgonovi, Professor of Economics and Management of Public Administration at the Bocconi University and Prof. Tony Bovaird, Professor of Public Management and Policy at the University of Birmingham.

The meeting will consist of individual paper presentations and conclude with a round table discussion about the study group’s plan for future intercontinental collaboration in coproduction research.

The goal of the study group is to shed light on the current theory, research, and practice of coproduction. Therefore, we welcome both theoretical and empirical papers on all topics addressed above. We also invite scholars to use a variety of disciplinary analyses: public administration, political science, law, economics, psychology, sociology, and history among others. Interdisciplinary papers are also welcomed.

As a study group of IIAS, we seek to establish an intercontinental discussion, and therefore invite scholars from both western and non-western settings to submit paper abstracts. Submissions are particularly encouraged from doctoral students working on the topic of coproduction.

Output
The study group co-chairs aim at providing outlet for papers presented at the meeting, most likely through a special issue in an international public administration journal. A special issue of IRAS (International Review of Administrative Sciences) is in process, as a result of the successful first meeting of the study group, which was held in The Hague last May.

Moreover, the study group aims at setting up close intercontinental collaboration among coproduction scholars beyond the scope of this meeting, including the development and sharing a database of international cases on coproduction and strategies to enable effective interaction between professionals and citizen-users in the production of public services. In addition to special issues of international journals, the study group is exploring the possibility of a book project at the closing of its three-year (2013-2015) collaboration.

Date and Location
The meeting of the Study Group on Coproduction of Public Services will take place in Bergamo, Italy from May 20 to 21, 2014.

Cost
The registration fee is 100 Euro. Participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodations.

Submissions
Please submit abstracts (maximum 600 words) by March 15th, 2014 to mariafrancesca.sicilia@unibg.it and t.p.s.steen@cdh.leidenuniv.nl.

Participants will be notified of acceptance by March 31st. Full papers should be submitted by May 10th.

Organization
The IIAS study group on ‘Coproduction of Public Services’ is co-chaired by Trui Steen (Leiden University, the Netherlands and KU Leuven, Belgium), Tina Nabatchi (Syracuse University, US) and Dirk Brand (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa). The second meeting of the study group is organized by Mariafransesca Sicilia (University of Bergamo, Italy).

Free Copies of “The Practice of Peace”

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We recently saw a post on LinkedIn from the good people at the Open Space Institute about a great opportunity that we wanted to share. They are giving away copies of The Practice of Peace by Harrison Owen, one of the creators of Open Space Technology! But this offer will only last until December 31st, so make sure to get your copy today! You can find out more below read the original post here.

The Open Space Institute in the US has generously received a donation of 2,000 copies of “The Practice of Peace” books by Harrison Owen and is distributing them for just the cost of shipping and handling.

One box of 34 books shipped domestically is $50. Shipping internationally starts at $145. We can confirm international shipping for your country before you place your order.

The Institute will not be continuing this offer past December 31st when our storage contract with the distribution company ends, and the remaining books will be “recycled.”

The Practice of Peace is a very special and comprehensive book on what Open Space has brought and continues to bring to the world. It is even more relevant and timely today than when it was first published.

Please consider if you have friends, colleagues, organizations and communities which would benefit from learning more about Open Space, the power of self-organization and genuine peace. Please help us get as many as possible out the door and not to the dumpster!

To order, please visit the OSI US website at http://osius.org/content/practice-peace-books.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Courtney Breese

This 2010 book by Henry Giroux capitalizes upon the popularity of zombies, exploring the relevance of the metaphor they provide for examining the political and pedagogical conditions that have produced a growing culture of sadism, cruelty, disposability, and death in America.

The zombie metaphor may seem extreme, but it is particularly apt for drawing attention to the ways in which political culture and power in American society now operate on a level of mere survival. This book uses the metaphor not only to suggest the symbolic face of power: beginning and ending with an analysis of authoritarianism, it attempts to mark and chart the visible registers of a kind of zombie politics, including the emergence of right-wing teaching machines, a growing politics of disposability, the emergence of a culture of cruelty, and the ongoing war being waged on young people, especially on youth of color. By drawing attention to zombie politics and authoritarianism, this book aims to break through the poisonous common sense that often masks zombie politicians, anti-public intellectuals, politics, institutions, and social relations, and bring into focus a new language, pedagogy, and politics in which the living dead will be moved decisively to the margins rather than occupying the very center of politics and everyday life.

