Making Civil Society Sustainable: The Legacy of USAID in Croatia

What makes civil society sustainable? This paper examines USAID “Legacy Mechanisms”—programs designed to support a stable civil society after USAID withdraws aid—in the context of post-war Croatia to reconceptualize civil society sustainability in terms of resilience. Rather than examine whether specific legacy mechanisms remained intact, this paper looks at how Croatian civil society organizations adopted, adapted, and dropped these legacy programs to respond to novel crises and a changing political and social environment once USAID exited Croatia. Drawing on archival data from USAID’s time in Croatia and interviews conducted between 2008 (the year after USAID withdrew) and 2016, this paper shows that the long-term impact USAID had on civil society lay not within the formal institutions and organizations it supported, but in the resilience, creativity, and cooperation it fostered in the civil society sector.     

Ebenezer Obadare: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Humor,Silence and Civil Society in Nigeria</Emphasis>

This is a book review of Ebenezer Obadare’s “Humor, Silence and Civil Society in Nigeria.” It examines conceptual issues around the role of civil society in Nigeria, the nexus (or lack thereof) between ngo’s and civil society, and the roles that humor and silence play as roles of agency in how a population responds to oppression and the suppression of dissent.     

The Co-production of a Community: Engaging Citizens in Derelict Neighbourhoods

In order to deal with “wicked problems” like inequality and social exclusion, one needs the support of committed citizens (Brandsen et al. in Manufactured civil society: practices, principles and effects, Palgrave, London, 2014). A promising setting to examine to what extent this is the case is that of community development projects in derelict neighbourhoods where the largest representation of ‘marginalised’ citizens can often be found (Head in Community development: theory and method of planned change, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1979; Needham in Personal co-production, 2009). In this article, we examine to what extent citizens are actually involved in local co-productive community development projects (in the city of Ghent, Belgium), and how professional field workers influence this engagement. We focus on three different potential effects of co-productive community development (inclusion and empowerment of citizen co-producers and the equity in the benefits they receive), and whether professional support can influence these effects. We find that co-production in community development projects may lead to more inclusion, empowerment and equity. Moreover, it is posited that the presence of professionals in their different roles does have a positive impact on co-productive community development.     

Participatory Spaces of Mental Health Service User Organizations in the Post-deinstitutional Era: Mapping Roles and Challenges

By applying the concept of participatory spaces, this article maps and analyzes current research on mental health service user organizations (MHSUOs). We have analyzed research literature from 2006 to 2016 to examine how the role of and challenges facing MHSUOs are formulated in the post-deinstitutional era. The current situation is marked by MHSUOs parallel presence in invited, claimed and popular spaces for participation. The post-deinstitutional era is characterized by a shift in focus from gaining access to such participatory spaces, to critically examining the political opportunities available in these. We further argue that the dominance of psychiatry-specific spaces could prevent MHSUOs from fully exploring their potential for participation in broader social issues.     

Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey from a Nascent to a Formal Not-For-Profit Venture

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the results from an in-depth case study examining the gestation and boundary-forming phases of Robert’s Place Cooperative, a plucky start-up cooperative in a midsize Midwestern city.     

Resisting to the Neoliberal Urban Fabric: Housing Rights Movements and the Re-appropriation of the ‘Right to the City’ in Rome,Italy

This paper scrutinises the phenomenon of collective squatting for housing in Rome (Italy), which has reached remarkable proportions and developed new characteristics since the start of the 2008 crisis. Based upon two pieces of ethnographic research within the housing movement organisations Coordinamento Cittadino di Lotta per la Casa (Urban Coordination of Housing Struggles) and Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Precarious Metropolitan Block), the authors aim to enlarge empirical knowledge of the case under study and provide renewed analytical instruments for understanding housing mobilisations. These organisations appear to be more than grassroots approaches to housing deprivation; they also represent alternative forms of social reproduction in post-welfare neoliberal cities. Indeed, squats configure themselves as sites for broader political elaboration. For this reason, we propose to analyse housing squatting using the notion of ‘urban commons’. The introduction of this notion to analyse housing movements helps in the theoretical elaboration of a re-appraised ‘right to the city’, in line with current urban challenges.     

Integrated methodology for multiple systems estimation and record linkage using a missing data formulation

There are now three essentially separate literatures on the topics of multiple systems estimation, record linkage, and missing data. But in practice the three are intimately intertwined. For example, record linkage involving multiple data sources for human populations is often carried out with the expressed goal of developing a merged database for multiple system estimation (MSE). Similarly, one way to view both the record linkage and MSE problems is as ones involving the estimation of missing data. This presentation highlights the technical nature of these interrelationships and provides a preliminary effort at their integration.     

Double ASN Minimax sampling plans by variables when the standard deviation is unknown

We deal with the double sampling plans by variables proposed by Bowker and Goode (Sampling Inspection by Variables, McGraw–Hill, New York, 1952) when the standard deviation is unknown. Using the procedure for the calculation of the OC given by Krumbholz and Rohr (Allg. Stat. Arch. 90:233–251, 2006), we present an optimization algorithm allowing to determine the ASN Minimax plan. This plan, among all double plans satisfying the classical two-point-condition on the OC, has the minimal ASN maximum.