Civil society is defined here as including community based organization, traditional leaders, implementing NGO’s, Unions, business associations, religious organizations, independent media, student groups, cooperatives and other associational groupings. Civil society’s role in decentralized and democratic governance may be viewed to have four major functions as follows,
i) As an advocacy for representing interests of their constituencies.
ii) In service delivery in education, health and other sectors.
iii) As a partner with government in development planning, in promoting understanding of the decentralization system and in other areas.
iv) As watchdog over government.
However, these roles are not played by all civil societies’ actors or at all times-nor are these civil society functions always clean or rigid. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organization, community groups, women’s organizations, faith based organization, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associates, coalitions and advocacy groups and so forth.
Civil society as advocacy
Advocacy is generally viewed as a primary role of civil society. Often time, civil society groups building coalitions amongst themselves to advocate for policies. For instance, in Zimbabwe MISA Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe Lawyers for human Rights challenged the application of POSA and AIPPA. These two among to be mentioned civil society advocated for the liberalization of the Zimbabwean media from heavy government controlling rules and laws. This is both a means for weak organizations together sufficient strength to address state authorities as well as a bottom up consensus building effort (Charlick 2003)
Civil society groups do confront authorities for specific policy change, but sometimes these are not always well received or have positive outcome. In Zimbabwe media organization such as MISA Zimbabwe, MMPZ, WOZA and so forth confronted the government of Zimbabwe to repeal POSA, AIPPA and so on. Therefore, in general civil society groups have had success in influencing the central government to improve the environment and conditions in which they operate.
Furthermore, civil society plays a major role in the social relation of the media and the audiences. In Latin America in 1983, social movements of different kinds were involved in bringing down the authoritarian regimes. Community based protest contributed to discrediting and delegitimizing the Pinochet regime of Chile. In Zimbabwe, Non-governmental organization has collaborated with members of the publics to fight against the hostile ZANU PF government. The social relation of the ordinary citizens has been greatly influenced by the NGO’s and private media which play a watchdog role such as Financial Gazette and The Independent.
In addition,, civil society in its service delivery role works together with the government of the day to improve the living conditions of the public. Privatization of certain government service has led to opportunities for both private businesses and civil society organization to increase their service delivery role at all levels of government. In Pelengana, for example, the commune has worked with women’s groups on sanitation service delivery and has established a system to provide financial resources. In Zimbabwe Musasa project works to assist women to be represented in the community. The doctors with borders have worked hard to improve the community’s health. Other NGO’s such as CARO International, ORAP, OCRAST, OXFARM, CONCERN and so forth have assisted immensely to provide food to the starving communities around the country in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, many international NGO have eschewed advocacy activities but have helped strengthen local partners in service delivery from identifying needs to professional standards of service. Many civil society/NGO have now become adept in service delivery and cover many domains. For instance, community mobilization, enterprise development, health education, micro-finance and so forth.
Civil society plays the watchdog role and contributes immensely to the political economy of the mass media. In a democratic system, civil society plays key role as a watchdog over the workings and effectiveness of the state and elected officials. This starts with election monitoring but is far more extensive and includes regular control of policies, priority setting, implementation, equity, budget allocations and service delivery effectiveness. For example, in Zimbabwe ZESN played a crucial role in educating journalist on how to report and to interview political members representing their parties in March 2008 harmonized elections. However, it should be noted that, “the civil society watchdog role in a decentralized system is not only critical at the central government level, but also for the regional and local level”.
Ideally, decentralization as a system of government confers on civil society the important role of controlling/monitoring critiquing government initiative to all strata of society. For example, in Zimbabwe MISA Zimbabwe have criticized the government for brutalizing and arresting journalist from independent papers for exposing the hostility caused by the ruling party supporters. In addition, MISA as a civil society have pressured the government to do away with ruthless media laws such as POSA, AIPPA, OSA and so forth. A call for licensing of independent foreign media and Independent media regulating board to replace MIC is the critique and pressure the Zimbabwean government has been facing. On the other hand, MMPZ as civil society have documented and criticized the government for using hate speech to fail an “All Inclusive government”. Hence basing from the above contribution in critical political economy civil society plays a watchdog role to expose, defend and safeguard the rights of the local citizens.