Reviews

“In this timely and compelling critique of U.S. political culture, Henry Giroux makes clear how it is that Americans are living through what Hannah Arendt once called ‘dark times’, times in which the violence and cruelty of human disposability remains hidden in the black light of an increasingly authoritarian public realm. Passionately and incisively argued, Giroux’s critique offers insight into the political and pedagogical conditions that have produced a ‘zombie politics’ and its associated forms of authoritarianism. In this respect, Giroux illuminates what we need to see in order to reconstitute a lost social democratic imagination.”

-Roger I. Simon, University of Toronto

“Henry Giroux offers his most passionate defense yet of democracy and civic values in his new book. This volume is a must-read in dark times like these. Giroux has for decades been an outstanding tribune for democracy, an advocate for civic values and for questioning the unequal status quo. In this new book, he takes up more vigorously than ever the threats to the public sphere from reactionary forces gaining momentum. For Giroux, these threats to humane democracy fit the ‘zombie aesthetic’ now pervading television, film, and popular culture. Politics has become a monstrous caricature of public deliberation with wild propositions and charges spreading fear and division. Giroux explores the hostile forces sucking the blood out of our constitutional rights as well as the vitality out of ordinary families. We have become a society of monopolized wealth and distributed poverty, a culture of endless war, legalized torture, detention without trial, bursting prisons, and schools that turn our bright children into data. These intolerable conditions require the outrage and insight Giroux offers in his new book. He has written a volume inviting us to democratic action and civic restoration before these dark times grow even darker.”

-Ira Shor, Professor, City University of New York

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (2009), Politics Beyond Hope (2010), and Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (2010).

Resource Link: http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Culture-Capitalism-Popular-Everyday/dp/1433112264

Knight Foundation Maps Civic Businesses & Investments, Seeks Feedback

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

Our interest was piqued recently by a report released by the Knight Foundation presenting the first mapping of “civic tech” businesses and investments here in the United States. We know that many NCDD members work in or are interested in the high-tech end of public engagement, so we wanted to share some snippets from a great article about the report that we found on the tech blog, GigaOm (you can find the original article here), and to let you know that you have a chance to give your feedback on the report.

So what is “civic tech”, you might ask? Well, it’s not so hard to understand:

Jon Sotsky, the foundation’s director, described civic tech as “technology that’s spurring civic engagement, improving cities and making government more effective.” The field includes a range of private and public organizations, from groups the Knight Foundation and its data analytics and visualization partner Quid designate as “P2P local sharing” (Airbnb) to “community organizing” (Change.org) to “data access and transparency” (Open Data Institute).

And as many of us know, civic tech has been on the rise in recent years, taking on different shapes and being used in many different ways. It is a growing sector, which is why the Knight Foundation set out to map it in the first place:

You might not have heard of “civic tech,” but chances are it has affected your community and its influence will only increase over time. According to a Knight Foundation report released today — the first to track civic tech businesses and investments — the sector has raised $430 million in investments in the past two years and civic tech company launches are increasing 24 percent annually.

The report generated quite a bit of interesting data, and that’s why it came along with a nifty visualization tool:

Users can explore civic tech through a bubble treemap data visualization, sorting by themes, communities and companies. Investments are color-coded as either private investments or public grants and the size of the bubbles depends on the size of investments. As you explore each section, you can see the investment types and amounts as well as several other data points, all of which can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet.

Visualizations of this type can be crowded by the number of nodes they include, but the Knight Foundation does a good job showing the structure of the civic tech field as a whole. Indeed, the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit geared at benefiting media and the arts, is using the information to make its own investment decisions. The intention is that everyone can get a better view of the field, including new startups trying to find their way in the space.

