Introduction

This chapter builds on the previous chapter's analysis of active citizenship via third sector engagements in public policy processes and politics. The discussion moves on here to explore active citizenship and social movements, with a particular focus on social movements committed to mobilising for social change. As previous chapters have already suggested, the distinction between third sector organisations and social movements is not totally clear cut and active citizenship may be nurtured in both. Moreover, social movements have been presented as being potentially transformational, their relative freedoms and flexibilities standing in contrast with the typically more restrictive pressures on third sector organisations, especially if third sector organisations are involved in competing to provide public services – in increasingly market-driven contexts (Milbourne, 2013). Without the pressures towards professionalisation, bureaucratisation and mission drift that have been associated with contracting processes themselves, social movements have been able to pursue more independent, creative – and inherently more radical – agendas for social justice and social change, pushing previously accepted limits, breaking the rules where necessary in ways that question the legitimacy of existing power structures and demonstrate the potential for alternatives. As the slogan accompanying World Social Forums proclaimed, ‘another world is possible’, another world that was being brought into being and exemplified within the lived practice of social movements on a global scale (Gitlin, 2012). Or so it has been suggested.

This chapter therefore sets out to explore a number of varying ways in which social movements have been forming part of more complex scenarios and illustrates a number of the tensions that have already been emerging from previous chapters. Are social movements or social movement organisations inherently more transformational than other parts of the third sector more generally? Or do they encompass a similar range of aims and objectives, underpinned by a comparable range of political perspectives from different parts of the globe, including varying perspectives on the changing relationships between the third sector, the state and the market? The chapter asks whether social movements actually face similar challenges to other parts of the third sector in terms of building flexible but sustainable alliances between organisations and individuals with varying experiences and differing approaches to strategies and tactics.