Illusion or Opportunity

Civil Society and the Quest for Social Change

Henry Veltmeyer

The failure of development strategies in the past few decades has given rise to a worldwide movement in the direction of “another development.” This is a form of development that is social as well as economic, oriented towards people’s basic needs, people-centred and initiated from below. It is human in scale and form, equitable and socially more inclusive, capacitating and empowering of the poor, sustainable in terms of both the environment and livelihoods, participatory and community-based. This concern for another development is a major theme of this book, which includes a series of analytical probes into the dynamics of social change—its theory and practice.

Contents

• Introduction: The Macro-Dynamics of Social Change 
• Banking on Poverty 
• Social Capital and Social Development 
• Bad Government, Good Governance 
• Dynamics of Market-Led Development 
• NGOS, Social Movement and the State 
• Bibliography 
• Index

About the Author

Dr. Veltmeyer lived and worked for six years in south America before coming to Canada to pursue a doctoral program in Political Science and subsequently (in 1976) beginning his academic career in the Sociology Department at St. Mary’s University. He has participated in the university’s Atlantic Canada Studies program and founded the program in International development in 1985. He also served for eight years as Coordinator of this program in addition to eight years as chair of the Sociology Department. Currently he has an academic appointment in the PhD program of Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico and annually engages in an extended program of research and public lectures across Latin America.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of International Development Studies and serves on the editorial board of Studies in Political Economy and a number of international journals in his major field of research-the political economy of international development.

Dr. Veltmeyer conducts research, writes and teaches about diverse issues related to the political economy and sociology of development, with a particular focus on issues of Latin American development, globalization processes, government policies, alternative models and approaches and social movements. Since 2000 he has authored/co-authored and edited 13 books and 25 scholarly refereed articles that have been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. Several of these books, written in English or Spanish, have received awards and have been translated into other languages – among them Portuguese, Italian, Tugalese and German.

In addition to these scholarly books, several of which have achieved international recog-nition and/or special awards and distinctions, 25 of Dr. Veltmeyer’s scholarly articles since 2000 have been published in some of the most prestigious academic journals in his field or by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Places of publication include Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

 

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