We agree that it is important for all of us to gain a better understanding of this emerging field, so we highly encourage you to check out the Knight Foundation’s report and the visualization tool. But we especially wanted NCDD members to know that the Knight Foundation is looking for feedback on civic tech initiatives or funders that they may have missed in their report:

As with any sector that is measured for the first time, Sotsky admits it is incomplete, which is why they’ve included feedback links for people to add missing civic tech businesses and investments. The intention of the list is to “get a conversation started” so that next year’s civic tech data directory will be more robust.

So if you are connected with a civic tech initiative, funder, or group that you don’t see in the report, you’re invited to email Knight Foundation director Jon Sotsky at sotsky@knightfoundation.org with suggestions of what may have been missing from this year’s report. We hope that next year’s report will be bigger, better, and more informed by the NCDD community of practitioners!

Original GigaOm post: www.gigaom.com/2013/12/04/knight-foundations-civic-tech-data-visualization-project-reveals-surge-of-startup-activity.

Peter Levine on Making Public Participation Legal

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

This post is shared from the blog of supporting NCDD member and professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Boston, Dr. Peter Levine. Peter shares a humorous take on the not-so-funny state of public meetings, and highlights the NCDD-supported Making Participation Legal report. For more info about this important intitiative and how it was created, check out our write up on its release.

Making Public Participation Legal

This is pretty much how “public participation” looks when it takes the form of a meeting with officials at the head of the table defending their policies, and their fellow citizens lining up to speak:

The “Parks and Recreaton” satire hits so close to home because public forums usually use awful formats and methods. As Matt Leighninger writes:

The vast majority of public meetings are run according to a formula that hasn’t changed in decades: officials and other experts present, and citizens are given three-minute increments to either ask questions or make comments. There is very little interaction or deliberation. Turnout at most public meetings is very low – local officials often refer to the handful of people who typically show up as the “usual suspects.” But if the community has been gripped by a controversy, turnout is often high, and the three-minute commentaries can last long into the night. On most issues, the public is either angry or absent; either way, very little is accomplished (Making Public Participation Legal, p. 3).

One reason is the laws that allow or require public participation: they are poorly structured. The Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation has developed frameworks for better state and local laws. Their model legislation and other materials are presented in a new report, Making Public Participation Legal, available from the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC).

You can find Peter’s original post here: http://peterlevine.ws/?p=12660.

Announcing the New Journal of Dialogue Studies

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We were pleased to learn recently about the creation of the Journal of Dialogue Studies, a brand new academic publication dedicated to the theory and practice of dialogue. The JDS will be published by the Institute for Dialogue Studies, which is the academic platform of England’s Dialogue Society.

For us non-academics, this journal presents a great opportunity to engage on a deeper level with dialogue theory. For you NCDD members who are doing scholarly work on dialogue to reach a broader audience with your work. We highly encourage you to consider submitting your work to the Journal of Dialogue Studies by emailing your paper to journal@dialoguesociety.org. You can find more information on submissions here.

To understand a bit more about the new journal, check out the overview provided by its creators:

The Journal of Dialogue Studies is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal published twice a year. Its aim is to study the theory and practice of dialogue, understood provisionally as: meaningful interaction and exchange between people (often of different social, cultural, political, religious or professional groups) who come together through various kinds of conversations or activities with a view to increased understanding. The Editors welcome vigorous discussion of this provisional description, of dialogue’s effectiveness as a means of increasing understanding, and of other fundamental questions. The Journal brings together a body of original scholarship on the theory and practice of dialogue that can be critically appraised and debated. It publishes conceptual, research, and/or case-based works on both theory and practice, and papers that discuss wider social, cultural or political issues as these relate to the evaluation of dialogue. In this way, the Journal aims to contribute towards establishing ‘dialogue studies’ as a distinct academic field (or perhaps even emerging discipline).

The new journal will be published twice a year, and the first issue is already available online, and is focused on questions such as:

What arguments might there be for (or against) developing ‘dialogue studies’ as a distinct academic field (or perhaps even emerging discipline)?

What are the implications of doing so?

How might ‘dialogue studies’ be of use to academics, policy-makers and practitioners?

