Active citizenship and the third sector have come to the fore in policy debates internationally, as well as in a variety of national contexts. As John Gaventa was already arguing at the turn of the new millennium, through ‘community organizations, social movements, issue campaigns, and policy advocacy, citizens have found ways to have their voices heard and to influence the decisions and practices of larger institutions that affect their lives’ (Gaventa, 2001, p 275). Over several decades there has been growing interest in the capacities of citizens to take responsibility for their own destinies as civil society actors, if for a variety of reasons, as we explore subsequently. And one of the key sites that has been identified as having the capacity for nurturing as well as for expressing active citizenship has been the third sector. Yet ‘active citizenship’ and the ‘third sector’ have been contested as concepts and both have been affected by processes of change, including neoliberal globalisation.

There are those who argue that the expansion of active citizenship provides significant opportunities to promote democracy and human rights both locally, nationally and globally (Held, 1995; Archibugi, 2008), while globalisation offers possibilities ‘for a new sense of solidarity and new opportunities for engagement’ (Gaventa and Tandon, 2010, p 5). In an increasingly interconnected world, changing patterns of power and governance have been emerging and, with these, new and reconstructed spaces for public action together with changing, multilayered and multidimensional identities of citizenship (Gaventa and Tandon, 2010). Citizens and their organisations have been invited to engage with policy makers at local, national and, increasingly, at international level – in the latter case through opportunities such as the UN Human Rights Committees and the Global Platform for Disaster Reduction. They have also been creating their own discursive spaces

However, critics argue that, far from extending democratisation and the promotion of human rights, deepening neoliberal globalisation policies have been undermining the role of the state along with the independent role of the third sector. Thus Gaventa and Tandon question the extent to which globalisation does actually offer a ‘real opportunity for expanded solidarity’, suggesting that it ‘weakens the possibilities for human agency’ and concluding that ‘In sum there are winners and losers in this process’ (Gaventa and Tandon, 2010, p 5).