GROWING CIVIL SOCIETY IN NORTHERN IRELAND
Jon Van Til
The task ahead involves growing civil society in Northern Ireland. Social systems, like
gardens, are grown intentionally. We talk about growing a garden. We talk about
growing families. And a recent American President much beloved in Northern Ireland,
Bill Clinton, used to talk a lot about the importance of growing the economy.
All these ideas share a common characteristic: They have to do with intentional acts
aimed at making something good bigger and better. The gardener wants to grow food
that is tasty, nutritious, and bountiful. The parent wants a family composed of children
who are happy, healthy, and able to take on the world. The president wants an economic
order that is productive and expanding in its size.
And so it is with civil society. The reason we want to “grow” it, to see it develop and
flourish, is that we are interested in what it will provide for us—both as individuals and
as a society. Civil society is important, that is to say, if it helps produce what the
American founders identified as a “more perfect union”.
Now what precisely is meant by civil society? How might we recognize it if we actually
came across it? The more I have worked with the idea, as for instance in a recent book
titled Growing Civil Society (Van Til, 2000), the more I have come to find it invaluable
in understanding not only what citizens can do to make society work, but how we can
come to understand the structure of the good society. A civil society, after all, is one in
which the lives of its individual residents and citizens are enriched by the right workings
of the major institutions and organizations of that society.
Studies and experience in many nations indicate that civil society works best where
citizens have learned the lessons of communitarianism, where the organizations of their
communities have learned to partner with others, and where they are not afraid to take
risks toward the improvement of the life of their neighborhoods, town, region, country
and world.
The lessons of communitarianism? As sociologist Amitai Etzioni (1993) has shown
clearly, both rights and responsibilities are important in the modern world, and need to be
balanced with each other. Too much focus on rights and not enough on responsibilities
leads to contention and endless dispute. Too much focus on responsibilities and not
enough on rights leads to paternalism and apathy. A leading spokesperson of this view
is British Prime Minister Tony Blair, with his ideas of the “third way”.
Partnership? In the modern organizational world, where even in a small city there may
be thousands of differing organizations of all stripes, it is critical to build bridges among
and between groups of varying sorts. Often the most successful communities are those
which have the capacity of linking with a wide range of organizations in other
communities, city-wide, and nationally as well.
Risk-taking? The literature on community development and voluntary action is full of
the concept of social entrepreneurship, which really means organizing risk in response to
the meeting of a social need.i Social enterprises, it is asserted, may be more capable than
traditional voluntary efforts to sustain their work in a time of increasing privatization and
declining levels of statutory or governmental support. They may also be more attentive
to the needs for expanding employment and meeting a variety of economic needs within
communities in a cooperative structure and process.
I had begun in my own work, particularly in a book published in 1988 and titled Mapping
The Third Sector, to look at society as composed of four basic institutions: the economy,
government, the third sector, and the "informal sector"--the last being the home of family,
kin, and neighborhood, what I identified above as “crucibles of identity”. A good society
resembles a sturdy vehicle, firing on all four of its cylinders.
I'll hold to that position even now. Contemporary society provides us with four major
sets of institutions to solve our common problems: families and other crucibles of
identity like churches and schools that represent "core culture", voluntary organizations
and other nonprofit organizations that bring people together to address common
problems, governmental structures that embody democratic aspirations and institutions,
and a myriad of corporations and businesses that build common wealth and foster
employment.
I developed a somewhat flaky way of remembering these four institutions, which I called
the "PECTS" schema: P for Politics, E for Economics, C for core Culture (the family,
kin, neighborhood, and much of education and religion), and TS for the third sector. Out
of that schema comes a formula for building a good society, or, if one prefers, growing
civil society:
Solutions will come when it becomes widely recognized that both tradition and
change are important, that both freedom and order must be secured. This will
only happen when the contributions of each major sector of society are
recognized: when cultural values sustain family, religious, and community life;
when Third Sector (voluntary, community) organizations organize both collective
action and service freely and effectively; when business organizations discover
and serve the humanity of their employees as well as their consumers; and when
government assures a level field of opportunity and a fairness of result in policy,
economic reward, and individual expression (Van Til, 2000:, p. 79).
For an excellent study of community enterprise in Derry, see Denise Crossan, Towards a
Classification Framework for Non-Profit Organizations, doctoral dissertation submitted
to the University of Ulster, 2007.
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