What do we mean by dialogue, dialogue theories and dialogue practices?

Where along the spectrum of fields is this field best placed?

We are encouraged to see the dialogue field continue to grow and deepen, and will definitely be keeping an eye on this new publication.

You can find out more about the Journal of Dialogue Studies by visiting www.dialoguesociety.org/publications/academia/829-journal-of-dialogue-studies.html.

Civic Studies Field Continues to Grow

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

This post comes via Dr. Peter Levine, a civics scholar, philosopher, and NCDD supporting member. Peter recently announced on his blog that he will be helping convene a “civics studies mini-conference” this January in New Orleans as part of the Southern Political Science Association meeting.

Civic studies is an emerging discipline that holds a great deal of value and potential for deepening the work of our field. I personally participated in Peter’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies last year in Boston, which helped me see first hand that the work Peter and his academic peers are doing to advance the discipline has a great deal to offer in terms of expanding and refining our own work in engagement.

We will definitely be keeping an eye on the gathering and the progress of the civic studies movement, and we encourage NCDD members, especially our academic friends, to do the same.

Civic Studies Mini-Conference

Soon after the volume entitled Civic Studies is published, a daylong discussion of the same topic will take place at the Southern Political Science Association meeting (January 10th, 2014, in New Orleans).

As Karol Soltan and I write in the volume, the phrase “civic studies” is quite new. A group of scholars coined it in 2007 in a collaborative statement entitled “The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for the Future.” Civic Studies does not mean civic education, although it should ultimately improve civic education. Instead, in the words of original framework, Civic Studies is an “emerging intellectual community, a field, and a discipline. Its work is to understand and strengthen civic politics, civic initiatives, civic capacity, civic society, and civic culture.”

The framework cites two definitive ideals for the emerging discipline of civic studies “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research: the Nobel-Prize-winning scholarship of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on managing common assets; deliberative democracy; public work; the study of public participation in development; the idea of social science as practical wisdom or phronesis; and community-based research in fields like sociology.

Here is the agenda for the mini-conference:

Civic Studies “Conference Within a Conference”

Friday, January 10, 2014, New Orleans, LA

9:45 to 11:15am – Author Meets Critics for Peter Levine’s We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Author: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Critic: Olivia Newman (Harvard University)
Critic: Ryan McBride (Tulane University)
Critic: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Critic: Rumman Chowdhury (University of California, San Diego)
Chair: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)
* Albert Dzur participating remotely via skype

1:15 to 2:45pm – Roundtable “What is Civic Studies?”

Participant: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Participant: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Participant: Tina Nabatchi (Maxwell School Syracuse University)
Participant: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Chair: Peter Levine (Tufts University)

3:00 to 4:30pm – Teaching Civic Studies

Participant: Katherine Kravetz (American University)
Participant: Timothy J. Shaffer (Wagner College)
Participant: Alison Staudinger (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay)
Participant: Donald Harward (Bates College)
Participant: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)

4:45 to 6:15pm – Author Meets Critics for Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond

Author: Paul Aligica (George Mason University)
Critic: James Bohman (Saint Louis University)
Critic: James Johnson (University of Rochester)
Chair: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Critic: Samuel Ely Bagg (Duke University)

You can find the original post on Peter’s blog here: http://peterlevine.ws/?p=12782.

Moving the “Delibertainment” Conversation Forward

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We were pleased as punch to see the Real Dialogues Project, one of the winners of the 2012 NCDD Catalyst Awards, reach an important milestone last week – they hosted their very first Google hangout discussion! We encourage you to check out their post and the short video about the conversation here.

We also wanted to share a related write up on an interesting article from the Journal for Public Deliberation on public engagement in news media. We are inspired to see growing amounts of discourse on this “deliberative television” or “delibertainment” model that Real Dialogues is pioneering. You can read the write up below, or you can find the original post by NCDD organizational member Tim Bonnemann on his Intellitics blog.

