The UK Consortium on AIDS and International Development was an essential partner to the evaluation leaders in harnessing the contribution and expertise of civil society. This article describes what the partnership entailed, the additional value it brought and how civil society might use the evaluation findings both as a tool for advocacy and a means for improving its own engagement with the ind...

Among the various educational models in Latin America that seek to increase parental participation in schooling, perhaps the most far-reaching is the experiment with self-managed schools. These are publicly funded schools administered by parents. Broad public powers, such as the capacity to decide the budget and make staffing decisions, are given to parents, many of whom have had very limited p...

In recent years, citizens' and civil society engagement with science and technology has become almost synonymous with participation in institutionally organized formats of participatory technology assessment (pTA) such as consensus conferences or stakeholder dialogues. Contrary to this view, it is argued in the article that beyond these standardized models of "invited" participation, there exis...

In the last decade or so, civil society space in India has witnessed the proliferation of organizations engaged in budget analysis. Budget analysis can be defined as the process through which state budgets are scrutinized from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. Its focus is on critically evaluating budgetary allocations made by governments at the beginning of the fiscal year and trac...

We examine the official scope and actual coverage of immigrant civil society in seven California cities using a widely employed 501(c)3 database. First, we code immigrant organizations in official data and compare their number and proportion with population statistics; we find substantially fewer immigrant organizations than we would expect. Second, we measure the organizational undercount of i...

Sustainable Development Goal Three is rightly ambitious, but achieving it will require doing global health differently. Among other things, progressive civil society organisations will need to be recognised and supported as vital partners in achieving the necessary transformations. We argue, using illustrative examples, that a robust civil society can fulfill eight essential global health funct...

This paper describes the formation of a civil society consortium, spurred to action by frustration over the Ebola crises, to facilitate the development of infrastructure and frameworks including policy development to support a harmonized, African approach to health crises on the continent. The Global Emerging Pathogens Treatment Consortium, or GET, is an important example of how African academi...

One of the most striking features of the anglophone literature on NGOs is the diversity of NGO sectors and their contributions to civil society and democracy; yet, exploration of this complexity is often eschewed in favour of a normative approach in which the apparently mutually enhancing relationship between NGOs, civil society and the state is underpinned by liberal democratic assumption rath...

In this Health Policy article, we selected and reviewed evidence synthesised by nine knowledge networks established by WHO to support the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. We have indicated the part that national governments and civil society can play in reducing health inequity. Government action can take three forms: (1) as provider or guarantor of human rights and essential se...

The paper considers the usefulness of the concept of civil society—both as an analytical construct and a policy tool—in non-Western contexts drawing on a selected review of literature on Africa from anthropology and development studies. Rejecting arguments that the concept has little meaning outside its Western origins, and critical of the sometimes crude export of the concept by Western donors...