Latin America and the Caribbean in Voluntas

Since 1990, Voluntas has organized three regional Special Issues:

1. 1. Non-governmental organizations and philanthropy in Latin America: an overview, guest edited by Leilah Landim & Andrés Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997, volume 8, issue 4)

2. 2. Latin America and the Caribbean Revisited: Pathways for Research, guest edited by Jacqueline Butcher & Beatriz Balian Tagtachian (Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016, volume 27, issue 1)

3. 3. Civil Society in Latin America: Experiments, Resilience, New Utopias, guest edited by Patricia Mendonça & Humberto Muñoz Grandé (Reference Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé2023, volume 34, issue 5)

Across the three Special Issues, we have several similar themes: democracy, inequality, and the role and influence of the Catholic Church as related to civil society and the third sector. Appropriately so, in the first Special Issue, Landim and Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997) emphasize a historical approach. Voluntas was in its first 10 years of existence and needed a baseline in the region as it related to civil society and third sector scholarship. This first Special Issue was timed within a handful of years from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other civil society groups were active, and which needed to be brought to the attention of third sector scholars. Landim and Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997) observed and were cautious about the influence of Anglosphere and Europe on the understanding of civil society in the region, something that becomes a running theme and is scrutinized in one way or another across the three Special Issues. The guest editors in 1997 also profiled the influence of colonialism, the Church, populism and authoritarianism, and democratic transition (all of which are still relevant today).

Butcher and Balian Tagtachian’s (Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016) Special Issue, almost 20 years later, continued the conversation in Voluntas. Their collection of articles illuminated three themes of scholarship on the third sector in the region: social inclusion and development; human rights and public policy; and third sector governance. While these themes overlap with the first Special Issue (1997) and research trends in the field more generally, newer content was illuminated about the quality of democracy, as many of the contributions incorporated dimensions such as public accountability, participation, ethics, and transparency, among others. These are tied to another identified trend: that of cross-sector relations—including relations with government and the private sector. Butcher and Balian Tagtachian (Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016) note that these cross-sector “working relationships” (p. 6) likely emerged out of necessity and the growing demands of “eradicat[ing] social problems in the region” (p. 6). Tendencies such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) as well as instances when policy makers bring civil society groups to the table started to be captured in the literature coming out of and about the region. Butcher and Balian Tagtachian (Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016) also underlined the dynamics among the so-called North and so-called South (with commonalities to Landim and Thompson’s [Reference Landim and Thompson1997] concerns of Anglosphere and European influence). This is an area of contention that has been debated over the years and continues. Furthermore, coalitions in the region were acknowledged as being more important to civil society organizing; evidence of coalitions in participating in peace negotiations in Colombia, involved in informing security regulations in Mexico as well as pushing for legal and tax reforms for nonprofits in Argentina were documented as examples.

These ideas and trends form the foundation of the Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé’s (current) Special Issue in 2023. This current Special Issue gives a new slice of where we are in the field, and this time we did not have to wait 20 years! The guest editors identify traditional topics in the region consistent to the broader collection of the research in Voluntas: philanthropy, volunteering as well as relations with other sectors and institutions (e.g., Catholic Church, government, private sector). The introductory article emphasizes democracy and the democratic backsliding that bring present-day apprehensions to the region, what some call a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann & Lindberg, Reference Lührmann and Lindberg2019). They reflect on local initiatives, explore further North–South relations and also pinpoint the importance of coalitions and networks in the region.

Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé (this issue) review publications in Voluntas on the region and observe an uptick since 2010, which is promising. As a Voluntas Co-Editor, I would like to see more of our Latin American colleagues engage with the journal as reviewers and authors, and also as an important segment of the journal’s audience. Currently, we have 127 reviewers in our roster who are from universities and other institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean. We want this number to increase. Of the about 470 reviewers we engaged with in the last year, only 17 were from Latin America and Caribbean. In 2022 and 2023 (until August 1), we received a total of 646 first time submissions, of these 34 were submitted by an author from the region.Footnote ¹ In the end, there were 7 published articles from three countries, 5 of which are part of the current Special Issue (countries and distribution include: Brazil [5 articles], Mexico [1] and Peru [1]). None of the 2022 and 2023 articles are from Caribbean countries, a concern noted by Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé (this issue). We call on scholars from and those who study the region to submit their work to Voluntas and engage in what we consider as a conversation about civil society—in the region, elsewhere and globally.

