In the last decade in North America, there has been an explosion of books on the subject of civil society. Like so many other concepts in contemporary political science, the notion of civil society has been imported to analyze other polities outside the North American hemisphere, and India is no exception. However, Tandon and Mohanty's edited book presents a fresh perspective by combining academic analysis with that of on-the-ground practitioners to examine the relationship between civil society and governance. The book is divided into two parts: the first deals with the theoretical conceptualization of civil society and the second with actual case studies.

The introductory chapter by Tandon and Mohanty is extremely well written. They review the literature on civil society and examine the thorny issues underlying the concepts of civil society and governance. They correctly point out that the concept of civil society is not only complex and ambiguous (the concept emerges out of two different traditions: civil society as reforming or replacing the state by juxtaposing itself against the state, and, civil society as performing the guardian role of a functioning democracy), but it is also quite fluid. How does civil society fit into good governance? The authors maintain that the international lending policy communities have in the recent past made their aid accessible to developing societies conditional upon their good governance (fair and free elections, civil rights, transparency in the political institutions). In conformity with this international policy discourse, civil societies (non-governmental organizations) emerged as non-state participants, able to pursue two goals simultaneously: to act as a channel for development aid and to ensure good governance by checking state authority. For Tandon and Mohanty, this relationship is ill-conceived simply because the boundaries between civil society and the state are highly “porous,” the relationship between the two is both dynamic and dialectical. Civil society does not exist outside the state but within it. The state sets the framework within which civil society operates. Therefore, within the Indian context, the lack of good governance is common to both state and civil society. Neera Chandhoke further extends the discussion of the concept of civil society as the “third sphere.” For her, the consensual nature of the concept has allowed it be flattened to such an extent “that it has lost its credibility” (28). Tandon in his chapter on the civil society-governance interface addresses the different contributions of civil society to different aspects of governance: the voicing and placing of societal issues on the government agenda, pushing for governmental reforms, and ensuring the self-governance of public institutions. The other three theoretical chapters by Narayan, Mander and Oommen deal with the issues of dysfunctionality of the state, its corrupt practices and a cooperative relationship between state, society and the market.

The second part of the book (and, in my view, the more enjoyable) deals with actual case studies. There are four case studies narrated in detail: the Chilika Movement in Orissa led by the fishermen against the Integrated Shrimp Farming Project; the Chhattisgarh Mukti Movement of industrial workers against the state; the Rashtriya Soshit Morcha Dalit movement for justice and rights; and the Akhil Bhartiya Samaj Seva Sasthan's struggle for tribal land rights. Each movement is presented historically and the detailed and complex nature of each study makes it impossible to provide a concise summary, without doing injustice to them. Most importantly, however, each case study raises issues of considerable importance: governance and movement; collective mobilization; state violence and justice for the marginalized sectors of society; the urban poor and the concept of citizenship; and the tribal community and its claims to land.

Although students of Indian politics will find this book quite useful in seeing the theoretical debate surrounding civil society from a non-Western perspective and in reading the complex and interesting case studies, they are likely to miss (and this is the book's main weakness) a concluding, synthesizing chapter. The editors have done such a fine job in their introductory chapter of presenting the book's theme of civil society and governance that one is left wishing for even a half so successful effort to bring it all together in the end. Without a concluding chapter, in which the empirical and the theoretical could have been related, the reader is left with an uncoordinated set of insights.