Collective Actions and Concerted Efforts in Building Civil Societies - A Case Study
True democracy has five essential ingredients - freedom, self-governance, rule of law, empowerment of the people and self-correcting institutions of the State. Very often democracy has been identified with the practices of the State. Certain NGOs articulate that state functioning is today beyond the reach of common people and also incomprehensible. Therefore the role of the civil society is to “reform institutional structures”. In developing countries spill effect of globalization has increasingly reduced the functioning of the state. The role of civil society is to liberate the people and bring them back to roots of democracy.
It is these focused attentions of people ‘concerned with civil society’ interest all practicing social work professionals. Social work is concerned with change and change process. As a practicing profession it is also concerned in understanding the change, the change process and the role of change agent as it occurs in societies. Therefore it is considered appropriate and relevant to examine some of the concerted collective actions to enable practitioners to use these skills in their own local situations. The best way to bring some knowledge input is to critically study ‘actions as it happens where it happens’. This paper provides critical information from three practicing NGOs in Bangalore, South of India. These NGOs have different approaches but believe in collective action with effective net working.
The first NGO focuses on developing citizen’s charter for various public institutions and indicators for effective governing. The second operates through creating a broad based ‘people’s forum’ empowering the marginalized poor to assess various entitlements under ‘rights and advocacy banner’. The third focuses on budgets and policies of local government concerning marginalized people and core human resource development sectors.
All the three NGOs have certain things in common, with well-defined operational structure for people’s participation and empowerment. They have taken concerted efforts to inter phase public institutions with common man for direct articulation leading to improvement in the quality of service and people friendly policies.