Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations, Civil Society, and Democratization in Bulgaria
Author(s)
Cellarius, Barbara A.; Staddon, Caedmon
Abstract
Challenges the conventional wisdom that the presence in post-Communist Bulgaria of environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGO’s) during the 1990’s was an “index” of the progress of democratic or “civil” society. This simplistic view, promoted by such free-market exponents as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, obscures a more complex reality. The growing number of ENGO’s that were present in Bulgaria after the fall of its Communist government in November 1989 did exert a positive influence, but Bulgarian ENGO’s were “more complex and more amorphous organizations than the neoliberal model allows.” Further, the concept of “civil society” is similarly amorphous and not concrete enough as a “model for social and political practice.”