Many civil society groups are potentially constrained in their watchdog role by lack of independence or a partisan political outlook. With civil society getting much of their funding from external donors, this may very likely influence the issues they stress and the issues they avoid very frequently. The press is also be made through provision of transport and per diem or pay of production costs. For example, during March 2006 workshop held in Bamako on International foreign aid effectiveness organized by the Africa development Bank (ADB) journalist made it clear to the organizers that without payment for transport costs, they would not attend the event. After ADB agreed to make one transport payment for each press group attending the event, one group did their best to collect for more than one person attending.
Curran (2000) defines civic media as a media sector consisting of channels of communication linked to organized groups and social networks intended to facilitate the expression of dissenting and minority views. It supports organizations that are the life force of democracy. The organizations include political parties, new social movements, interest groups and sub-cultural networks that relay the concerns of society and propose policy initiatives for consideration by the political system. Civic organization are important in parliamentary democracies in need of democratic rejuvenation and where political parties have a pivotal position as organizations that aggregate interests, distribute costs, define electronic choices and offer channels of general (rather than single issue) influence.
On the other hand, civil society consists of the interested parties and organizations calling for democratic rule through the use of media’s creation of a public sphere as well as adherence to the principal democratic role of the media acting as a check on the state, as the Fourth Estate. Curran (2000) argues that the media should monitor the full range of state activities and fearlessly expose abuses of official authority. Dahlgren (1991) asserts that the public sphere is a concept, which in today’s society points to the issues of how and to what extent the mass media especially in their journalistic role can help citizens learn about the world, debate their responses to it, and reach informed decisions about what courses of action to adopt.
Civic society calls for a more liberal atmosphere which the media must operate. Dahlgren (1991) argues that according to classical liberal theory, the public sphere (or in more traditional terminology, public forum) is the space between government and society in which private individuals exercise formal and informal control over the state through the election of governments and the pressure of public opinion. The media are central to this process as they distribute the information necessary for citizens to make an informed choice at election time. They also facilitate the formation of public opinion by providing an independent forum of debate enabling people to shape the conduct of government by articulating their views. In this regard civic society views as an aggregation of individuals and government as the seat of power, with the nexus between the state and individuals as the key social relationship that need to be policed by an ever vigilant media which is on permanent guard duty, patrolling against the abuse of executive power and safeguarding individual liberty.
Civic society’s argument is that the media should brief the electorate and assist voters to make an informed choice at election time. They argue the media to provide a channel of communication between governments and governed, which helps society to clarify its objectives, formulate policy, co-ordinate activity and manage itself. In the liberal view, through the free market, it secures the media’s independence as an inclusive debate. The freedom of the market, it secures the media’s independence as an intermediary, generating wide ranging and inclusive debate. The freedom of the market allows anyone to publish an opinion and this ensures that all significant points of views are aired and also that information is made available from varied sources, extending participation in public debate. Good governance is also fostered, because decision-making processes are exposed to the interplay of apposed opinion. Barron 91995:3200 quotes the American jurist Oliver Holmes who declared in a much quoted statement, that “the best test of the truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market..
Gramsci (1971) sees what he calls civil society as having the responsibility for the production, reproduction, and transformation of hegemony, while the state is responsible for the use of coercion. This is a fairly simple and direct equation whereby the state exercises repression and civil society exercise hegemony. In addition, hegemony operates culturally and ideologically through the institutions of civil society which characterize mature liberal-democratic capitalist societies. These institutions include education, the family, church, the mass media, popular culture and so forth. Civil society in critical political economy is the way Gramsci (1971) locates the place of culture and ideology within societies, and hegemony is the way he tries to understand how they work.
In critical political economy Gramsci 91971) states that the liberal-democratic societies of western capitalism are different in that they have relatively weaker states and much more extensive and complicated civil societies which strengthen the hegemony of the dominant groups. In this situation, a war of position rather than a war of position rather than war of movement becomes the strategy to be adopted by revolutionary socialist forces. This involves a long, protracted and uneven struggle over the hegemonic hold of the dominant group, and is eventual replacement by the hegemony of the subordinate groups aspiring to power and the radical transformation of society. According to Gramsci (1971) he says that, in critical political economy the revolutionary forces have to take civil society before they take the state, and therefore have to build a coalition of oppositional groups united under a hegemonic banner which usurps the dominant or prevailing hegemony.