Challenges and Opportunities Remain

Language can be a barrier in particular. Like other scholars from countries where English is not an official language, our Latin American and Caribbean colleagues feel the pressure to publish in English. Meanwhile, there are vast literature in Spanish, Portuguese and other languages in the region that go unseen and unrecognized given the very dominance of English in the so-called global academy. In fact, some of the strongest characteristics of Latin American scholarship—its activist orientation for example—goes unknown internationally. Undoubtedly, “[w]hat remains a challenge... is that the richness of Latin American activist intellectual experience is largely invisible to a world that operates mostly in English” (Gutberlet et al., Reference Gutberlet, Tremblay, Moraes, Munck, McIlrath, Hall and Tandon2014, p. 179).

Social science research in the region is indeed tied to its strong tradition of academic activism. In the context of the Latin American university, I have written with colleagues about public intellectualism (Appe et al., Reference Appe, Rubaii, Lippez-De Castro and Capobianco2017) and its (potentially positive) influence on university governance. While this tradition is present in the Latin American university, it is often deprioritized in other places in the world. Still in the case of Latin America, leading scholars from varied disciplines are often expected to write widely in the popular press, drawing on their scholarly expertise but in a way to speak to and attract a wider audience. As such, Latin American scholarly work is often inherently policy-relevant.

In fact, the International Society for Third-Sector Research’s (the institutional home of Voluntas) first Civil Society Policy Impact Research Awards in 2020 were awarded to Latin American scholars. Ines Pousadela of CIVICUS/Universidad ORT in Uruguay won for her scholarship on social mobilization and political representation. Her research brought to the fore the role of civil society in the overturn of the criminalization of abortion in Uruguay, a controversial policy in the context. This work also showed the influence of the Uruguayan experience on the region more widely. The second award was to Aline Goncalves de Souza and Eduardo Pannunzio of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Brazil. Their research explored the role of civil society in policy influence in the case of pending restrictive NGO legislation. Civil society groups and academia mobilized and sought out the media to effectively stave off government threats to the sector. In its inaugural year in 2020, the ISTR Civil Society Policy Impact Research Award allowed our Latin American colleagues to be exemplars in how to commendably bridge scholarship and policy change.

This policy-relevant scholarship is regularly presented in the biannual ISTR Latin America and the Caribbean regional conferences. In 2023, Voluntas will be looking to the 13th Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Conference, Civil Society in Times of Democratic Reconstruction and Climate Crisis, for potentially new and future submissions to the journal. There were about 160 submissions from all over the world, representing 24 countries, and spanning all three of the conference languages: Portuguese (44%), English (34%) and Spanish (21%). The regional conferences have been incubators for trends in the field, touching on themes such as climate change and environmental crises, racial and gender inequalities, democratic ideals, transparency and accountability, and digital civil society spaces, among others.

In addition to policy-relevant scholarship, our Latin American and Caribbean colleagues and those who have studied the region know that there is a praxis for critical work. In several systematic reviews, the pages of Voluntas have been found to contain a healthy dose of skepticism. In their review of critical scholarshipFootnote ² in the field, Coule et al., (Reference Coule, Dodge and Eikenberry2022) found that Voluntas consistently publishes the highest number of critical articles and continues to be on an upward trend since its start in 1990. More recent reviews on critical scholarship in the field of civil society and third sector studies underline its relationship to geographic diversity. Centering on critical “research that originates or is focused on countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America or multiple countries across these regions” (p. 1), Eikenberry, Dodge, and Coule (forthcoming) found Voluntas to be a primary outlet for such work. Eikenberry, Dodge, and Coule (forthcoming) included a review of 65 published articles in core third sector studies journals: Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Voluntas from 2009 to 2021. As they report: “Nearly all these articles, 60 out of the 65 (92%), were published in Voluntas” (p. 3). Some of these are discussed in a recent Voluntas Virtual Issue published in May 2023 (see, Eikenberry et al., Reference Eikenberry, Dodge and Coule2023).

