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Book Shelf Global Civil Society Yearbook 2005/06 Helmut Anheier, Mary Kaldor and Marlies Glasius (eds), Sage, London, 2005, ISBN 1-4129-1193-1 The fifth Global Civil Society Yearbook continues the intellectual shaping of an emerging global civil society. As the Global Call for Action on Poverty, GCap, makes its voice heard under the whiteband symbol, this analysis of current issues of migration, climate change and UN reform, with a focus on gender and social movements, provides a timely intellectual resource to strengthen shared commitments. These annual volumes have themselves become an occasion for enacting global civil society: each Yearbook is a project that involves hundreds of people around the world in various ways and they often fight it out around divergent understandings of critical issues. This volume enters the extreme zones we face today ^ the growing injustices which increasingly are only addressed by global civil society actors, and also the powerful innovations brought about by new technologies that can construct whole new global spaces for global civil society. Illustrated throughout with summaries, maps, figures, tables and photographs and encompassing regular features such as updates on previous editions and the an-
nual data reports, the Global Civil Society Yearbook remains the standard work on all aspects of contemporary global civil society for activists, practitioners, students and academics alike. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the key actors, forms and manifestations of global civil society around the world today. Civil Society and the Market Question: Dynamics of Rural Development and Popular Mobilization K.B. Ghimire, UNRISD, Geneva; Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2005, 376 pages, ISBN 1-40394915-8 Neo-liberal reforms often rely on civil society playing an active role in development projects and service delivery. This has often led to a groundswell of civil society opinion and activism against structural adjustment programmes, policies to privatize public services and liberalize the agricultural sector, and the increasing dominance of TNCs and lending institutions. In light of (and, at times, in lieu of) weakened states, many civil society organizations have sought to directly influence market outcomes in favour of the poor and to blunt their negative thrust. The collection brings out the heterogeneous and ambiguous character of civil society positions and responses to market reforms
in agriculture.‘Market advocates’ support market-based economic activities and welfare in rural development; ‘market sceptics’ express misgivings about the possibility that the market mechanism can resolve rural poverty and inequality, but are, at the same time, prepared to collaborate with mainstream development institutions and ‘market opponents’ try actively to oppose such institutions and construct radical alternatives. Crucially, this volume finds, none of these perspectives seems able to significantly influence the philosophy and functioning of the market. The writers
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