Civil sector and advocacy activism in the Czech Republic Civil sector and advocacy activism in the Czech Republic Civil sector and advocacy activism in the Czech Republic
Abstract
There is a market and there are institutions set up by the state in the broad sense. Alongside these, however, a third pillar of public life, which we refer to as the civic sector, can be identified.
It is made up of so-called non-profit or non-governmental organisations, their staff, volunteers, supporters and relations between them. Two main functions of the civil sector can be distinguished: service and advocacy.
The service function consists of providing services to disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, such as people who are sick or disabled, dying, homeless or in difficult living situations. Service functions also include ecological work in nature and, more broadly, educational activities.
In contrast, the advocacy function consists in defending the so-called public interest and the interests of particular groups, most often those perceived as in some sense disadvantaged or threatened. The essence of advocacy work is to highlight systemic inefficiencies or structural inequities and to make suggestions for improvements.
The aim of advocacy work is not to help particular individuals in the first place, but to change the system, primarily through changing public opinion and changing legislation. That's why advocacy organizations are sometimes referred to as campaign organizations.
This study looks at the state of this advocacy section of the civil sector in the Czech Republic. At the same time, the study represents a comprehensive output of my research work to date on the civic sector, social movements and activism in the Czech Republic, which I am pursuing as part of my doctoral studies at the Department of Sociology of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.
The chapter on social movement theory was published as a separate theoretical paper in the journal AUC (Mazák, 2016), the methodological supplementary chapter of this study was published in the Slovak journal Sociológia (Mazák, 2017) and Chapter 3 served as the basis for an article published in the journal Social Movement Studies (Mazák & Diviák, 2018). Some other empirical parts of this study are in the pipeline to be published as separate articles in the future.
The study as a whole has the ambition to offer a view of the advocacy activities of the non-profit sector from several perspectives, contributing to literature devoted to civil society and social movements in Central and Eastern Europe. The study manuscript was submitted for review and subsequent preparation for publication in mid-2017.
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