Gramsci (1971) write that the nature of civil society make sure of this;
“Civil society has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic incursion of the immediate economic element (crises, depression and so forth). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter…”. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises” (Gramsci 1971:235)
Keane (1988a:33-6) suggests that the political dichotomy of left and right is not very helpful in sorting out this history and developing a modern and progressive understanding of civil society. In critical political economy, while we may find in Gramsci something of a useable tripartite model of state, civil society and economy, most of the Marxian tradition has tended to collapse civil society into bourgeois society, thereby dismissing it as the domain of ideology. And as the blueprint for the organization of society, the meshing of social life with the political life has not met with much historical success. Dahlgren (1995:126) states that in critical political economy of mass communication, the right today tries to equate civil society with the space where the private citizen can pursue his or her individualism, free from the interventionism of the state, thereby turning the concept into an argument for neo-liberal tradition, starting with Mill and de Tocqueville, have put politics before economic and appropriately warned that the state can abuse its power, engulf and smoother civil society, and undo the fragile progress towards democratizations.
In critical political economy of mass media Dahlgren (1995:128) states that civil society is thus created through various forms of self-constitution and self-mobilization. For Cohen and Aarato, civil society stands in a dialectical relationship to the political; the political role of civil society is seen not as aiming for the direct control of political power,… but to the generation of influence through the life of democratic associations and unconstrained discussion in the cultural public sphere. Ideally, civil society would function in a similar mediating way vis-à-vis economic society but, under capitalist relations, this vector is obviously less pronounced.
In critical political economy, civil society functions along side with the Neo-Marxist. Hence Dahlgren (1995:127) states that “the domain of civil society is characterized by legal frameworks to guarantee basic rights and to secure pluralism, publicity and privacy from the state, and, at least partially, from the economy. In this regard, they follow Gramsci’s three part model. Cohen and Arato’s orientation is towards the institutional aspects of civil society. In their views, civil society is institutionally composed chiefly of:
(i) The intimate sphere especially the family)
(ii) The sphere of associations (in particular, voluntary associations)
(iii) The many forms of public communication.
Strinati (1995) states that hegemony operates culturally and ideologically through the institutions of civil society which characterize mature liberal-democratic, capitalist societies. These institutions include education, the family, the church, the mass media, popular culture and so forth. Furthermore, civil society is the way Gramsci locates the place culture and ideology within societies, and hegemony is the way he tries to understand how they work.
Curran (1997) further argues that the watchdog perspective is commended for assuming that democracies need informed and participant citizens to manage their common affairs and believes that public debate is more likely to produce rational and just outcomes if it takes account of different views and interest, in some form of active self determination, reasoned debate and social inclusion.
Conclusively, it can be argued that civil society’s plays a salient role in critical political economy of media as public sphere through which the masses can discuss the issues that can influence the way they are govern by the elite. Again Gramsci (1971) ,views civil societies as having the responsibility for production, reproduction, and transformation of hegemony, while the state in responsible for the use of coercion. In Zimbabwe clear example for civil society groups such as MISA, MMPZ, WOZA, Doctors without Boarders, Zimbabwe Crisis and Coalition, Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions ZFTU and so forth, fight along side with the masses for social change. While some civil society’s are media oriented others are for human rights and democracy and they play a pivotal role in critical political economy of mass communication. The civil society fight for democracy and to reinforce strong social relations in the society. According to Gramsci (1971) civil society locates the place of culture and ideology within societies
References
Dahlgren P (1995) Television and the Public Sphere. British. Sage
Char lick R (2003) “Institutional Dynamics in Contemporary Mali- A study of the context for the impact of citizen advocacy world Education report, January 2003.
Norberto B (1988) Gramsci and the concept of civil society in Keane (ed) Democracy and civil society, Verso. London.
Downing J.D.H et al (2004) the Sage handbook of media studies. Sage. London
Hill.D; Class, the crisis of neo-liberal Global Capital, and the role of education and knowledge Workers. Saturday 28 march 2009 PDF
Strinati D (1995) An Introduction to theories of popular culture. Rout ledge. London
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