Civil society as a driver for change
As we head to local elections on Sunday, social media is inundated with ads from all the different candidates. It seems that the number of citizens seeking to be re-elected or elected is not at all negligible and this is a good thing because local government is a crucial link in the chain of democracy. That said, the rhetoric of most of the candidates appears so mundane and stilted that it inspires little confidence in their abilities or even in the effectiveness of the institutions that are seeking to serve as a whole.
At the same time, however, I have also noticed a few highly creative and innovative initiatives spearheaded by citizens outside the framework of these institutions. The term civil society appeared around 30 years ago to describe collective actions outside the framework of the state and political parties. Greek society is defined by a close entanglement with the state, through the clientelist system, as with the political parties, which tend to dominate society. Their ineffectiveness, however, offers significant scope of activity for groups and organizations with a specific purview and the ability to mobilize citizens independently of the state and parties. Two specific examples come to mind.
The more the influence of such organizations grows, the more they will resonate with and influence young men and women
The first is the mature and successful Society for the Environment and Cultural Heritage (ELLET), which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Its origins started in the early 1970s, when a young couple living in London, Costas and Lydia Carras, visited Greece and were appalled by the destruction of the country’s architectural and environmental legacy which they encountered. They decided to do something to “protect” Greece and, ever since, the society has played a leading role – often successfully – in a series of important initiatives for the protection and promotion of Greece’s culture and natural environment. It would be no exaggeration to say that ELLET lies behind many of the areas and landscapes that we admire so much nowadays, like the historical Athens neighborhood of Plaka, the Prespes lake district or Delphi.
Its biggest campaign right now concerns the institutional zoning and urban framework that will ultimately determine what kind of country this generation bequeaths to the next. That such an organization does not have the kind of broad visibility it ought to have says a lot about our relationship with the environment. “When we first started out, people thought we were kooks; they didn’t care,” says Lydia Carras, adding that “society’s stance has changed in the past few years.”
The second example concerns a new organization with the interesting name, Ecogenia. It is the brainchild of two young women, Greek American Lia Papazoglou, who grew up in New York, and Erika Spagakou, who has spent the past few years living and working in Abu Dhabi. Inspired by the work done by major international organizations like AmeriCorps and Unis-Cite, Ecogenia connects small rural communities to young men and women who are selected, trained and paid to move there for a certain period of time and help the communities bolster environmental protection and sustainable development. The organization has so far carried out two 10-week pilot programs: in Dorida in central Greece, where participants revamped 5.5 kilometers of hiking trails, repaired two bridges and fixed the flow of a stream so they could build basic ecotourism infrastructure; and in Hania on Crete, which involved an afternoon program of environmental education for 523 elementary school children.
The initiatives of these and other such organizations are the polar opposite of the activities that most local authorities engage in. But the more the influence of such civil society organizations grows, the more they will resonate with and influence young men and women, who will, in turn, help change the model of local governance for the better.
Stathis N. Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government in the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations.
