Emerging Nature of Civil Society in Latin America and the Caribbean
By S. Bruce Schearer and John Tomlinson | December 1997 | View Full Text | Email Link

Abstract

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.

This online document is a summary of a report prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank with support from The Ford Foundation. The complete report in print can be ordered from Synergos. The complete report includes an annotated list of 72 civil society directories and findings from an opinion survey of Latin American civil society leaders.

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