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The new development agenda formulated through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is rich with issues such as women empowerment, inclusive society, environment, and decent work that have been high on the agenda of civil society actors. However, civil society itself gets only a scant attention among other implementing bodies. We argue for nuanced investigation of civil society in the context of SDGs, and its rethinking in the arena of development research, and propose an approach that pays attention to situated hegemonies at different scales, and engages with empirical complexities in a non-normative tone. We illustrate the proposed agenda by reviewing literature on local organizing, established organizations, and networks and alliances especially in the contexts of South Africa and Tanzania. In conclusion we suggest that paying attention to situated hegemonies at different scales provides a fruitful framework for discussing civil society in both development research and practice in the threshold of new global development era.

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South African cities regularly experience service delivery protests, which often target local governments who are blamed for non-delivery and non-participation. The legitimacy crisis of local democracy can be understood in the context of broader urban governance transformations since 1994, with implications for city governments' ability to deliver services and realise participatory governance. This paper explores the initial phase of the N2 Gateway project from 2004 to 2006 as a case study of the politics of urban governance in Cape Town As a centralised and politically driven project, the experiences from the first phase of N2 Gateway shows how local actors were sidelined and how narrow participatory mechanisms failed to engage local government actors and community interests, contributing to a local politicisation of exclusion and allocation.

This article discusses how global ideas on co-production and citizenship built from below are translated into community mobilization and participatory planning practices in urban Malawi. It shows how limited national and local resources, disconnections from national and urban policies of redistribution, and a local politics shaped by both clientelism and democratic reforms create a glass ceiling for what global models of community mobilization and participation are able to achieve. It calls for a more systematic and empirically diverse research agenda to better understand how participatory discourses and practices embedded in grassroots organizing are transferred and mediated in place.