Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an increasingly prominent role in addressing complex environmental issues such as climate change, persistent bio-accumulative pollutants, and the conservation of biodiversity. At the same time, the landscape in which they operate is changing rapidly. Markets, and direct engagement with industry, rather than traditional government regulation, are often the tools of choice for NGOs seeking to change corporate behavior today. Yet these new strategies are poorly understood-by business, academics, and NGOs themselves. How will NGOs choose which battles to fight, differentiate themselves from one another in order to attract membership and funding, and decide when to form alliances and when to work separately? In Good Cop/Bad Cop, Thomas P. Lyon brings together perspectives on environmental NGOs from leading social scientists, as well as leaders from within the NGO and corporate worlds, to assess the state of knowledge on the tactics and the effectiveness of environmental groups. Contributions from Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund describe each organization s structure and key objectives, and present case studies that illustrate how each organization makes a difference, especially with regard to its strategies toward corporate engagement. To provide additional perspective, high-level executives from BP and Ford share their views on what causes these relationships between companies and NGOs to either succeed or fail. For students of the social sciences and NGO practitioners, this book takes an important step in addressing an urgent need for objective study of NGO operations and their effectiveness.

'What a welcome gift!' John Clark, Project Director, UN Secretary-General's Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations. 'This book truly breaks new ground in the field of civil society studies by introducing an innovative assessment tool which can be of use to practitioners, policy-makers and researchers alike.' Kumi Naidoo, Chief Executive Officer, CIVICUS Civil society - comprising the activities of non-state organizations, institutions and movements - has in recent years emerged as the major force for change in the realms of politics, public policy and society both globally and locally. Yet, despite the crucial importance of this political phenomenon to the principle and practice of democracy, it eludes definition and systematic understanding. This book provides a comprehensive and flexible framework for the definition, measurement, analysis and interpretation of civil society based on the innovative 'Civil Society Diamond'. Written as a guide for both practitioners and academics, the book presents precise and insightful solutions to the issues of how to understand the concept of civil society, where to locate it theoretically and empirically, and which techniques are best suited to its measurement. The approach presented here has been successfully adopted across a wide range of civil society organizations in over 30 countries. The author draws on and applies a diverse repertoire of indicators, tools and data - suitable for various organizational forms, practical contexts and theoretical perspectives - which measure the effectiveness of civil society initiatives and reveal certain strategic and policy options. The aim is to promote and facilitate structured, informed and fruitful dialogue within civil society organizations and between them and the governmental, corporate and academic actors with whom they are now so integrally linked.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in contrast to many official development agencies, have often been seen as the saviours and sources of hope for an otherwise disappointing development process. Dorothea Hilhorst offers an empirically rooted and theoretically innovative understanding of the internal workings, organizational practices and discursive repertoires of this kind of organization. Her evidence and insights lead to a different picture of NGOs from that prevailing in the literature. Her model of NGOs, as organizations which often have several different faces, fragmented and comprising fluctuating social networks, should be helpful to understanding not just these bodies, but official development agencies too.

How can artists in a developing country be able to dedicate themselves to the laborious task of creating art when there are few resources? How can the government and intellectuals support artists without imposing a centralized idea of national culture? This book explores these questions and others, focusing on lived experience in the ABC region of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Beginning with two lectures by two renowned professors and activists of the Brazilian solidarity movement, Ladislau Dowbor and Celio Turino de Almeida, the book then opens up space for artists from diverse areas to speak about their experience in real life and real time. This work functions partly as a testimonial narrative and partly as an opportunity for those giving testimony to interact with culture managers, university professors, public intellectuals and other artists who struggle to ensure that their work reaches the most distant areas of the city. Because Sao Paulo is still considered a cultural center of Brazil, the experiences and reflections appearing in this book will serve as guide and inspiration to others - artists, culture managers, intellectuals - not just in Brazil, but throughout the world as well.

This is a no-holds-barred, comprehensive, real-world guide to building political power and successfully lobbying for nonprofits in the 21st century, written by an insider who has been in the trenches as both a lobbyist and a government official.

In the humanitarian field those we rather mockingly call "French doctors" seem always to be in the vanguard, the first to arrive in any critical situation. If they hold such a position in modern humanitarian intervention it is because Medecins Sans Frontieres, and its 'little sister' Medecins du Monde, have drawn on the experiences of other organizations gradually to develop their particular brand of intervention; France was after all the last to join the group of so-called "founder democracies" in the humanitarian field.
This detailed study of the comparative history of humanitarianism reveals that it was by learning from forms of action devised by agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Switzerland, that MSF, MDM and many others sought to combine relief practices (learnt from the Red Cross) with efforts to mobilize public opinion (using strategies invented by Amnesty International) in the way that they do.
The contributors assess the competing French and "Anglo-Saxon" models of intervention and propose approaches to humanitarianism for the twenty-first century.