Emerging Nature of Civil Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (Study Summary and Conclusions)

To many of the region's governments and development assistance agencies, civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean often seems like a source of additional unwelcome complexity and demands in an already overloaded, underfinanced development arena.

This report documents a different, much more inner-driven and self-reliant civil society, immensely diverse in the forms it takes and intrinsically rooted in the national societies and cultures from which it arises. Rather than a source of increasing demands, Latin American and Caribbean civil society can more accurately be seen as a source of increasing financial resources, services, programs, new solutions and citizen engagement in all the countries of the region.

On the basis of available data, civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean appears to encompass over a million organizations. Only a small percentage of these are commonly termed NGOs (non-governmental organizations); the vast majority are nonprofit social service organizations, education institutions, health facilities, research institutes, cultural organizations, sports and recreation groups, and the like. On the order of 100,000 appear to be religious organizations, and an estimated one thrird of the total are not formally registered or incorporated.

These very heterogenous groups spend well in excess of three billion dollars annually on program activities, perhaps more. Their revenues come from a combination of earned income and fees, government financing, foreign aid monies and private philanthropic contributions, probably in that order.

Because of the large number of institutions and the wide range of activities they cover, civil society touches the lives of almost everyone in the region. Over the course of the last two decades, citizen participation in civil society activities in the region has grown substantially, fueling growth in the numbers of civil society organizations (CSOs). In recent years, the sector has become more professionalized and institutionalized as it has responded to increased demands for public goods and services.

Further professionalization and institutionalization of the civil society sector accompanied by the formation of working partnerships with government to supply public goods and services is critical to the continuing democratization and opening of economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. So, too, is wider acceptance and regularization of civil society's role of influencing national policymaking and debate. All of these are supported by civil society leaders in the region.

Together these three elements -- deepening professionalization, building partnerships, and regularizing roles and relationships -- offer an action agenda for governments and civil society groups in the region over the coming decade. Also needed is greater buy-in of all sectors of society -- including political and economic elites -- for a trisector approach that fully engages business, the state and civil society as partners in setting national priorities and seeking to meet them.

Advancing the partnership-building agenda, regularizing civil society's role in national life through appropriate laws and practices and obtaining broader political consensus for the trisector approach are fundamentally intertwined. Government-civil society collaboration of any real scale requires a climate of cooperation and a framework of supportive legal and regulatory structures.

This is an area where the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), bilateral donors and private foundations can play a vital catalytic role. They can bring forward and organize exchanges around the successful experiences of other countries. And they can co-sponsor and facilitate consultative processes between government and civil society within Latin American and Caribbean countries to apply such learning from other countries to the domestic situation. They can support the collection of more data about the civil society sector so that all the stakeholders will be more informed about its actual dimensions and capacities.

And they can encourage prominent leaders from business, government and civil society to study and publicize what Latin America and the Caribbean could look like in the twenty-first century with the full engagement of each sector of society in the region's development.

Written 1997