Deliberative Television

The latest edition of the Journal for Public Deliberation features an interesting article by Ashley Muddiman and Matthew R. Meier that discusses how using citizen panels might be applied to “refocus news outlets on their fundamentally democratic functions and foster a more engaged and deliberative citizenry”: Deliberative Television: Encouraging Substantive, Citizen-Driven News.

Abstract:

With Americans’ confidence in the news media dwindling, the quality of programming declining, and audiences turning elsewhere, the American news media is at a crossroads. We argue that news outlets should consider a new form of deliberation-based programming for local news coverage as a means of responding to these problems. As a basis for the programming, we build on public journalism (Rosen & Merritt, 1994) and deliberative citizen panels (Knobloch, Gastil, Reedy, & Walsh, 2013). By engaging citizens in the production of news, media outlets not only stand to gain viewers by increasing the quality of their issue coverage, but they also could secure their claim as a public institution providing a valuable public good. We urge media outlets to consider turning to citizen panels to determine which issues are salient and to engage in structured deliberations about those issues, which can be captured and built into content packages for use in news programming. In so doing, news outlets can help activate viewers by positioning them not as passive consumers but as engaged citizens prepared for public deliberation.

The authors note:

We believe that the problems facing local news can be overcome by changing the content of local news programming. In particular, we suggest news content be built on three components: emphasizing state and local issues, engaging citizens in the production process, and maintaining audiences by relying on an alternative format.

They outline the following general process:

Host a so-called priority conference, whereby randomly selected citizens decide what issues to cover
Host a “citizen jury” (using the 2010 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review pilot project as a guide), whereby participants learn about the issues, deliberate with each other and form a range of opinions.
“Soft news” coverage of steps 1 and 2
Various options for further content implementation:

Develop content into a weekly stand-alone program with each episode focusing on a new issue
Create regularly occurring segments for broadcast in traditional news programs
Substantive web- or app-based interactivity

With regard to interactivity, I would specifically add the many opportunities digital engagement has to offer when it comes to turning viewers into participants. With the right setup, viewers could be brought into the deliberative process and that, in turn, could become part of the programming, thus creating a virtuous cycle of deliberative television!

In related news, a recent report by AmericaSpeaks also talks about new ways in which the news media might support citizen engagement and collaborative governance: Integrating News Media, Citizen Engagement, and Digital Platforms Towards Democratic Ends (PDF)

The article’s section titled “What can news media do?” (page 3) outlines four functions that news media might support to “bring greater citizen engagement and connection to decision-making and governance”. The authors suggest that “news media will need to find ways to heighten the entertainment value of the presentation” and bring up the idea of “a reality-TV show where popular participants work together to understand and react to current news events.” The authors further suggest that “second screen polling technologies can be used in conjunction with [...] the aforementioned reality-TV show” as a way to give citizens the chance to participate in decision-making in order to help them “fully understand the complexities of policy making”.

The report concludes:

Many of us in the world of deliberative democracy and citizen engagement have sought ways to institutionalize stronger links between citizens and decision makers within government. While those efforts should continue, building infrastructure and capacity for more informed, citizen-based decision-making and action within other sectors is needed. The news media and the evolution of digital platforms and engagement tools provide a powerful opportunity for this.

News media and deliberative democracy share an understanding of the importance of strengthening the connections between citizens and government to promote a healthy democracy. Though they have viewed this connection in different ways and employed very different implementation methods, both need to learn from each other, shift their approaches, and create something new together to accomplish the shared goal of engaging ever larger numbers of people, especially from the political center, in governance and strengthening our democracy.

Both the JPD article and the AmericaSpeaks report fit in perfectly with the work we’ve been doing as part of the Real Dialogues project. We’re prototyping on a shoestring budget, of course, but if things go well we should be able to validate a first few key pieces of the bigger delibertainment puzzle.

Stay tuned!

Find Tim’s original post here: www.intellitics.com/blog/2013/11/07/deliberative-television.

Hot off the presses: The latest issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD)

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Matt Leighninger

JPD issue 9:2 is now available at www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/. The issue is our largest to date, with 18 manuscripts that include:

Articles on topics such as: stakeholder and citizen roles in deliberation; participation in the New York Public Schools; a new study agenda for deliberative research; the effects of non-neutral moderators; and “communities of fate” and the challenges of international public participation.

