Articles from June 2004

How healthy is your civil society sector?

Lester M Salamon

We live in an era of performance and accountability. Increasingly, citizens, consumers and investors are demanding proof that their taxes, purchases and investments are really effective. Civil society is hardly immune from these expectations. To date, however, the civil society sector has lacked a convincing and reliable way even to demonstrate its progress, let alone gauge its impact. Judgements about its health and development have therefore had to rely on sketchy hunches and subjective guesstimates. The new Johns Hopkins Global Civil Society Index will begin to fill this gap.

With the publication this coming summer of Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector Volume II, the civil society sector will gain a new tool for measuring its progress and demonstrating its capacity and impact in countries around the world.

Developed in cooperation with my colleague, Wojciech Sokolowski, the Johns Hopkins Global Civil Society Index (GCSI) is an effort to pull together the significant body of data that has recently become available on the civil society sector around the world through the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector project and other efforts, and to express it in a meaningful and coherent way. Several features of this index are worth emphasizing:

• It focuses on the core of the civil society concept – the formal and informal associations that engage citizen energies in pursuit of public purposes.
• It seeks to meet basic social science norms of index construction, which stress the need for objective measures as well as conceptual clarity, comparability and utility.
• It incorporates multiple dimensions, and multiple indicators for each dimension, to give equal weight to the diverse forms that civil society takes in different places.

More specifically, the GCSI measures the level of development of the civil society sector along three basic dimensions: (1) capacity, or the level of effort the sector mobilizes; (2) sustainability, or the ability of civil society to survive over time; and (3) impact, or the contribution that civil society makes to social, economic and political life.

To capture the complexity of the civil society sector, each of these dimensions is measured with a number of different indicators. Thus, sustainability is assessed in financial terms, in terms of the sector’s popular support, and in terms of the legal environment in which it operates. Each country’s ‘score’ on each indicator is then computed as a percentage of the maximum among all countries for which data are available. The resulting country scores are then averaged across the various indicators to get each country’s score on each dimension. These dimension scores are then averaged for each country to produce a composite GCSI score.

The table below reports the results of this index construction for the 15 countries that scored the highest on the composite index among the 34 countries to which we have so far applied it. Several features of these results are worth noting:

• The US does not top the index. Both the Netherlands and Norway score higher.
• The index captures the multiple dimensions of civil society. Countries with small civil society sectors as measured in terms of paid employment (eg Norway and Sweden) nevertheless score quite high because the index takes into account volunteer activity, informal movement activity, and expressive as well as service functions.
• No country achieves a score of 100 on any dimension of the GCSI or on the index as a whole. This index should therefore not foster complacency.
• The index demonstrates the varying levels of civil society development around the world. With a maximum value of 74, a minimum score of 29, and an average score of 40, the index should serve to stimulate efforts to promote civil society. Now, however, we have a way to measure how successful those efforts prove to be.

No doubt, the Hopkins GCSI will not be the last word on how to measure the progress of civil society around the world. On the contrary, we hope it will spur others to improve on what we have done as well as leading to improvements in the basic data on which we can all rely. The recent publication of a new UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts should make an important contribution to this by making the collection of systematic empirical data on the civil society sector, philanthropy and volunteering a more explicit obligation of national statistical agencies. But countries must be persuaded to adopt the Handbook and implement its procedures.

Civil society is too important to operate any longer in the dark. Hopefully, by indexing its progress from place to place and over time in a coherent and reliable way, we can focus more attention on its status and encourage its development. That, at any rate, is our wish.

For a full account of the Hopkins Global Civil Society Index, see Lester M Salamon and Wojciech Sokolowski, ‘Measuring Civil Society: The Johns Hopkins Global Civil Society Index’, in Lester M Salamon, Wojciech Sokolowski and Associates (forthcoming 2004) Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the nonprofit sector Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. For information on how to order, see p3.

CNP goes where angels fear to tread

‘We had so much data,’ he says, that it was becoming difficult for people ‘to get their arms around it’ – an expression that came up several times in the interview. The index is a way to pull the data together coherently, organize it, and make it understandable.

An objective index

‘Perhaps the most important feature of this index is that it is based on objective data,’ he stresses. ‘This means that it meets the basic social science standard of reliability, which requires that different observers looking at the same reality will come up with basically similar results.’ But doesn’t this depend on accepting the definitions and indicators used? ‘Yes, to some extent,’ agrees Salamon, ‘but these choices aren’t arbitrary ones. There is a substantial body of social science advice about how to construct a reliable index. The advice is to focus on the central core of the concept being examined and to use indicators that are validly related to it, that reflect the diversity of relevant experience, and for which objective measures can be found.

‘So we focused on what is commonly considered to be the core of the civil society concept – namely associations of people, whether formal or informal, operating outside the market and the state. And we used a definition of this associational core that we have tested and found workable in more than 40 countries, North and South.’

The index focuses on several different dimensions of civil society and uses a variety of indicators for each one. ‘This produces a much fairer and more balanced picture of the state of civil society in different countries than any single measure can.’ The team took particular care to capture not just the formal, service-oriented parts of the sector, but also the informal, expressive parts involving volunteers, advocacy, and members. ‘This is why a country like Norway, with a relatively small number of civil society organizations with paid staff, could still score second highest of all the countries we examined.’

What is the purpose of the index?

‘The index is intended, in the first place, to help focus attention on the civil society sector just as the Millennium Development Goals and the Human Development Index have helped focus attention on the need for development and poverty alleviation,’ notes Salamon. It will also help civil society activists make the case for changes in law and policy in their countries by enabling them to compare their circumstances with those elsewhere. Finally, it is intended to provide a way to chart the effects of such changes. ‘If you can’t measure your progress, how do you know how well you’re doing?’

Very similar claims are made for the CIVICUS Civil Society Index. How will the new index differ from this? ‘The CIVICUS Diamond,’ says Salamon, ‘is a good-faith effort to create a diagnostic tool that local civil society leaders can use to structure an assessment of civil society in their own countries. But it relies heavily on the subjective judgements of local informants and can’t really be used for comparisons among countries, or even within countries over time.’

Will there be criticisms?

‘If you rank anything, there will be people who feel they were ranked too high or too low,’ Salamon admits. ‘Some people will quarrel with the basic definition or challenge particular indicators. So long as this remains on the level of substantive debate and doesn’t degenerate into a squabble over the supposed motives behind the choice of this or that indicator, this can be healthy for the field.’ But, Salamon emphasizes, there will always be room for improvement. In fact, he hopes the index will advance the debate about the basic meaning of civil society and stimulate improvements in the indicators and data available to depict it.

Is there a danger that low-scoring countries will become demoralized and high-scoring ones complacent? Salamon sees complacency as the greater risk, but given that no country scored the maximum of 100 per cent, and that all fell down on some indicators, he hopes countries at the top won’t be tempted to think they’ve got as far as it’s possible to go.

He’s less worried about demoralization. He hopes the index will spur countries that are ranked lower than they would like to take action to strengthen their sector. ‘To the extent this occurs, civil society will be strengthened and the world will be better off.’

From Alliance, Vol 9, No 2, June 2004