Relatedly, we have seen more work emphasizing, and pointing to the dearth of other ways of being and other ways of thinking in civil society and third sector studies on the pages of Voluntas. As part of a two-issue series about methodology in Voluntas (which set out to generate more discussion about how we study the third sector, see Kim & Raggo, Reference Kim and Raggo2022, Reference Kim and Raggo2023), Foxworth and Ellenwood (Reference Foxworth and Ellenwood2023) illuminate the extractive nature and other challenges of research in the field relating to Indigenous people. Voluntas was more likely to have content related to Indigenous people but Foxworth and Ellenwood (Reference Foxworth and Ellenwood2023) still call on the field “to engage in research with and for—and not on—Indigenous communities” (p. 106). For Latin America and the Caribbean, this contribution is salient. Additionally, scholars close to the region have brought rich bodies of scholarship in other languages to the English audiences of Voluntas. An example of this is (Pozzebon et al., Reference Pozzebon, Tello-Rozas and Heck2021) introduction of the social technology framework which enables the application of a “global South theoretical lens.” It provides a counter to Western emphasis of development and knowledge. Previously, the framework of social technology, or technologia social in Spanish and Portuguese, was “almost unknown outside the South American journals and databases” (p. 666), highlighting the true limitations of working in English only.

This is all to say, the current regional Special Issue feeds into a long running pledge of geographic diversity, critical work and broader international/global/local lenses in Voluntas, right alongside some of the more mainstream and highly relevant management and organizational studies found in the journal.

Moving Forward

Since the first Special Issue on the region, we have seen work on Latin America and the Caribbean in philanthropy, volunteering, and social movements especially. Landim and Thompson’s (Reference Landim and Thompson1997) introduction brought to the forefront discussions on definitions and acknowledgement that there are “different social, historical, political and cultural contexts” for civil society (p. 347). Butcher and Balian Tagtachian (Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016) reminded us that the region had already been part of the major and seminal comparative studies, namely the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at Johns Hopkins University in the 1990s. However, they draw on ideas planted by Landim and Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997); that these comparative approaches must understand local “values, traditions and environment” (Butcher & Balian Tagtachian, Reference Butcher and Balian de Tagtachian2016, p. 8). Indeed, Landim and Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997) were hesitant with (Salamon & Anheier, Reference Salamon and Anheier1998) definition of the nonprofit organization; that nonprofit organizations: “are private and non-governmental, they are non-profit, they really exist (though not always with legal status), and they are self-governing” (p. 347). Landim and Thompson (Reference Landim and Thompson1997) found that “[t]hese characteristics are sometimes less clear in the Latin American context” (p. 347).

These tensions are picked up again in this current Special Issue. Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé (this issue) call on moving away from the constraints, often informed by social origins theory (see also Anheier, forthcoming). They explain:

As such, Voluntas seeks more geographical breadth and more comparative analysis (see also Simsa & Brandsen, Reference Simsa and Brandsen2021). The current Special Issue has brought forward major issues and key research topics in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Voluntas Co-Editors want to see further comparative work, from within regions and across regions. And while Latin America has been present in the field’s comparative work from the beginning, we need more comparison using (and building) better theory and more local data applicable to Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé (this issue) focus on “problematizing the use of foreign models” (p. 16), but also note that some of these attempts to globally compare the sector has positively influenced research and even “encouraged research on the region” specifically (p. 16). The Voluntas Co-Editors and Editorial Board want Voluntas to be the space to advance theory and methods in the field, to produce comparative research when possible, to challenge theories drafted with Western bias and problematize their use in global scholarship, and to bring to Voluntas the research outside or invisible to the field due to language. Latin American research on the third sector is very often doing precisely this and I look forward to seeing more of it in Voluntas. I congratulate Mendonça and Muñoz Grandé and the contributors to this Special Issue.