Essays on: the politics of decentralization; illiteracy and deliberative democracy; and connecting deliberation, community engagement, and democratic education.

A symposium of articles presenting “New Ideas on Deliberation from Young Scholars.”

A review of Peter Levine’s new book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

In addition to being the last issue produced by editors Tim Steffensmeier and David Procter, this is also the last issue featuring the contributions of Essay Editors Lyn Carson and Ron Lubensky. Based at the University of Western Sydney, Carson and Lubensky have worked tirelessly to ensure that each issue in the last three years includes a wealth of interesting and provocative essays. Please join us in thanking Carson and Ron!

JPD is supported not only by IAP2 and DDC, but by a range of other institutions, including:

Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University
Kettering Foundation
New England Center for Civic Life, Franklin Pierce University
Public Agenda
The Democracy Imperative
Ohio University
Wagner College
Tufts University
University of Western Sydney

Importing Democracy: The Role of NGOs in South Africa, Tajikistan, & Argentina

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Courtney Breese

This 2013 book written by Julie Fisher and published by the Kettering Foundation Press, focuses on the roles of democratization nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in three countries in the developing world: South Africa, Tajikistan, and Argentina.

The book is organized around three chapters for each country, South Africa, Tajikistan, and Argentina. The first chapter of each country’s section begins with the historical, political, and economic context and continues with a discussion of the general contours of civil society. The second chapter in each section deals with the role of democratization NGOs in promoting both loyal opposition and law-based civil liberties. The third chapter focuses on their role in promoting political culture and political participation. Loyal opposition and law-based civil liberties help define democratization at the national level, whereas changes in political culture and increased political participation often occur throughout society. Following the nine country chapters, the book concludes with a comparative overview and implications for international policy.

Fisher, a former Kettering Foundation program officer, writes that the idea that democracy can be exported has lost credibility in recent years. In many countries, however, democratization NGOs are importing democratic ideas and recovering local democratic traditions.

From the book’s Introduction:

Nothing has so discredited the attempt to export democracy militarily as the Iraq and Afghan wars. Both Iraq and Afghanistan remind us that democracy must be built from within. Even peaceful efforts to export democracy, undertaken with the best of intentions, can founder on the reefs of simplistic Western visions of other societies.

A common response to this failure is to assume that many countries are simply not suited to democracy, at least for the foreseeable future. This book is about the people of three countries–South Africa, Tajikistan, and Argentina–who refuse to be so easily dismissed and who have already started the long, arduous process of democratization from within. They have done this, first, by “importing” democratic ideas from abroad and, second, by rediscovering indigenous democratic traditions….

Table of Contents includes:

Preface & Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 South Africa: History, Politics, & Civil Society

Chapter 3 The Role of Civil Society in South Africa: Building a Loyal Opposition & Law-Based Civil Liberties

Chapter 4 The Role of Civil Society in South Africa II: Nurturing a Democratic Political Culture & Deepening Political Participation

Chapter 5 Tajikistan: History, Politics & Civil Society

Chapter 6 The Role of Civil Society in Tajikistan: Building a Loyal Opposition & Law-Based Civil Liberties

Chapter 7 The Role of Civil Society in Tajikistan II: Nurturing a Democratic Political Culture & Deepening Political Participation

Chapter 8 Argentina: History, Politics, & Civil Society

Chapter 9 The Role of Civil Society in Argentina: Loyal Opposition, Strengthening the State, and Law-Based Civil Liberties

Chapter 10 The Role of Civil Society in Argentina II: Nurturing a Democratic Political Culture & Deepening Political Participation

Chapter 11 Conclusions

Chapter 12 International Implications & Recommendations

Appendix I List of Interviews

Appendix II Democratization NGOs in Other Countries

Appendix III An Overview of Democracy Assistance

Appendix IV Research Methods

List of Acronyms

Bibliographies

Ordering info: The book is currently available for purchase from the Kettering Foundation or from Amazon.com

Resource Link: http://kettering.org/publications/importing-democracy/

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