During the last two decades, there have been various attempts at measuring and assessing the health of civil society. Some have focused almost exclusively on "counting" the nonprofit while others have assessed the strength of nongovernmental organizations. Yet, these sectors are just a small part of a much larger environment. Moreover, they are the result of Western conceptualizations of civil society, thus not very helpful to understand civic participation in non-Western settings. Taking stock of these fundamental issues, this article presents the conceptual framework and methodology of a new global index to measure the "enabling environment" of civil society, rather than its forms and institutional contours. Given the inherent diversity of civil societies worldwide, which defies any attempt at developing predetermined definitions, understanding the conditions that support civic participation becomes the most important objective for those interested in promoting a strong civil society arena. The index was launched by CIVICUS in late 2013 with the name of Enabling Environment Index and covers 200 countries and territories, making it the most ambitious attempt ever made at measuring civil society worldwide.
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For decades, academic scholars and multinational organisations have been assessing how ready governments are to meet the various political and socioeconomic challenges they face. These benchmarks of good governance have led to the creation of well-known composite indices such as the Human Development Index and the Rule of Law Index. Today, there are dozens of different governance indices, but few attempts have been made to properly classify them. We still know surprisingly little about what different kinds of indicators the indices contain and how much impact they have had. This chapter introduces and classifies thirty-seven governance indices and analyses their impact on academic research, the news media, and policy-making. The results provide new insights for the comparative analysis of composite indices and offer a useful resource for index creators.
During the last two decades, there have been various attempts at measuring and assessing the health of civil society. Some have focused almost exclusively on "counting" the nonprofit while others have assessed the strength of nongovernmental organizations. Yet, these sectors are just a small part of a much larger environment. Moreover, they are the result of Western conceptualizations of civil society, thus not very helpful to understand civic participation in non-Western settings. Taking stock of these fundamental issues, this article presents the conceptual framework and methodology of a new global index to measure the "enabling environment" of civil society, rather than its forms and institutional contours. Given the inherent diversity of civil societies worldwide, which defies any attempt at developing predetermined definitions, understanding the conditions that support civic participation becomes the most important objective for those interested in promoting a strong civil society arena. The index was launched by CIVICUS in late 2013 with the name of Enabling Environment Index and covers 200 countries and territories, making it the most ambitious attempt ever made at measuring civil society worldwide.
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