This book aims at presenting a conceptual apparatus and empirical analysis of the ways Nordic civil society is affected by social transformations by focusing on the Norwegian case. The Norwegian empirical focus allows identifying processes and factors of change that are relevant outside this context and enable us to understand, on a more general basis, the relationship between social transformations and transformations affecting the voluntary sector.
This book will make an original contribution to the field of comparative civil society studies both by increasing the available knowledge on the Nordic civil society model and by analyzing the societal transformations affecting civil society over time.
Since the 1990's, a number of studies have documented a remarkable high and stable amount of popular engagement in civic organizations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Often these countries have been considered deviant cases against the proliferating decline of social capital studies. However, despite great international interest in the Scandinavian region, the volume argues that the civil societies and the civic engagement of these countries remain poorly understood. Most interest in the Scandinavian welfare models addresses the balance between state and market, but under communicates the role played by civil society and popular engagement in associations and voluntary organizations. The contributions offer a coherent portrait of stability and change in formal and informal forms of civic engagement over the past 25 years as well as offering contextualized knowledge of the history and institutional design in which Scandinavian civil societies are embedded.
their collective action. The more unique the case, the more we need to study it not only to understand the case itself but also to understand the structure and limits of environmentalism in general. We hope that we have been able to show the value of this research strategy. The way we have organized our study is different from the Rootes study (2003). This study emphasizes the importance of different environmental cultures and of political conjunctures in a single country of which different environm- tal groups take advantage. We are not arguing against the fact that branches of environmentalism have features in common across countries (e.g., animal rights and antinuclear movements). However, we would not go as far as the Rootes study. We argue that looking at political conjunctures, even if important, does not tell the whole story. Researchers need to understand the broader context in which political conjunctures and environmental culture operate.
