On the difficulty of studying ‘civil society’: Reflections on NGOs,state and democracy in Bangladesh

Abstract

In common with most countries of South Asia and indeed the rest of the world, discussion of the concept of ‘civil society™ has emerged recently in Bangladesh among academics and activists. Much of it has been generated by the international aid agencies and their ‘good governance™ policy agenda of the 1990s, and is concerned primarily with the increasingly high profile community of local and national development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which have emerged in Bangladesh since 1971. But there are also local meanings to the term derived from the independence struggle and the construction of a Bangladesh state, from local traditions of urban and rural voluntarism and from the organisation of religious life. The concept of civil society in contemporary Bangladesh is therefore best understood as both a ‘system™ and an ‘idea™, consisting of both ‘old™ and ‘new™ civil society traditions, resisting tendencies to privilege only one (external, policy-focused) definition of the term. By recognising these different understandings, the concept of ‘civil society™ can help illuminate aspects of the changing relationships between citizens and the state, the formulation and implementation of public policy, and the shifting dimensions of the institutional landscape. But it would be wrong to overestimate the contribution of ‘civil society™ as currently configured in the building of democratic processes, since there is a weak state and pervasive patron-clientelism. There is little sign of the more optimistic accounts of Putnam and others concerning the relationship between civil society and democracy.