Civil society
This topic explains what civil society means, how does it work and how we can valorise it
Civil society in our daily life
„People’s participation in civil society is regarded as the exercise of their civil and political rights to freely form associations, freely express their opinions, to pursue their interests, etc. Civil society groups are also expected to exert pressure on the state to grant and protect these and other rights. The quality of democracy in state can be evaluated also according to a stage of civil society and the so called third sector or NGO sector, the government policies in cooperation with them or it´s support towards the citizen participation.“ Moksens, 2010
“Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organisations.” Edwards, 2013
You can find the various situations of our citizen life below. Go through them one by one and cross each that is known to you (have already happened in your life):
1. There is a danger of cutting down the trees on the street where you live because the local government is going to widen the road.
2. There is an old abandoned house just next to yours where drug dealers meet and this creates a serious risk of fire and also lowers the price of all the properties around
3. There is a group of young people that fight for a skate-park in their neighbourhood instead of a landfill
4. The spring that flows through your village is full of waste and no one takes care of it
5. There is always mess around the rubbish bins just in front of your house
6. There is a damaged playground in the area where you live
7. There is no cycling route on the way to your work and you use bike regularly
8. You would like to enhance the place where you live but the flowers that you have planted in front of the house last year have dried in summer because there was no one to water them
9. In the town centre, there is a building that has been demolished but there had been no information about it before and the circumstances around it are not clear
10. Every day, you drive damaged roads to your place of work and no one repairs them
11. The wall on the local school is damaged and dirty
12. You go to school by bicycle every day but the school directorate hesitates to install a security kickstands in the area of the school
13. The neighbourhood where you live is polluted by the dog waste and your children are in danger when moving around the few grass-fields that are left there
14. The glass-door on the main entrance to your apartment is always damaged by the leaflets that are sticked to it
15. There is a local issue that citizens would like to discuss and solve it with the representatives of the local government
Are you familiar with some of the situations above? Have you marked at least three of them? Do you think that you would be able to influence these situations? No? We would argue that there is always a way to influence the processes in public arena. Just keep reading further, we have prepared a manual on how to „use“ civil society.
We all belong to civil society and we all can become involved in it. It is not something far from us, something what is often being, mistakenly, related only to foreign financed activities of various interest groups or individuals. No, it is related to our very local environment, with broken benches in the park behind your block of flats, with corruption in your municipality, with struggle against local environmental damage done by textile factory.