The third sector

For decades, political thinkers have raised alarm bells about the outcome of an unrestrained market economy and looked for a viable alternative system of governance. One such widely discussed alternative is the ‘third sector. It is said that if something is ruled neither primarily by market logic nor via a bureaucratic chain of command, it must be part of the “third” sector. Many current operational definitions follow this basic schema. In practice, ‘third sector’ is used to refer to widely different kinds of organisations such as charities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations (CSOs), self-help groups, social enterprises, networks, and clubs, to name a few, that do not fall into the state or market categories. The idea of a third sector suggests that these entities, however diverse, together make up a coherent whole – a sector with its own distinct type of social form and practical logic.

Most accounts of the third sector place it in relation to the state and the market. For the British government, for example, the term is used to distinguish such organisations from the other two sectors of the economy — the public sector (‘government’) and the private sector (‘businesses’). According to a textbook on social enterprises, a national economy can be conceptualised as having three sectors — the public sector, a private economy, and a third sector “with organisations established by people on a voluntary basis to pursue social or community goals”

The UK Government defines the third sector as non-governmental organisations that are value-driven and which principally reinvest their surpluses to further social, environmental, or cultural objectives. In their official document titled, ‘The future role of the third sector in social and economic regeneration: final report’, released in July 2007 by the HM Treasury Cabinet office, the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown mentioned, “I believe that a successful modern democracy needs at its heart a thriving and diverse third sector. The government cannot and must not stifle or control the thousands of organisations and millions of people that make up this sector. Instead, we must create the space and opportunity for it to flourish, we must be good partners when we work together and we must listen and respond”.

The report had identified four major areas of common interest between the third sector and the government — enabling greater voice and campaigning, strengthening communities, transforming public services, and encouraging social enterprise. These formed the basis of the UK Government’s proposed framework for partnership over the next ten years.

In contemporary political literature, civil society has been defined in various ways. Antonio Gramsci — an Italian socialist — in his theory of ‘hegemony’, argued that any political system, such as democratic capitalism, is maintained in two ways. The political realm or the ‘state’ exercises its control through force and laws. The private realm of ‘civil society’ complements the state by maintaining the system by producing consent without resorting to force. However, a

more apolitical definition of civil society is used here. It is defined as an intermediary entity, standing between the private sphere and the state. It excludes individual and family life, in-ward looking group activities like recreation, spirituality et al, profit-making business enterprises, and political activities aiming to take control of the ‘state’. Civil society involves its citizens to act “collectively in a public sphere to express their interest, passions, and ideas, exchange information, achieve mutual goals, make demands on the state, and hold state officials accountable.”

Capitalism and democracy are guided by different principles that create tensions between the two

Conclusion

Joseph Schumpeter (1974) had identified the great threat to capitalism as: Capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own. The bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values”.

It may be expected that a global network of ‘rationalist’ civil society organisations (CSOs) that are not nudged into line with grants and assistance from ‘foundations’ managed by mega-corporations with high stakes in governance and management of production and distribution of the commodities and services required to meet the basic needs of people, will bring in huge changes, through a sustained campaign, in the oligarchic structure of the present system.

In the 21st century, the CSOs are likely to act as a countervailing force against the monopolistic power of the transnational corporations and will largely influence the basic supplies to the citizens in a sustainable way.

Views expressed are personal